Politics

Richard Lung

Youve made a case for electoral reform. But you dont seem to want to support it. How British!
Take your notion that safe seats are not to be taken for granted.
One day some political genius of the Press will get the idea of removing them with elections that actually elect.
There is such a democratic voting system (STV-PR).
You mention Churchill and at least he called for proportional representation in reply to the Kings Speech 1950. No-one of the two main party leaders has been big enough to step into his shoes since.
But then Churchill was the last liberal-minded PM without a Liberal party, thanks to the two-party FPTP.
This sounds partisan but it is meant to be objective.
British politics is so obsessed with Left and Right that it has forgotten right and wrong.
The right voting method is STV for all official elections.

David Lindsay

“Mandatory reselection”? You might have thought that Labour had introduced this, not without acrimony, nearly thirty years ago, while the Tories and at least the Liberal Party (I don’t know about the SDP, which were mostly set up by people whom it had caused to be deselected) always had it anyway. But apparently not.

In those days, and indicating very starkly that they had and have absolutely nothing in common with New Labour (who were doing the deselecting at the time), those with the gravest reservations about mandatory reselection feared that it would give too much power to vocal cliques within Constituency Labour Parties, and argued that a CLP should be at least one twelfth the size of the Labour vote at the preceding General Election.

The CLP in Erith & Thamesmead (Labour majority 11,500) has well under three hundred members. Not activists. Paid up members. If there were two dozen activists, then I for one would be flabbergasted. Take out councillors and their spouses, and there will be as good as none. And to what consequence? Georgia Gould.

Malcolm Redfellow

Richard Lung [@ 10:20 PM] might have added that PR was once also official Labour policy.

The PR-option (and Gordon Brown, from the grins at that last Presser, has something in his back-pocket) solves a lot of the reasonable issues raised by this fine article.

My suggestion would be a quick and simple amalgamation of (say) five existing seats to create multi-seat constituencies, similar to the Irish model. [Yeah, yeah: I know the very term "Irish" raises hackles; but I've worked in Dublin elections, and seen the pluses).

The usual complaint is that big multi-member constituencies separate the Member from a defined constituency. Not so. The areas of party support do not move, and a five-seater made up of 2+2up-for-grabs return a not-wholly dissimilar pattern to the present. Each party is obliged to maximize its vote across the whole patch: result - end of the rotten boroughs, and revitalized local organisation.

Then, the "pecking-order" of a party's candidates needs to be sorted. This inevitably acknowledges previous service and performance. There is a coat-tails factor, the marshalling of transfers, and the recognition-quotient. All of those throw clout back to the electors.

Nor am I convinced by the "need for a clear majority" argument. All parties are coalitions of interest; and their policies are constructed thereon. The only difference in PR, and coalition governments, is that the consensus is arrived at openly and externally, rather than in secret caucus and internally.

Westminster ordains PR for the devolved assemblies, and has had it imposed for EU elections. Time to swallow the rest of the medication.

JohnAnt

'Cap' the tax-free mortgage payment at £15,000 per year per individual MP, for a property which is theirs to keep or sell? Nice try, but no, I don't think so. It doesn't solve the essential abuse. Much better to have one or several blocks of small flats they can use for the actually quite small number of nights per year they need to spend in Westminster.

Sibylla Chan

My contribution: a poem on the present situation.

Fury

The country erupts in fury
At the callousness of the political class
Who prove to have been out for themselves
Without a thought for the rest of us.
Driven by greed, amongst other things
One of the seven deadly sins
They always warn us against
The arrogance of it all!

Surprised?
Don’t we know power corrupts?
The opulence of Westminster
A temptress in disguise.
You are a member of a club
With a system to legitimise
Your actions
(How convenient)

Greed, dishonesty, collusion
Corrupt to the core
We are horrified to find
The extent to which some went
To have their pockets lined.
Flipping homes, avoiding tax
Moats, phantom mortgages
Not to mention all the rest.

Now we know,
The “Rotten Borough” syndrome
Is alive and well in our time.
Were they not aware they sold their souls to the devil
When they signed the dotted line?
Lose their integrity and undermine
The moral authority of a government
They were responsible for?

Shame is the order of the day,
The speaker all but gone.
New systems will be put in place
Transparency the norm.
Then it’s up to the electorate
To wisely use their vote
And rid the country of the arrogant fools,
Who roamed the corridors of Whitehall.

Sibylla Chan
May 2009
©

Sam Pepson

I wholeheartedly support your nomination of Frank Field for Speaker. I don't always agree with him, but he's honest, a real Parliamentarian who could lead a fight-back against the executive. And he probably doesn't want the job. Ideal - and surely not impossible with a secret ballot.

David E. Jones

Frank Field would be a popular choice for many people but having had a glut of ex-Labour MP's become 'Speaker' in recent years it is probably time for a change.

I have often wondered whether David Cameron could tempt him to ‘cross the floor’ and then give him responsibility for sorting out the welfare mess – the job that he was originally trying to achieve before Mr Brown got him sacked.

But do I detect that you have some inside information for us as to whom the next ‘Speaker’ will be?!

D G Macleod

Why doesn't someone who knows how to do these things launch a petition on the web asking the Queen to use her powers to dissolve parliament and call a general election