Ooh text alerts…

No doubt they’ll announce new legislation on Twitter as well. *roll eyes*

Putting the slightly fluffy elements to one side, Cameron has put some substance on the ‘reforming Parliament’ platitudes that have been thrown around recently – which yet again puts him way ahead of the other party leaders, even if you don’t agree with the rejection of PR.

Text alerts: content-free 160-char fabble.

Full-text RSS: probably a MySociety project…

No sane party on their way to a landslide will want to abandon FPTP, his reasoning for rejecting it is spurious and I hopehe gets called up on it.

However, there are some pretty exciting things there. Not so much text alerts though…

*Beep*Beep* “STOP THAT, right now! Whatever you were just doing before, well, it’s illegal now, so just cut it out.”

It’s excellent that all main parties are now talking seriously about constitutional reform. No longer is our “constitution” considered the perfect result of tradition and adaptation – the seal has been broken and the topic is now acceptable at all levels and in all parties.

Cameron’s proposals are not bad – his attachment to FPTP appears self-serving and muddled, but you can’t have everything.

The biggest problem though is that proposals to shift power away from government are only skin deep if they are not backed by the removal of the Crown from parliament. That mechanism makes parliament sovereign, and government remains largely in charge of parliament. So whatever reforms get put in (and my guess is that it’ll be Cameron who introduces some very watered down reforms) he and any future PM remains free to wind them back.

Only a new written constitution based on the sovereignty of the people can stop that from happening.

Cynicism about motivation aside, not to mention some justified eye-rolling about Twitter and YouToob (Dancing Dad: ‘What’s this kids? It’s got a great beat to it!) and the rather high threshold at which expense claims are published, this is a start.

We need PR though and a seperation of Crown and State, preferably that abolition of the former.

I’d be very interested to see what the last point means – does it mean government will no longer cap local council tax rises?

I disagree with free votes and I’m not sure I agree with giving MPs the right to change the timetabling of bills – isn’t this government’s responsibility?

I don’t see how government can force parties into granting free votes – surely it is up to each Party to make its own decision on that. After all, any MP is entitled to a free vote if they give up the Party whip.

Publishing details of civil servants’ expenses is fine if it’s anonymous, but I don’t think it’s fair if their name is given with it, unless the private sector will also reciprocate.

Whatever you think of Dave, fixed term parliaments are a good idea and Labour should have talked about them yonks ago. I believe Blair was keen on them but never got round to them, or something.

Publishing expenses for those in the private sector is fine – so long as that information goes to the investors.

Civil servants are our employees and it’s our money they squander.

They are not elected representatives and should not be subject to the same level of personal scrutiny as MPs should be. They didn’t sign up for that. If they have behaved badly in making expenses claims, they should be subject to disciplinary action from whoever their line manager is.

I completely agree that it’s public money and think just publishing the expenses without names attached would be enough to ensure transparency and generate an outcry about unacceptable claims, which could then be dealt with by superiors.

I’ll post the same response I did on CiF:

So, reading between the lines and stripping away the PR fluff that was his stock-in-trade at Carlton TV’s PR department, we have :

– Calls for “personal responsibility”, which means “benefit cuts”
– Transferring of power “from the EU to Britain”, which means “get out of the EU and retreat further into our abusive relationship with the US”
– “… Any suitably qualified organisation can set up a new school”, which means a return of the unfair selective education system, probably with the onus on religious schools
– The aforementioned “NIMBY” charter, which basically means new homes will only get built in areas which can’t afford to oppose them, handy for keeping the riff-raff away from your Surrey mansion.

Yup – same old Tories, despite their newfound affinity for spin.

There’s a fair few good ideas in the list, and I suppose that Cameron deserves credit for supporting them. I still think that the best we can hope for is a decent first year or two, much like New Labour 1997-99 (devolution, human rights act, minimum wage, ‘ethical foreign policy’, responsible spending), before the whole thing turns nasty.

Here is the conclusion of my post on Next Left about the Cameron piece.

http://www.nextleft.org/2009/05/camerons-constitutional-caution.html

….

