When Stuart Weir, who has died aged 85, became editor of the New Statesman in 1987, he made democracy a key theme of his tenure. The Conservative party under Margaret Thatcher had just won its third general election, having used the absence of checks in an unwritten constitution to abolish metropolitan authorities, curtail trade union rights and undermine civil liberties.
The weekly magazine became a platform for debate but also a vehicle for launching Charter 88, a campaign movement initiated by Stuart. Between January and November 1988 he planned and oversaw the drafting of a 1,500-word document that called for Britain to become a constitutional democracy with “citizens not subjects”. It was supported by 350 distinguished figures and eventually nearly 50,000 more signatories.
Stuart made Anthony Barnett director of Charter 88. It grew to become the most comprehensive campaign for constitutional reform in modern British political history thanks to the support of the Labour politicians John Smith and Gordon Brown, and then Tony Blair’s New Labour government, which passed such core demands as the human rights and freedom of information acts as well as establishing a Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly.
The failure of ministers to follow through on Charter 88’s ambition to break away from cabinet government, in Barnett’s view, led to dramatic policy failures such as the Iraq invasion and Brexit.
Stuart went on to co-create the Democratic Audit organisation alongside the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex. He was the first director, and with David Beetham produced a groundbreaking study Political Power and Democratic Control in Britain (1999), which used a series of rigorous criteria and standards for assessing the true quality of democracy. Democratic Audit saw itself as the first organisation to really assess how much power was being shared with ordinary people.
This work has since been used in more than 20 countries. Stuart himself acted as a democratic and rights consultant in Malawi, Namibia and elsewhere as well as acting as an international observer at the general election of Iraqi Kurdistan in 1992.
Stuart, who became a visiting professor at Essex from 1999, edited and co-wrote a raft of books including The Three Pillars of Liberty: Political Rights and Freedoms in the UK (2003), co-authored with Charter 88 policy consultant Francesca Klug, and the now prime minister, then barrister, Keir Starmer.
This book measured British compliance with international human rights standards and identified 42 violations and 22 near-violations for concern. It boasted of being the first analysis of both the political and legal systems for securing political freedom in the UK as a whole.
Stuart had come to the wider issue of democracy via an interest in the malfunctioning state benefit system. In 1971 he had been hired by Frank Field as the director of a new welfare rights office at the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG). There he played a key role in setting up a welfare rights officers group that for the first time gave a national voice to local authority welfare rights work.
Following CPAG, he was founding editor of Shelter’s housing magazine, Roof (1975-77), then was hired to be deputy editor at the weekly magazine New Society. In 1984 he accepted an offer to edit the Labour party’s inhouse New Socialist publication, a decision he regretted. Never one to avoid calculated risk, Stuart found himself buffeted between right and left factions of the Labour party and was eventually sacked after writing an article advocating tactical voting on the eve of the 1987 general election.
Born in Frimley, Surrey, to Robert Weir, an engineer, and Edna (nee Lewis), Stuart was educated at Peter Symonds school in Winchester, Hampshire. He then studied modern history at Brasenose College, Oxford.
Starting his journalism career at the Oxford Mail (1964-67), Stuart became the diarist for the Times (1967-71), which, he said, was “probably the easiest job I ever had, as well as the best paid”. It also provided him some of his favourite anecdotes, culled from interviews with people such as John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix.
Stuart did not just write or think about the democratic process, he engaged with it early on, winning election as a councillor in the De Beauvoir ward of the London borough of Hackney (1972-76). There he took on an epic – and successful – battle in support of the local community against his own council to stop much of the area being bulldozed for a modern estate.
Later in life he settled in Cambridge, where he founded and chaired the Cambridge Commons, a grassroots organisation committed to breaking down the town-and- gown divide.
Stuart was married twice, first in 1963 to Doffy Burnham, with whom he had two sons, Dominic and Seth. That marriage ended in divorce, and in 1987 he married Liz Bisset, with whom he had two daughters, Sophie and Georgia, and a son, Sean.
Liz and his children survive him, as do eight grandchildren and a brother, Alan.
• Stuart Peter Weir, journalist, academic and democracy campaigner, born 13 October 1938; died 2 July 2024
• This article was amended on 17 July 2024. Stuart Weir’s 1988 call to make Britain a constitutional democracy was made in a 1,500-word document, not through “a 1,500-person call” as an earlier version said; also, the call was eventually supported by nearly 50,000 signatories, not 10,000 as originally stated.
