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/
November 8th, 2005 at 10:25 pm
The House of Lords shouldn’t be elected. If the people elected a Labour government they would elect a Labour House of Lords too. Where would the opposition be then? The “reforms” should be repealed - hereditary peers are the only way to have any chance of an opposition in the upper house.
November 8th, 2005 at 10:59 pm
I see the argument for an apolitical upper house, but the House of Lords has been mistreated by Blair in a way that is irreversible. Further, the House of Lords is not apolitical, all the Lords have political affiliations.
If the lower house continues to use First Past the Post as its electoral method, a second house that uses Proportional Representation or another electoral method would create an interesting balancer. The HoL would represent the people in absolute proportions, while the House of Commons would continue to represent the ‘General Will’ (a majority most of the time).
November 9th, 2005 at 12:52 pm
The method of choosing should be different, or the constituencies not the same (Counties?) if you don’t wish to have a replication of the commons.
How about limiting it to those over 45 or 50, to ensure independently mined and experienced people. They would be much less likely to be ambitiously holding the party line.