An auction between the two major parties on political reform is to be welcomed. David Cameron is offering incremental reforms of a rather similar kind to that which has been pursued by the government, where Gordon Brown’s intention of a “new constitutional settlement” has so far become something more of a tidying-up exercise of moderate reforms.

David Cameron’s intervention sets out two possibilities for the next few weeks.

One is that a broad consensus is emerging on an incremental and somewhat cautious agenda of useful but piecemeal constitutional reforms of the type he sets out. This would strengthen Cameron’s claim to have responded confidently to the Parliamentary crisis, though in several areas his proposals are similar to those of the government.

The alternative is that the Labour government realises that Cameron has left considerable space for a more comprehensive constitutional reform agenda, and seeks to reignite an agenda which has lost momentum since 2001.

How should the bidding be raised? Alan Johnson’s intervention on an electoral reform referendum is gathering further support.

The most significant would be to move well beyond talking about responding, consultation and ‘listening’ to the public mood – and to cede significant power to shape the outcomes of political reform to a new constitutional convention.

If Labour are serious about outbidding Cameron on this they have to make progress beyond promises immediately, because they’ve had 12 years to do something.

I’d have to see actual changes – not consultations – initiated in the next few months.

The beauty is that Labour could, if they wish, happily just do something on electoral reform. An old review suggested a PR system to be put up for referendum, and their latest report, though spun by them to say PR is no good, actually said that PR is no worse than FPTP and the only barrier is how complicated it is perceived.

If they wish to u-turn on the u-turn then they’ve already done enough work to legitimately say that a referendum is needed, there’s no barrier in their way.

#13 Sunder

It’s *way* too late for any sort of constitutional convention on PR. There’s no way Cameron would agree to honour it, and it would have no time to report before he inevitably takes office. The best bet is to push for a referendum on PR to coincide with the next election. While the Tories wouldn’t be bound by that either, they would find a yes vote very difficult to ignore.

#14
> If Labour are serious about outbidding Cameron on this they have to make progress beyond promises immediately, because they’ve had 12 years to do something.

Precisely. Immediately being the operative word. Their record on this has been pathetic, and alas I see no reason it won’t continue to be bound by self-interest and conservatism.

DonaldS@16
I agree about the referendum. I was among the signatories of the letter published on Sunday, and am a supporter of the campaign on this. I posted this about that on Sunday
http://www.nextleft.org/2009/05/is-it-too-late-for-electoral-reform.html

However, a constitutional convention as a route to examining the full range of issues involved in a codified and written constitution remains an attractive idea too. I don’t think they are incompatible. Of course, it could not be run and completed within a year. If established in a way that had genuine engagement and participation (which is a big If I appreciate), I think it would be difficult for any government not to engage seriously with its outcomes and recommendations.

—

On Labour’s record: I think many of the criticisms are valid, and have made several of them myself. But I do think the Labour government’s record on constitutional change in the 1997-2001 Parliament is by some distance the most important and substantive set of political reforms in the UK since the 1911 Parliament Act.

The problem is that the momentum was not sustained after 2001, and the government has then also been caught by its own half-reforms where we have more transparency without legitimacy (eg party funding). There is lots of unfinished business and several areas where I have advocated going further (including electoral reform). But I think a fair assessment of the record would not the unusual scale of change, certainly in the context of British political history.

I welcome Cameron’s engagement, which is a long way from where the Conservatives have been in the past (though they did well in 1979 to carry through the introduction of Select Committeees). But I do not yet see anything at all on his agenda today which can be compared to devolution, or to freedom of information, or to the human rights act, in terms of judging the scale of change being mooted.

I do remember Gordon Brown saying some half-hearted things about reform before he became PM too. Although Tony Blair promised more, he did get devolution to happen. So, is there a connection between virtual certainty of becoming PM and promising reform? I expect very little to materialise from David Cameron’s shiny reform agenda.

