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Saturday 29 August 2015

We Need A New Democracy - Not A New Voting System

The General Election of 2019 has produced once again a governing party and an opposition who control our MP's through a tribal party system. These tribal parties disenfranchise our MP's and control them through a pernicious whipping system that takes away their freedom to vote and denies them the freedom to truly represent their constituents.

There are those, many with a vested interest, who are still demanding a change to our voting system from the current First Past The Post (FPTP) to a Proportional Representation System (PR), or its sister system Mixed Member Proportional (MMR), as they use in Germany & New Zealand. This despite the fact that the electorate voted against a proposed change in a 2011 Referendum.

It will be noted extremism in the EU this last 10 years has increased exponentially, in Germany the AfD have some 90 + seats in the Bundestag and this replicates across all other EU countries from Austria to France to Holland ... this has been facilitated by PR & endless coalitions in their Countries for decades, leading to voter frustration & extremist parties in their parliaments, there is a better way.

Any change away from FPTP to PR will leave the voters with the same broken system that we currently have and do nothing to improve our democracy, we will still be left with a tribal party politics that usurps our democracy and controls our MP's.

So we need to think this through carefully, before we look to change a voting system we need to fix/change a party political system that completely undermines our democracy and the will of the electorate.

The way forward has to be to diminish the power / control of the political parties and give to voters the choice and selection of our MP's.
  • Open primaries to select our candidates for election as MP's
  • MP's who are fully accountable to their constituents
  • A Recall system with the power of dismissing an MP & calling a by-election
The rules of recall must not be so restrictive they are rendered meaningless or so loose as to be unfair to a sitting MP.

Such a system, where the power lies with the voter through their MP, will lead to less tribal politics, less left and right, and allow our representatives to speak and vote as their conscience demands.So representing fully the views of their constituents without being forced to follow the party line. 

It would be an MP driven House of Commons where it would not be unusual or unacceptable to vote with one's conscience or the party opposite and the whips would become a shadow of their former selves.

The executive of the political parties would have to persuade not coerce, a genuine democracy would rule, party politics could flourish by representing the people and serious policy errors like the Iraq War would be far less likely to occur.

Under such a system politics could become honest, the electorate would be part of the democracy and we would have a politics that engaged and truly represented the people.

@richardcalhoun