Post was initially written here on my journal, there’s a good discussion going on there.

Specific clarification. Straw’s decision isn’t above the rule of law, it can still be subject to judicial review, etc. The powers granted under the FOI Act are quite specific.

I favour a fundamental reform of our system of government, but to do that requires a full and frank review of all elements. One of the problems we’re in is that we’re picking at the edges in a piecemeal fashion, and risk damaging the remaining parts that are still working.

I’ve voted for a full constitutional convention to analyse all of this, and been arguing for one for years. To pre-empt it and assert that one of the fundamental principles of our current system should be done away with is to damage the likely results.

Straw’s right. My party is wrong. That’s weird.

(countdown to being accused of being a lickspittle Labour apologist starts in…)

I agree, it’s what I was trying to get across on my comments on the referendums thread. Ministers should be able to formulate policy in private and then have to account for it to the public and Parliament once it is agreed. It’s the same argument about the Coroner’s Bill – the safeguards in the Bill are fine, if you abstract from the corruption of Parliament into a tool of the majority party. The problem is not privacy, sharing data or whatever, it’s the failure of the political system.

Where I do not agree is that the corruption of electoral politics is primarily, the fault of the voting system. PR-based Parliaments may be more representative and their executives may have less power, but policy change is still dominated by the desire to obtain and maintain power (by on an individual and party basis). I maintain that the problem is static political parties acting in no-one’s interests but their own.

I agree with you the papers should not be released , well said ! Your complaints about the way the system works are the usual Liberal stuff and I find it a litle tiresome but in the end I rather share your conclusions that we have a problem if that makes any sense .
The usual Liberal answer to the supine Parliament problem ( and I care not what colour they are myself ) is PR. This would concerntrate power even more the hands of coteries of politicians and for many more reasons is abhorrent ot the British .

Accepting that PR is never going to happen what do we do ? Open Primaries , more direct votes but then the idea of waging war by rolling referendum is fatuous .I see Iraq as the least problematical area . The Government decides for us , they know and we elected them. In notbher areas I woud like to see more referenda. Tax for example

Important point. I do not support “PR”. I support a return to the tradition of multi-member constituencies that were abolished by Labour in the ’48 Act, and a method of counting votes that works effectively in other Westminster system countries such as Australia, Malta and Ireland.

Newmania, specifically, the reform (return?) I favour removes power from coteries of politicians and returns it to the voters. The party system we have is a result of the single member system brought in by Labour in ’48. Before that it was fairly common for there to be two or more MPs representing an area, with MPs of different parties sharing the same constituency.

Safe seats are the biggest problem. Open primaries are a figleaf, if you’ve got a safe seat, you still have a corrupt House—look at Congress in the US for that, pretty much every Congressional seat is safe, and the whole thing is dominated by a two party duopoly.

And referenda have been dealt with in a different thread, I agree completely with Paulie, for political issues, we have a representative democracy, in every other area of our life we accept specialisation of labour, it makes sense to elect people to make such decisions on our behalf, as, if the system is working, they are representative of us but able to dedicate the time to understand the nuance.

California has tax policy decided by referendum, and that’s causing no end of social problems with ‘popular’ issues getting funds they don’t need but unpopular ones neglected causing massive knock on effects.

I think you make a mistake in placing the decision to have elections run by single-member constituencies using FPTP in 1948. It is true that the RPA 1948 did abolish the remaining two-member constituencies and the use of STV in multi-member University constituencies but by 1948 that was an ‘of course’ decision which did not require much thought because it was already what everyone thought would happen.

The real commitment came in 1917-18 when a dispute between the House of Commons and the House of Lords left Britain using FPTP by default. The Commons wanted to experiment with STV in all multi-member boroughs (so Manchester would have had 9 MPs elected by STV), while the Lords wanted the Alternative Vote in single-member boroughs; unable to agree, they defaulted to keeping FPTP.

The existence of STV in multi-member University constituencies was left over from this dispute but it always an anomaly which came to a natural end when the University constituencies were themselves abolished.

I also think you are mistaken in identifying the persistence of FPTP as the reason for partisanship in British politics; it is far more because of the strict dividing line between Government and Opposition within Parliament. And British politics has become much less corrupt over the last 60 years.

Y’know what David? You’ve actually told me something I didn’t know on the issue, which is impressive. You’re right of course that ’48 was the tail end of the process, but that end could have happened in a different way, the previous attempt (from your dates, during a Liberal govt before the last bunch of major splits) showed that the result wasn’t inevitable.