As has already been said, the texting etc. is populist nonsense, and his defence of FPTP is completely illogical (he seems to be arguing against an unmentioned straw-man of closed party lists, rather than taking on the gamut of PR options). Although his reforms look good on paper, even if he were to carry them through, they would be superficial.

There’s no exploration into the deep areas of where sovereignty is located in our system, and thus no examination of the problem of the Crown, symbolised by an ineffective and unaccountable head of state, whose powers are wielded with further unaccountability by the executive, who control both legislative houses (by patronage of the Lords and block voting in the Commons).

My thoughts here.

http://willrhodesportmanteau.com/2009/05/26/dave-cameron-i-will-become-a-socialist-in-power/

So ‘call me dave ‘ wants fixed term parliaments at the same time as he calls for an early general election.

Classic Tory hypocrisy.

The single most important reform the Parliament need right now is to have the same percentage member of parliaments from each ethnicity or religion in the population,
A cap must be introduced for each ethnicity to only have the same number of members of parliaments as per their percentage rate of the total population,and without exceptions.
If a certain Group is say 5% of total population, then only up to 5% members of parliaments should be from that group,not 5.5%
This should be followed in all the parliamentarian committees and legislations.

>An auction between the two major parties on political reform is to be welcomed. David Cameron is offering incremental reforms of a rather similar kind to that which has been pursued by the government, where Gordon Brown’s intention of a “new constitutional settlement” has so far become something more of a tidying-up exercise of moderate reforms.

Agreed on that, the Cameron suggestions reminded me in style of the Brown “new broom” presentation. Though things like fixed term Parliaments are necessary ideas – even with the exceptional events get-out clause.

But every small step is a small step, for all that.

I think it will depend on how far the momentum of the Expenses Gate Bandwagon can be transferred to the Real Reform Steamroller.

#23

“The single most important reform the Parliament need right now is to have the same percentage member of parliaments from each ethnicity or religion in the population,
A cap must be introduced for each ethnicity to only have the same number of members of parliaments as per their percentage rate of the total population,and without exceptions.
If a certain Group is say 5% of total population, then only up to 5% members of parliaments should be from that group,not 5.5%
This should be followed in all the parliamentarian committees and legislations.”

WTF? Seriously, what drugs were you on when you wrote this.

I take it you don’t like democracy. You don’t like the idea that people can vote for whoever they want. If there are “too many” of a particular race or religion in parliament, then we’re not allowed to vote in someone of that race/religion however good they would be.

When you think about it, what you’re suggesting wouldn’t work unless you abolished democracy, because every ethnicity and religion would have to have their precise percentage of the population represented in parliament in order to stop others having too much. So it would be a cap as much as a quota.

Unless of course, the only ethnicity you don’t want a cap for is “White British”, in which case you’re just a racist. (BNP troll?)

What we need is a massive decentralisation of power to local councils. Then the more conservative areas can adopt conservative policies and the more socialist areas adopt more socialist policies etc

@23: The single most important reform the Parliament need right now is to have the same percentage member of parliaments from each ethnicity or religion in the population

If you’re going to do that, why limit it to ethnicity and religion? Why not add gender, age, profession, nose length, left-handedness, level of educational qualifications, etc. And if you’re going to do that, the best way is to choose people randomly from the electoral roll. Which actually wouldn’t be a bad idea for part of the membership of the house of lords.

But it’s a stupid idea for the Commons, whose membership should be determined by who the voters vote for, and no other factors.

A week ago I though it was a sure thing Cameron would win the election.

I don’t think it is now. If Labour acts decisively (probably under a different leader than Brown, who’s about as decisive as a sack of suet) and writes up a list of constitutional reform proposals, then puts them to the people in a referendum (with each proposal being voted on separately, of course), they will appear to be responding decisively and appropriately to people’s concerns. This will improve Labour’s poll ratings.

Also, every voter who isn’t a Conservative supporter — about 62% of them — has an interest in avoiding Conservative victory under FPTP and will probably vote for PR.

So the constutional crisis prompted by the expenses scandal may well lead to a Labour minirity government. elected by PR, probably with Johnson or Miliband as leader.