Cllr. Gavin Ayling

I’ve added a link to ‘Elect the Lords’ to the Campaign section of my site. I hope you agree that the House of Lords is a laughably useless part of our democracy, especially since Blair’s reforms have stuffed it full of Labour supporters (whereas before it was stuffed with Tory landed-gentry)…

Anyway, I have also come across this fascinating article on the problems the Conservatives face in winning the next election because of our electoral system.

I have concerns about pure proportional representation. It causes too many hung parliaments (see Germany’s recent result) which means that no-one gets what they want because the government is compelled to compromise to get any legislation through. “By committee” is always used as an explanation for a poor decision - and coalition governments necessarily have to deal with this the whole time.

One must also note that an MP who is responsible directly to an electorate is far more accountable and represents his (his is genderless) constituents more satisfactorily (Daniel Hannan excepted).

But it can also not be right that Labour got 55.1% of MPs with 35.2% of the vote. It can’t be right, can it, that the Lib Dems and ‘others’ each got less than half of the correct proportion of MPs? Worse still, in Scotland the Tories polled 15.8% of the vote and received a pathetic 1% of the MPs elected from that country!

The Lib Dems have been crying foul for a long time, of course, and the Tories ignored them at their own detriment. By 1992, the Tories were being disadvantaged (see graph). I will give this more thought and get back to you…

Courtesy of http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/

We live in a scary world.

As I write Muslims across France are preparing for a twelfth night of insurgency; a cruise liner has been attacked off of the coast of the most unstable country in the world, Somalia; Venezuela is being dragged towards oppressive socialism; suicide bombings by non-Iraqis are continuing in Iraq; a terrorist attack killed 50+ in India, but went largely unreported; Arafat’s replacement doesn’t seem to have brought about the instant peace that many hoped for; global warming is damaging the environment…

Cox and Forkum have an excellent (as usual) cartoon on Venezuela:

But amid all this turmoil there’s always room for good news. The EU is haemorrhaging support across the continent in reaction to the continual bad press it receives on ’standardisation’ (a synonym for imposition) and its lack of democracy. And, best of all, the UK is the country with the lowest support for the EU!

Interestingly though, support hasn’t even been maintained in the May 2004 accession countries that held referenda on joining. Malta, for example, had 56% support for the EU when it joined and this has slumped to 38% in the latest poll.

And then, while looking into this, I found more than was scary. Democracy is the thing that makes citizens in Western countries happy to be treated with slightly less than respect by our governments. We know, whatever they do, we can remove them from power in elections.

That is why the EU and UK’s treatment of England is so unacceptable. The following picture shows the UK with four stars (that can be clicked on the EU’s website). These stars represent each of the three countries of the UK and London. Hang on… aren’t there four countries?

The EU does not consider the UK to be comprised of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland… England doesn’t exist in a civic sense… Little did the people of London realise, when they agreed to an elected Mayor, that they were agreeing to the part-regionalisation of England - maybe they wouldn’t have minded. But the people of the North East certainly did, and so would we if we were asked. Devolution should have created a federal-like system of four countries with Assemblies / Parliaments. Instead it created an unequal concatenation of one country with a Parliament (with many powers), three Assemblies (London, Wales and Northern Ireland with slightly smaller powers) leaving England at the mercy of Scottish, Welsh and Ulster MPs.

Fighting this inequity is the Campaign for an English Parliament.

The arguments against ID cards are not just financial, but let’s just consider that aspect now: click here.