Also, there’s an element of hyperbole in the above, as is naturally the case, FPTP is a significant contributory factor to the party system we now have, abolishing multi-member seats effectively forced the National Liberal/Constitutionalists to merge into the Conservatives in the 50s and 60s, for example. And yes, the split between Govt and Opposition benches is also a significant cause, but Govts for the most part before the current period weren’t always commanding massive overall majorities, yes, landslides happened, but even then individualism was taken as part of the natural order of things.

As for corrupt? I think it’s a lot less financially corrupt, really, the current arguments over expenses &c are small fry compared to what went on in the past/happens elsewhere. But in political terms, I consider it to be more corrupt—the corrosive effect of super-majorities and MPs beholden to the centre is just wrong.

Example, I live in a swing seat (Calder Valley, probably now a 3-way marginal) held by a good sitting MP who’s standing down. Labour nationally forced an all-women shortlist, and the local party selected someone, a well known local councillor. The NEC has rejected her selection, so the process has to be gone through again. As a member of a different, democratic party, the idea that someone can be deselected at a national level in the way she has been is horrifying: it takes “bringing the party into disrepute” for the Lib Dems to do similar, and that is normally coupled with expulsion.

That, to me, is a form of corruption. If you prefer a different term, feel free to suggest one.

“The nation almost certainly opposed it”

You have no proof of this whatsoever, and remember, TB was re-elected after the Iraq war.

Here are a number of polls on the Iraq war.

I’m not sure the re-election proves the nation wasn’t opposed to the Iraq war -the war was low down on the list of important issues at election time.

“and remember, TB was re-elected after the Iraq war.”

Which is also no proof that people supported the war.

Suppose you could design the system of government for a new nation. Would you copy ours?

I think the point about 1948 is that there was no real debate at that time which might have led to a different outcome. In 1917-18 there was. In fact the change to predominantly single-member divisions actually occurred earlier, in 1884, although I don’t know to what extent that was contentious. In 1917 there was a wartime coalition government involving all three parties, and a practically free vote, which makes it difficult to attribute responsibility.

Given that we have a system where the government is controlled by Parliament, it doesn’t strike me as fundamentally corrupt to have the political parties also have an influence over their own local bodies’ candidate selection. It is actually quite helpful to stop entrist groups from subverting the process and getting into Parliament someone under false colours. The US has FPTP but does have the problem whereby parties are stuck with accepting plainly nasty and/or corrupt people who are able to win selection – think of David Duke for the GOP and Edwin Edwards for the Democrats battling to be Governor of Alabama. In the UK both would have been stopped.

Oh, I’ve no problem with national party federations asserting minimum standards for what they expect of a candidate. The Lib Dems havve a training/approval process where you have to pass a nationally approved set of criteria first before you can put yourself forward to be a PPC–there are ways to make exceptions, but you don’t have candidate selections (which are effectively closed primaries for us) being overturned after the fact except in extreme cases; this most certainly wasn’t.

But yes, the move to single member started when they abolished the county seats/knights of the shires in ’84, but it wasn’t an inevitable process.

The lack of debate in 1948 was of course partially due to the massive landslide Labour received. Having said that, when I studied GCSE politics, the ’48 act was presented as an avowedly good thing, and much of it was.

The principle point I want to start reformers to make is that STV/multi member wouldn’t be new, and that the “constituency link” with a single MP is somewhat anomalous in our history, not the traditional way of doing it. I’d rather constituencies were mostly based on genuine natural boundaries, not changing and tweaking constantly to try and balance a small electorate, etc.

Plus, specifically, safe seats have become the modern rotten boroughs, and the way politics works under FPTP, with the move to the centre, Downs/Duverger, etc is something I think is damaging in and of itself, ‘safe’ Labour seats might fall again this time, but to extremist parties capitalising on the disenchantment that the aparatchiks have manged to create for themselves.

UKliberty: sort of, yes. I’d do what most of the Commonwealth countries that are succesful did–take the good bits, reform the bad bits, and adapt it to circumstance. Which is how the UK system is supposed to work. It’s just ossified a bit in the last 8 years, Blair was supposed to be the greatest constitutional reformer of the post-war era, instead we got a bit of tinkering.

I do think a compromise would be for an inquiry into the Iraq war to be given access to the cabinat minutes on the condition they weren’t published. The inquiry could then comment on if and how cabinet discussion was conducted and what evidence cabinet were given before appoving the decsion to go to war but the principal of being able to have free and frank discusssions within cabinet would be maintained.