The Reform System
At the heart of Campaign for Democracy lies a reform process. This process will allow you to hold referendums on reforming the political system and the influences on the system, influences such as corporate power, media power and union power. All of these things have value but they acquire power and sometimes that power is abused. Our system allows you to stop the abuse.
Referendum systems usually require that a petition with a set number of signatures is collected before a referendum can be held. There is a problem with this if the proposal is for political reform. Reform isn't an interesting subject so collecting the required number of signatures could be difficult. The alternative, setting the signature barrier low could result in a lot of daft referendums that would waste people's time and bring the system into disrepute. We propose that the signature barrier be set low but proposals would go to a Constitutional Commission that would filter out ideas that weren't sensible. The Commission would be like a jury, selected by lot so that we could be sure it was independent.
Once the signatures had been collected proposals would go to the Commission and if the Commission felt they had value they would go to the Welsh Assembly. If the Assembly passed them there would be no need for a referendum but if they weren't passed a referendum would be held.
What matters is that the control Welsh politicians have over the political system would be broken.
The Constitutional Commission
Our filter will be a commission of twelve people selected by a combination of lot and election. Our suggestion is that at every five year election two people are selected by lot from each constituency to give us a panel of eighty. Some will be willing to do this work and others will not. They will select twelve people from the eighty to be Commissioners for two and a half years, and when that period is up select another twelve from the eighty for the remainder of the term. This will give us a truly independent commission, but they're not going to be busy. Few poor proposals will get the required number of signatures and good proposals will be adopted without going to the Commission. If you have a proposal for reform you don't start by collecting signatures, you take your proposal to your elected representatives. If politicians reject good proposals and force people to go to the effort and expense of collecting signatures and running referendums unnecessarily it will cost those politicians votes at elections. This also applies to proposals for ordinary legislation because voters will punish parties that refuse to support good initiatives.