London Banter - View Single Post - These writhing whales of the road have swung their hefty rear ends round our corners for the final time.

[email protected] · August 3rd 09, 10:35 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In article ,
(Tim Roll-Pickering) wrote:

Bruce wrote:

The trouble is we in Britain always have to invent something of our
own. What we should be doing is looking at the most successful
comparable democracies (for some values of comparable and democracy)
and selecting which successful system would be most approproate for
the UK.

I believe the Jenkins Commission did look at other systems but the
problem is that their remit contained a number of criteria for any
system recommended. Fundamentally the debate on voting systems
boils down to which factors people prioritise over one another -
strong stable government, government that can be thrown out if the
electorate desire it, numeric proportionality and so forth - and
it's difficult to find a system that meets all the major ones. The
British political culture is such that there are sizeable third
parties who are expected to drift from side to side or maintain an
independent position, whereas in, say, Germany the main third
parties are allied to one or other of the big parties (although
recently the emergence of The Left as an independent force is
putting a spanner in the works) whilst in Malta third parties just
don't appear.

A Royal Commission would be needed to do this. Unfortunately,
Jenkins and his committee were appointed by the New Labour
government.

Whether the Commission is government, Speaker's or Royal, it's
likely to come to go through much the same process - hearings that
just allow the voting system anoraks and ideologically committed to
spout off whilst the public show no interest, analysis of various
other systems in use and a set of criteria that rules out most of
the alternatives before it's started. Until you can get agreement
on the basic principles of what takes priority, it will just go
round and round in circles.

The Jenkins report was pure politics.It was an attempt, which succeeded to
some extent, to co-opt Labour AV supporters to the PR cause. It worked on
my MP at the time, Anne Campbell, and maybe on some others but most
notably not on Peter Hain, an AV man since his Liberal days.

--
Colin Rosenstiel