If Boris Johnson has policies he is energetically committed to – most obviously Brexit and bridges – he also has policies inherited from his predecessors where his application is somewhat more doubtful. Climate change is one of these. Johnson re-entered Downing Street in December with two overhanging commitments on the subject: the UN climate summit in Glasgow in October, which has prompted much rhetoric of the Get Things Done variety but no discernible plan of action; and the newly convened citizens’ assembly on climate change, which no serving minister has seen fit to acknowledge at all. Notwithstanding Johnson’s historic personal evasiveness on climate change, both initiatives already feel like missed opportunities, with the assembly seemingly cut adrift from the outset. Nevertheless it’s worth examining how it came to be greenlit in the first place, and why – despite the centralising tendencies of Westminster in general and Johnson’s administration in particular – the trend is for more citizens’ assemblies in the near future, no matter how poorly supported they may be.

Climate Assembly UK emerges from Theresa May’s parting decision as prime minister to legally commit the United Kingdom to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. The assembly was commissioned by six Commons select committees in November and sat for the first time in Birmingham’s Park Regis Hotel on January 25. It comprises 110 permanent residents of the four nations of the United Kingdom, selected through voluntary submissions to reflect the age, education and ethnic profiles of the country as a whole. More strikingly, they have been selected in accordance with the most recent polling on how concerned UK residents are with climate change. (According to Ipsos Mori in 2019, 52% currently describe themselves as ‘very concerned’ while 14% say they are ‘not concerned’.)

The organisers argue that potential climate sceptics should be included because they will be affected by climate policy even where unconvinced as to its necessity. Climate Assembly UK will meet four times in all, and will hear from scientists, business leaders, policy-makers and from communities on the global front line of climate change. The discussions will be summarised by expert facilitators and the summaries honed into policy recommendations on everything from housing to the national infrastructure, which will go before the select committees that convened the assembly. The House of Commons will hold a debate on the assembly’s recommendations before parliament’s summer recess.

The only senior Tory to remark on the assembly’s foundation was Sajid Javid, who spoke cautiously in November of the need to preserve economic growth and “to avoid placing unfair burdens on families or businesses.” But with Javid now departed to the backbenches, the assembly looks utterly friendless in high office. Even before Javid had spoken, groups like Extinction Rebellion and Friends of the Earth had signalled the obvious limits of the initiative: none of the assembly’s recommendations will have any legal force, and while the recommendations will be published independently of their submissions to parliament, parliament has no obligations to the assembly other than to timetable a single debate in the spring.

The picture here – of an apparently inclusive process hedged in by restrictions, kept both at arms’ length and on a tight leash by the presiding legislative authorities – will be familiar to anyone who has kept an eye on the rising popularity of citizens’ assemblies since the start of the century. Beginning with assemblies on electoral reform in Canada and the Netherlands, moving through a citizens’ assembly on flood defence in the Polish city of Gdansk, and peaking with Ireland’s decade-long attempt to reframe its constitution through structured civic dialogue, seldom do six months pass without someone, somewhere, suggesting that a citizens’ assembly might be the thing to break a particular legislative logjam. The local response to citizens’ assemblies is often suspicious, at least at first, but the basic idea of taking the public deeper into the legislative process is difficult to object to in itself. This remains the case even where initial suspicions hold true: sometimes assemblies are just the means for the authorities to take an issue out of circulation by referring it to a smaller public. But there have been major successes as well, the most visible of which – the repeal by public referendum of Ireland’s abortion laws in 2018 – can justly be called epochal.

In Britain, the first movements towards deliberative democracy began in the wake of Scotland’s unsuccessful independence referendum in 2014. Responding to David Cameron’s chilly morning-after assertion that it was time to prioritise “English votes for English laws”, Labour leader Ed Miliband proposed a constitutional convention on how best to restructure democracy across the UK without making non-English MPs second-class legislators. This proposal was never fully articulated by Miliband, and sank with him after his defeat in the 2015 general election, but it gestures at something crucial about the current vogue for citizens’ assemblies – the aim is always in part to contain populism: in this case to reroute into procedure the potentially competing claims of Scottish and English nationalism, and to produce a mechanistic consensus that nevertheless bears the stamp of authentic public inclusion.

In this context it is no surprise that the next trigger for calls for a citizens’ assembly was Brexit. With Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement run aground by her own MPs, and with the public mood declining towards violence – or, more often, the fear of it – prominent liberal voices began to call for a citizens’ assembly on Brexit as a “democratic circuit-breaker”. A letter to The Guardian signed by, among others, novelist Ian McEwan and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gives a flavour of this approach:

A forum led by the public, not by politicians. People talking and listening to each other, not shouting and arguing on or offline, to find common ground. Not superseding MPs by judging the outcome, but offering recommendations on how Brexit should be decided, to help break this deadlock and start to heal the nation’s bitter divisions.

The distinction drawn here between ideas of inclusion (“a forum led by the public … to find common ground”) and populism (“shouting and arguing on or offline”) couldn’t be more stark, or more of a caricature.

As significant for Irish society as the referendum campaign for abortion has been, it sometimes feels as though its romantic significance has been reserved for other nations. What looked like an orderly and dignified process from abroad – and at its best actually was that – undersells the squalor and vituperation of much of the debate on the ground: the tantrums and walk-outs during committee reviews, the squeamish equivocations of fully a quarter of parliament, the opportunistic use of the referendum by Far Right figures to advance the idea that Ireland had been overtaken by a globalist conspiracy. The assembly happened, but those things also happened.

It also undersells the sheer hard work of an activist movement whose foundation was ordinary women who’d been chipping away at the issue for decades, joined at length by a civic army of every generation, race and creed in Ireland. The one dark spot on the weekend of the referendum was the number of commentators who rolled up after the results to praise the citizens’ assembly as a particular masterstroke on the part of the government – as though the assembly members themselves had contributed nothing of note, and as though the thousands of people who’d gone into the streets week after week were little more than a stadium crowd cheering their team.

The paradox of citizens’ assemblies in their current form is that they are prized for their ability to contain populist sentiments, and yet cannot succeed without them. Climate Assembly UK was convened after a summer in which Extinction Rebellion regularly disrupted life in London with mass demonstrations, for its troubles finding itself designated an extremist group by the south-east’s Counter Terrorism Policing unit. Parliament may intend Climate Assembly UK partly as a means of taking the heat out of such protests, but with so little formal engagement promised to the assembly it will likely fall to the public to keep the heat firmly on.