The Spectator's Notes

17 February 2007

Was it really an ‘own goal’ for 10 Downing Street to invite people to petition it on subjects of interest to them, and then find more than a million people saying that they opposed road pricing? It was information worth knowing. Politicians should not be frightened to look at new ways of getting people to participate in democracy. One reason that fewer people vote now is that voting has become, compared with other forms of choice, so ‘clunking’. A single decision on who should be your MP for four or five years does not feel very empowering. The Our Say campaign, headed by Saira Khan, advocates a system by which the signatures of two and a half per cent of the national voting population — or the equivalent within a local jurisdiction — could trigger a referendum on their chosen subject. And a pamphlet called Supply Side Politics from the Centre for Policy Studies by Matt Qvortrup (who sounds like the first line of the keyboard but makes more sense) illustrates how well comparable schemes work in Switzerland, 24 of the American states and various other countries. As Europe takes power away from Westminster and focus-group politics narrows differences between the main parties, voters need better means of being heard.

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