Actually, I think parliamentary democracy works quite well. What's broken about the current system, though, is the party system. Your local elected representative may well have local interests at heart, but they won't be allowed to vote against The Party/The Executive in important things. Party MPs are "whipped" to vote for the governing party, and threatened with being held back or passed over for more important jobs within the government if they do hold to their own ideas.

I really believe the answer is to elect fewer Big Party MPs, and more independents and those of smaller parties. We have one Green Party MP and a sprinkling of independents currently. The rest of the House of Commons is made up of whipping cannon fodder.

That's ok, if the independent candidates directly represent their constituents. The disconnect between Joe Schmo and decisions taken on his behalf is my problem with a parliamentary democracy. This country is a big ass place to have just one group of a couple hundred people decided everything.

If we had a "parliamentary democracy" it may work. However we don't have that, we have an adversarial system where one party has a parliamentary dictatorship and the others line up against them. It leads to political ping-pong most typified by PMQs where opposition is based on opposing everything the governing party proposes rather than taking the ideas on merit.

The system used here in the Northern Ireland Assembly, while not perfect, has so much potential. All parties share the departments based on the level of vote they got in the elections. This means there is no opposition as such, parties have to work together, there are more controls and checks with each Minister having a Committee lead by a political "opposite" to answer to. It would be interesting to see it tried at a national level.

Actually many (possibly most) of the people in the Athenian assembly on any ordinary day were either paid to be there or had been dragged in by soldiers. This semi-interested mob then decided to launch invasions or put people to death on the basis of which advocate's speech was most amusing.

That claim about parliamentary democracy is the most absurd hyperbole. You sound like a little boy who declares that all ice cream has been ruined forever because he doesn't like the colour of his sprinkles (/hundreds and thousands).

It's all very well to be grumpy about the perceived imperfections of a system, but what we have right now is far better than any system of political organisation that has ever preceded it, including earlier versions of itseslf, especially the Greek ones. People all too often presume that they have a vision of a perfect system with which the existing one should be replaced, but for that I merely direct their attention to Isiah Berlin (yet again) and his explanation of why perfect justice (etc) are impossible. http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=77888213

The way to a brighter future is to accurately assess the faults in the existing system, and to address them carefully. And one of the biggest problems in the UK system is the voters, who are a shower of greedy ignorant selfish bastards who demand that all the services they personally require or approve of (health care, intercontinental nuclear munitions, pensions, education) must be paid for out of somebody else's pocket. On the reverse, they expect sufficient savings to fund all of this to be found by denying these benefits to whoever they sanctimoniously disapprove of (travellers, migrants, filthy layabout chavs).

Either way, the British voter can always be relied upon to vote for more spending and less taxation to fund it, because he is an ignorant twunt. So if you really want the British voter to take direct authority for policy decisions, you have to start by making him ready to think first.

Fair enough. I don't suppose to have the prefect system, nor the knowledge to enact it. I merely suggest that the one we have is FAR from perfect and is managing too many people to be effective, in any case. You're right about the average Brit, but you still haven't given me a better idea than mine. I never said we should return to the Greek model exactly, just that city states held more merit as an idea, IMO.

We can sit here and hypothesise or have philosophical/socratic debates about which way to go (and perhaps we should), but I asked for better ideas than mine. Let's have them...

Retain parliamentary democracy.

Encourage fragmentation of the large parties - i.e. abandon first past the post and learn to live with coalition governments.

Enact far tougher laws against public servants gaining financial benefits from government contracts they have signed or influenced (the number of outsourcing and PFI contracts that have gone to companies that either subsequently hired civil servants or ministers who drew up the contracts as 'consultants' or in some cases actually supplied the 'special advisers' who negotiated on behalf of the government should be the biggest scandal in British politics today). Also provide for them to be rigorously enforced.

New laws to protect whistle blowers who uncover malpractice in places such as the NHS.

Change the remit of the BBC, and remove public service broadcasting requirements from commercial TV and radio. The should stop trying to provide light entertainment, and be more focused on educational and journalistic programming. Amend its charter to state explicitly that it is expected to inspect the behaviour of governments, and to bring them down if they lie cheat or steal. Everyone involved in not [LIFTED] Tony Blair for the shameful Hutton inquiry must be sacked.

