Bristol People’s Assemblies is an Occupy Bristol project to create local people’…
Bristol People’s Assemblies is an Occupy Bristol project to create local people’s assemblies in an attempt to address the problem of politicians not effectively representing the interests of those that elect them. If you are interesting in getting involved in this project please join the page.
Bristol People’s Assemblies
Increasingly people are finding that politicians don’t effectively represent their views and interests, and seem to have forgotten that this is what they are elected to do. Bristol People’s Assemblies is a project to create local People’s Assemblies around Bristol where people can collectively have a voice on local, national and international issues and can represent themselves, rather than relying on politicians to represent them. This project has come out of the Occupy Bristol movement and plans to use the same system of consensus decision making used in the occupy camps and many other groups. Consensus decision making is a form of participatory democracy that allows everyone who wants to have their say to do so and all views to be taken into account, with the aim of coming to a decision that most people can live with. This model is already successfully being used for the Bath People’s Assembly project. Other forms of participatory democracy have also been successfully used by the Quaker movement for over 300 years, various activist groups, and the ancient Athenians to successfully run their 300,000 population city-state for around 80 years. This project was inspired by a Bristol Radical History talk on how the Athenians did it: http://blip.tv/bristol-radical-history/every-cook-can-govern-from-athens-to-the-electoral-lottery-4320628