Category Archives: Democracy

Jun 10 2009 2 comments

Griffin is egged - a bad day for democracy

nick-griffin-eggThe “egging” of BNP leader Nick Griffin [see video below] is not good for democracy. Rather, it’s very bad for democracy.

No matter what we think of him and his party, they have the right to say their piece. They are a legitimate party, and they did win their seats in a democratic election. And the best way to deal with their disgusting and racist views and policies is to expose them in rational discourse.

Rather than attacking them with eggs (which I hope were rotten - otherwise it was a waste of perfectly good eggs) and chanting “Nazi scum, off our streets”, these protestors should have butted in and asked Griffin well-rehearsed and pertinent questions. These would have destroyed his credibility in front of the cameras and created a story that would have been far larger than “cranks make BNP leader abandon speech”.

On an aside, the BNP aren’t far-right or, really, far-left either - they’re just racist extremists. So please can people stop arguing about it? And can the media please take note.

BNP, Democracy, Video
Jun 09 2009 2 comments

Proof that PR isn’t fair

We elect our Members of the European Parliament under a system of proportional representation, a system which bases its entire claim to legitimacy on the fact that it is “fair”. But lets look at the results we got in the UK last night:

Conservative - 4,198,394 - 27.7% (+1.0%) - MEPs: 25 (+1)
UK Independence Party - 2,498,226 - 16.5% (+0.3%) - MEPs: 13 (+1)
Labour - 2,381,760 - 15.7% (-6.9%) - MEPs: 13 (-5)
Liberal Democrats - 2,080,613 - 13.7% (-1.2%) - MEPs: 11 (+1)
Green Party - 1,303,745 - 8.6% (+2.4%) - MEPs: 2 (0)
British National Party - 943,598 - 6.2% (+1.3%) - MEPs: 2 (+2)

Look at the links between percentage increases and MEP increases - or, rather, the lack of.

The BNP made the greatest increase in MEPs, but had only a small increase in its vote share - and received fewer actual votes than four years ago when they got no MEPs. And the Greens had the largest increase in their vote but no increase in the number of their MEPs. Is this “fair”? No.

The reason for this unfairness is the type of PR used in the EU elections: the massively complicated D’Hondt method:

After all the votes have been tallied, successive quotients or ‘averages’ are calculated for each list. The formula for the quotient is , where:

- V is the total number of votes that list received; and
- s is the number of seats that party has been allocated so far (initially 0 for all parties in a list only ballot, but includes the number of seats already won where combined with a separate ballot, as happens in Wales and Scotland).

Whichever list has the highest quotient or average gets the next seat allocated, and their quotient is recalculated given their new seat total. The process is repeated until all seats have been allocated.

So the fallacy that proportional representation is inherently “fair” is dead. Maybe now, proponents of PR will move the debate to actually looking at the many different versions of it and pick the one that they prefer before coming back to argue their case against FPTP (SMSP - single member simple plurality, its actual name).

Until they can actually come up with any sort of consensus or even a considered majority on a replacement electoral system for FPTP, they’re not even worth listening to. Advocates of FPTP know what they like about it and why - few proponents of PR know more about it than a vague desire for “fairness”.

After all, even the Greens are questioning it!

Democracy, Election, Vote
Jun 03 2009 1 comments

Parliamentary reform

uk-parliamentThe word of the moment is clear and unambiguous… yet no-one can agree on what it means. What’s the word? Reform, of course.

Mention any issue that is in the news to a politician and very shortly you will get the word “reform” bandied around. Let’s reform this, let’s reform that, everything needs reform! But what reform? Reform of what? And why?

Reform of the MPs expenses system is needed for obvious reasons - one of them being to rescue public opinion of politicians from the sewers that it has resided in since the stories first started coming out in the Telegraph some last century 24 days ago. But even this clearly required reform does not have consensus, with some wanting to go so far as to house MPs in a block of flats, Brown wanting to replace expenses with a daily allowance, Cameron wanting to restrict expenses to only certain items, and Clegg floundering around saying something new about “reforming the expenses system” in some way or another every day - and then you have the great number of people who have just turned to the “screw them all” approach.

From the MPs expenses scandal and the (even further) collapse of public confidence in politicians has re-emerged another place to use the word - just after “parliamentary”. Parliamentary reform, however, is even more impossible to reach any form of consensus on than MP expenses - primarily because everyone’s view of what parliament is and/or should be does not agree. And so there are four main issues:

  • Proportional representation
  • Fixed term parliaments
  • Elected House of Lords
  • Referendums
  • MP recalls

There is a poll that says that people are generally in favour in all of these things, but this is not based on real knowledge of the political system, but a perception of “fairness” with little thought for the consequences.

Get the whole story »

Democracy, Politics
Jun 02 2009 1 comments

A general election trumps parliamentary reform

big-ben-ballot-boxA popular refrain from politicians at the moment is “parliamentary reform”. parliamentary reform this, parliamentary reform that. Give us PR, state funding of political parties, etc. But what the people want is a general election.

Voters would rather have an early general election to bring in new MPs than make fundamental changes to the parliamentary system, a YouGov poll for the Daily Telegraph has found.

Six in 10 voters want Gordon Brown to call a general election by the autumn rather than waiting until next year, blaming MPs rather than the system in which they operate for the scandal over expenses.

Two thirds of those questioned agreed that there was “nothing fundamentally wrong with Britain’s constitution providing that MPs are honest and competent”.

Despite another poll saying that “radical changes to the political system are overwhelmingly backed by voters”, I think that the YouGov poll is more accurate because people understand the current system - even if they know its not perfect.

