Talk:Review of Electoral Systems

From Democracywiki

I think it is a tactical mistake to accept the government's view that reform of the House of Lords has to come before any consideration of voting reform for the Commons. Both should be considered together. Otherwise it's just an excuse to kick any discussion of proportional voting for the Commons into the long grass. Since 1997 the besetting sin of Labour's constitutional reform agenda has been its ad-hoc approach and its inability to think logically about the wider picture or relate one part of the constitutional structure to the next. There's been a terrible lack of joined-up thinking. I fear that if some kind of proportional element is introduced for an elected second chamber, this will be used as an excuse to do nothing about the first-past-the-post system for the Commons, on the grounds that it has to be different. We all need to think more creatively about the role of parliament as a whole and its place in the constitutional landscape, demolish the hoary myth of parliament's 'sovereignty' and establish a clear set of principles against which both present and future constitutional arrangements should be judged. We need more separation of powers, more transparency and accountability of the executive and greater realism about the fact that the UK legislature is now part of a European federal system. I am however rather sceptical about the wisdom of pushing for a citizen's convention as anything other than a forum for thrashing out ideas. I do not believe that constitutional reform is a 'Big Bang' event rather than an incremental process in which inevitably parliament will have to have the final say. Since I wrote my book 'Reforming Britain' in 2001 the one positive thing that has changed is the fact that in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland proportional voting has become a normal, uncontroversial thing and without absolute majorities, politics has changed as a result. Over the next ten years we have to make sure that the same ideas are applied at Westminster. Of course reform of the Lords is overdue and we all want to see it happen, but it mustn't be used as an excuse for failing to reform the Commons.