No need to get annoyed at me, just trying to point out that I'd never vote Tory and of the other two main parties, who I have voted for, there's nothing about what they say or do that wants me to back them. Thought that was pretty much easy enough to gleen from my statement.

Get annoyed by other things mate, not voting Tory is not down to prejudice unless you term prejudice as just not agreeing with a party's main beliefs.

Now your comment has annoyed me, good one, didn't think I had to spoon feed comments in order to avoid people getting annoyed by them.

Agree with getting rid of parties. How about a system where we vote for each major thing? eg Privatise the NHS - Yes or No?; War with Iraq - yes or no? and then just go with whatever the majority wants.

I'm surprised we've got a Sinn Fein voter! It seems statistically unlikely if nothing else

Bratty?

Mark

My apologies then mate.

In my head, it wasn't specific to you. I just hear a lot of "I'd never vote for [insert party name here]" all the time and it winds me up, because I don't believe that's the answer. Jon is right in that the party system is broken and Paul is right in that every party is largely similar these days anyway. IMO, excluding a whole party forever is a little short sighted when the whole system is broken. I not sure about everyone else here, but I don't a "party's main beliefs" have really existed since at least the mid-90s...

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough in making that point.

Oh, the parties (in so far as the rank & file activists) still have their 'principles', it's just that the people who lead the parties have been happy to ignore them at even the vaguest sniff of power & wealth. It's no coincidence the memberships of all the main parties have been dropping like a stone for several years.

He was my first thought so I'm glad you asked

Unlikely anyone else would :S

Yes the rank and file have barely changed but the parties have. Blair took the Labour party to the right, nudging right up to the Tories on some policies. You could not not even get a cigarette paper between them.

Actually that does not really explain all the debt problems across Europe and the US. The Tories had even pledge to maintain Labours spending plans right up until the financial crisis and they would have done little different before the crisis.

On the plus side you have legitimacy. Parliament operates as a political abstraction layer sitting between the people - who lend it their authority to make decisions - and the actual decisions. So parliament's decisions are considered legitimate in so far as they represent the will of the people. Making those decisions directly removes the distortion of the abstraction.

The negative aspect is fairly considerable though. It requires a great deal of faith in the electorate to suddenly take their responsibilities seriously. I hate to sound like some modern day Metternich, but I have to say that in my experience I have two key doubts on that front.

The first is a matter of methodology. Every public debate has at least two major factors. On the one hand you have stuff like factual evidence - say for instance that the UK economy gains far greater rewards from immigrant labour than the associated costs. And then you have moral interpretation of the issue - in which case suddenly the UK is being overrun by scrounging immigrants who contribute nothing but armies of sticky, thieving children. You can probably infer from my choice of example that I am very dismayed by the present direction of public policy in this regard. But I fear that it would go further and become nastier if the man on the street were able to cast his ballot on a whim, what with the man on the street being subject to unthinking prejudice in this matter.

The other issue would be consistency. Say what you like about politicians, they tend to make each new decision with some awareness of their prior positions on other matters. They understand that if they cote for an expensive policy, the cash for it must come from somewhere. Obviously Gordon Brown was a spineless fool who thought he could do magic, and the current mob are a little too happy with regressive taxes, but in general all the whining that happens on the internet about this sort of thing is overblown melodramatics. But if we give the raw electorate a choice both of what we want to buy, and of how much we want to pay for it, that can quickly be changed.

So letting everybody vote directly is an option, but it would either cause disaster (the tyranny of the majority under the direction of the Daily Mail); or we would have to limit voting rights to that section of the population capable of submitting a properly costed, morally and financially coherent manifesto of their own manufacture, to which they must promise to remain consistent. Realistically speaking, that latter option would effectively disenfranchise every person here, myself included. that's a level of elitism that even with my healthy distrust of the dung eating electoral herd, I am not sure I would like much.


There was another proposal I read about once long ago. It was something like filling parliament by lottery - like jury service. The idea being that if you keep a decision making group very small, suddenly people who don't normally put any thought into the matter realise their vote is important and they actually listen to the arguments and take expert evidence into account. The problem is that as soon as the group grows too large, people feel anonymous and irrelevant and stop caring.

Isn't it California that has a vote on just about everything? It didn't work out too well long term IIRC

Plenty of places do. I believe Switzerland has a more referendal rather than representational system. Could be Sweden. One or the other. My memory..

The system I was thinking of is a mix of the two. You still have a representational system - with the caveat that only candidates names are allowed on the ballot paper; no statement of policy or political affiliation, if you want people to vote for you you have to convince them to by campaigning within the constituency. So you still end up with 600 or so MPs.

That still provides us with a representational parliament. That parliament is allowed to propose legislation. But it is not allowed to enact legislation. For any bill to become an act, it must be passed by referendum. Each bill has a period on the 'legislative billboard' once it's been passed by the house, during which time MPs may campaign for or against it, and people may vote for or against it. At the end of the stated time for that bill, if enough people have voted for it (I'm kind of undecided as to whether to go for a percentage of votes cast being in favour with a minimum in favour required or whether to go for a simple summed threshold), then the bill is enacted and becomes law.

Done in the way we currently run elections, this system is impractical. But in the more connected world we actually exist in, It's actually feasible. It may mean some good legislation doesn't make it but if MPs can't get anyone to vote for it then, by definition, in a democracy it isn't good legislation.

Jon

Democracy is bollocks.

Can't remember who said it, but they were right. Since when do the majority know better about anything?!

However, that Jon, sounds like the kind of system I could get interested in. I still think it's the size and weight of the thing that ruins it. Going back to ancient Greece where the forum literally allowed anyone to show up and have a say makes sense where everybody is educated and/or polite to understand the responsibility that brings AND where the area/amount of people being governed is small enough to ensure relevancy and practicality.

With 65million people and seemingly the majority of them X-Factor watching dicks with kids they don't care to raise but will happily vote Conservative or Labour just because, it seems we're doomed.

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”
Winston Churchill