Make the Inland Revenue independent of the Treasury so that it is harder for
1. Newspaper barons to evade taxation on a massive scale if they think the politicians are afraid of them - i.e. the Daily Mail owners, who should be in prison (as perhaps should their cretinous columnists).
2. Companies like Vodafone and Tesco to arrange sweetheart deals.

You see, I don't think we need massive root and branch changes, but there should be some means of discouraging greedy chancers from entering politics to line their own pockets. There's often a lot of talk about getting 'ordinary' people to make more of the decisions that count, but I did jury service once, and was horrified at the reasoning capacity of the randomly chosen ordinary citizenry (who seriously considered the argument that he wouldn't be in court if he wasn't some kind of wrong 'un). I see no problem with elitism in politics so long as we are getting that elitism itself right, parliament should contain the best, brightest and least corruptible of people, and anyone who fails to live up to these standards must be quickly discovered, and viciously weeded out. Then the system will work better.


<edit> proper free speech laws and a massive overhaul of libel law.

<edit 2> revised Human Rights Act, which is constitutionally superior to European legislation on the grounds that the European parliament is not open or democratic enough to have superiority over our own.

Part of the problem is that Members of Parliament are necessarily representatives rather than delegates.

• Delegate -> votes in accordance with the expressed will of the majority of electors
• Representative -> votes in accordance with his/her conscience and/or the perceived best interest(s) of all constituents

There is a massive difference between the two. In a hypothetical scenario where the majority opinion was to act illegally/immorally, for instance to forcibly castrate all men with ginger hair:

• Delegate -> votes with the majority opinion and therefore votes to forcibly castrate all men to ginger hair.
• Representative ->votes in the interest of all his constituents, i.e. including the ginger men, and votes against the proposal.

It's a silly example I know but it clearly illustrates the problem with both the party whip system and our current media set-up. It is the job of an MP to act in the best interests of his constituents even if that means voting against your party or taking a battering from the predominantly stupid press.

Therefore the first thing I would do is ban party whips. It seems absurd to me that we ask MPs to perform a service for all constituents and then we allow groups of MPs to strong-arm them into acting a certain way.

The second thing I would do is have a Register of Journalists' Interests. Why is it fair that those reporting on the affairs, interests and mistakes of public servants should be any less subject to public scrutiny? Make any journalist with a circulation of more than say 10,000 go on the register. This would regulate the more popular journalists whilst still allowing essential privacy for less popular but no less important reporters.

I'm liking all of that. Where's Heather?

Do we just accept that people are idiots and work with that, or is there a way to engage and educate idiots?

I'm the one in the stripey top, silly glasses and beanie.

I've been sort of following things, but what with Best Beloved overdoing the man flu it's been a bit of a random weekend.

Essentially, yes. I agree with SW and RB. All good, sensible comments and ideas. The snag is getting them to happen in the real world. I rather think those in power will only give it up when we prise it from their cold dead fingers.

You up for that then?

I don't advocate violence. If the solution can be found by peaceful means, all well and good. If it can't, well, what can you do?

To me, the problem we have is that running the country has been ruined by party politics.

In my view we should abolish the party structure we have now so we don't have a governing party and an "opposition" (this alone speaks volumes for how useless the current system is - instead of being constructuve, the opposition usually lives up to its name an opposes just about everything, irrespective of whether it's in the best interests of the country).

We should also pay our elected representatives on the basis of their performance, and it should be the general public that decide whether or not they've done a good job and deserve to be rewarded. Nothing focusses the mind of a public figue more that being told your last year's performance was diabolical and you ain't getting anything).

I'd also like to see the critical services (gas, electricity, water etc) run as not-for-profit organizations, and they should also be paid in the same way.

Police, the HNS and other national organizations should also be streamlined where possible - why does each county need it's own individual setup when I'm sure there are ways of centralizing some of the functions rather than having lots of duplicated jobs.

And as for the banks, they should be forced to pay into a central "security fund" and told that if they go to the wall, there will be no bail-out and people will be recompensed from the fund. Bonuses to employees will be in the form of shares that are not redeemable for at least 5 years.

It'll never happen, but it's nice to dream...

Well that's the question, isn't it?

Whatever system you chose or changes you want to make, you have to end the current regime. The climax of V is a wonderful idea, but to have that many people want their country back seems unlikely in the near future. The students are getting close lately, but they need more numbers and less fire extinguishers if they are to rally public opinion.

Write a strongly worded letter to The Times.

How middle class of you.