Abolishing, or not, elections for RSA trustees: update

Over the weekend I blogged about the debate brewing at the RSA over proposals to abolish the elected trustees and instead have a fully co-opted body.

Tessy Britton (outgoing chair of the RSA Fellowship Council) has kindly been in touch to point me at her detailed and lengthy post explaining the background to the proposals and also going through the counter-proposals now being made.

It’s well worth a read if you are also a Fellow of the RSA and wondering what view to take – or indeed whether to be worried at all about what decision is made. (If you’re inclined to the latter, I hope the post changes your mind as these are important issues for the future of the RSA.)

I am still instinctively sceptical about removing elections, especially if one of the motivations is extremely low turnout. I can conceive a point at which turnout is so low that you have to admit a particular form of accountability is no longer working, but I’ll still need some persuading that this is the case and that enough has been tried first to raise turnout.

If nothing else, I suspect this debate will result in many Fellows, like me, switching from a previous attitude of benign non-interest in how the RSA is run to active interest. Now, I need go think further to make up my own mind…