Electorial Reform – or just vote rigging
There’s been a lot of talk about reforming the constitution, House of Commons, House of Lords, voting system and MP’s expenses and general fixing our broken political system.
According to websites like www.323.me.uk, we have the largest number of MP’s of any parliament anywhere in the world except for China. Even in the United States they have only 400 in each house compared to our 642 in the House of Commons and however many in the Lords.
But I don’t think we should dismiss our system quite so easily. We talk of making our vote count and quite frankly that means we need lots of MP’s, we average about 68,000 votes per MP – that not bad compared with the Americans, where it’s closer to 400,000. We want our MP’s to listen to us and for us to have access to them and for them to be ‘in-touch’ with people – well we need more, not fewer for that to happen.
First past the post – this system does have flaws, but every single system has flaws and when it comes down to it, the first past the post system is probably on balance the fairest of all. Take the US with its electoral college – where each state is allotted a set number of ‘votes’ and whichever party wins the state then gets ‘all’ the electoral college votes. It’s a weird and very unfair system.
Take the Europeans many of whom have a form of proportional representation suffer from the problem of the sheer number of powerful and often extremist political parties that do well, Le Penn in France, The Northern League in Italy, the Greens in Germany, these are often one policy parties that have a disproportional influence on the politics of their nations.
The role of the House of Commons vs. the Lords – to have an elected and non elected house is actually extremely fair. People forget – elected politicians are accountable to the electorate – but if we all vote to kick immigrants out of our country (as many would like) that’s not something a civilised nation does.
Therefore we need a counter to extremist’s policies and in our unwritten UK constitution we have always had that, it’s called the House of Lords and it is unelected. The purpose of having an unelected body countering the elected is that they are not accountable and therefore they are able to look at issues from a different viewpoint – from a neutral position.
If anything we need to work harder to remove party politics from the House of Lords, we should make the House of Lords side on common sense (fewer cases of wonky bananas) and realistic law making. That is the job of the ‘second’ house to act as a balance to law makers.
The accident of birth is as good as any other method to achieve this; in fact it’s probably the best for the simple reason that members can be groomed from a young age for their future position in life. The second important consideration is to make it voluntary – I see no reason why a law maker should decide law for which he has absolutely no interest. In this way too, despite the accident of birth, members are free to ‘not-bother’ if they so choose, you can’t disrespect them for it.
What you end up with is a body of well trained, common sense people that are dedicated and committed to the bettering of our country without the burden of being elected and being responsible to a party line. And that has to better than a House full of ‘wan’na be celebrities and socialites’ that Labour would like to have in place.