Under the current system, people know how their vote affects the political process. They know that they can vote their MP in or out, and that parties need a majority of MPs to form a government - it’s nice and simple. But these reforms muddy the waters and complicate things, and make the individual voters role far less clear.

Another reason is that a general election the people know that they can effect - and they can do it now. Any parliamentary reforms will, of necessity, be beaten out in the back offices of the parties and the public will only get a choice of a few, restricted, options - if any choice at all. And it will be no quick change - I mean, we haven’t even had proper reform in the House of Lords and that was promised a decade or more ago!

A general election is simply a far more pressing issue. Parliamentary reform is important, but a general election more so. A general election is needed to give the political system back its legitimacy after the unelected assurption of Gordon Brown and the MP expenses scandal and it is needed now. Reform can wait whilst an intelligent and workable solution is reached - rather than the idiocy that spills out of the mouths of many (such as the Lib Dem fascination with the anti-democratic PR electoral system).

The call for a general election trumps the call for parliamentary reform in the eyes of the people - and for good reason.

Democracy, Election, Politics
May 26 2009 2 comments

A referendum on PR? Get in line.

alan-johnsonSo Alan Johnson thinks that we should have a referendum on changing the electoral system proportional representation - specifically AV+, which he describesas:

On polling day, a voter would have two ballot papers. The first would be for choosing the constituency MP: the voter marks his preferences (1, 2, 3 and so on) against the candidates. If one candidate gets more than half of the first preference votes cast, he or she is duly returned. If not, the candidate with the lowest tally is knocked out, and the second (and then third, etc) preferences are redistributed until finally one candidate reaches the magical 50 per cent mark.

On the second ballot paper, the voter simply marks which party she wants to give her vote to. All these votes are tallied up and those parties that exceed the threshold (say 5 per cent) get a proportionate number of seats. The majority of those sitting on the green benches, however, would be constituency MPs.

Yes, oh so simple.

Now, I’m no fan of PR. I think it is an undemocratic system for use in our political system which takes control from the people and places it in the hands of the political classes. But I’m not going to go into that right now (maybe later, if requested).

The issue here is that Alan Johnson is calling for a referendum on an issue that really is not needed and certainly is not pressing. Looooong before we need a referendum on the Commons electoral system, we need a referendum on the EU constitution like we were promised, the issue of an English Parliament decided by a vote and, preferably, a general election as well.

Frankly, the issue of how we elect MPs simply isn’t an issue right now. Long before we even think about considering it we need to sort out the democratic deficit regarding devolution (or, rather, the lack of devolution to England) and the complete lack of any democracy in the House of Lords. Let’s not get so sidetracked by the MP expenses that we start looking at ways to “fix” the Commons and actually forget about the real constitutional and democratic issues.

This referendum that Alan Johnson is calling for is not just a referendum that is needed, but one that also must wait its turn - we have plenty of actually important issues that need referendums first.

Alan Johnson, Democracy, Politics
May 24 2009 0 comments

The humiliation of MPs: We The People

The Telegraph continues to publish more and more details of MPs expense claims and, alongside public anger, forcing MPs into humiliating apologies and resignations. But Rowan WIlliams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is saying “enough’s enough” and that it is “damaging democracy” - oh, and giving the BNP support (like people become racist when their MPs exploit their expenses!).

Sorry, but it isn’t. Democracy was damaged by these MPs claiming excessive amounts, on inappropriate items, or by otherwise pretty much committing fraud by flipping their second home around or cliaming for an already paid-off mortgage. And then they voted to keep it secret, which was always going to end badly - bad news always gets out. If they’d published the details themselves, they could at least have had some control over it.

I think the important point to make here is that confidence in democracy is not reliant on confidence in those who have been elected. That is why we have general elections - so that we can change our minds every few years. We have have plenty of confidence in the principle of democracy and in our politicial system whilst not having confidence in our MPs. So long as we can vote them out - and are given the opportunity - democracy is not damaged. It is only when we are refused the general election we want because the government fears it will lose that our faith in our democracy - which is, after all, based on the principle of rule by the people - begins to be damaged.

MPs are not the embodiment of democracy, no matter what they might like to think. They are merely our current representatives; they have their job at our whim. They are no more than the embodiment of our past will, and that mandate has now quite obviously expired. This is why the humiliation of MPs certainly is not damaging to democracy, just to individual MPs and political parties. In many ways, democracy is strengthened by this as we the people can actively see how their anger is affecting politics and will be able to express that at the ballot box and vote out their sitting MP when a general election is finally called.

I can see a couple of problems arising after a general election if, as expected, at least half of the House of Commons is made up of brand new MPs:

As many as 30 will be forced to resign directly because of the expenses scandal, while whips expect more than 200 to quit because they are unable to cope with continued public anger. Up to 90 MPs will be voted out in the election. (The Times)

Firstly, forming a government will be awkward if so many MPs are brand new - at least some experience of the Commons is essential before ministerial office can be conferred - and a load of green MPs could confuse parliamentary procedure.

However, the biggest benefit would be that it would be crop of new MPs for a brand new era of a transparent Parliament. We could then start afresh, with confidence in our elected representatives - and the knowledge that they have all made a pledge of transparency and frugality with our money.

The humiliation of MPs now sets us up for renewed and complete confidence in their replacements. Without this humiliation, many would simply not go and the new broom would not be able to sweep through the Commons. Whatever damage this may cause now will be more than offset when we have a crop of new, untainted, elected representatives.

Democracy, Parliament, Politics, We The People