Needs more thought.
Indeed.
Remodelling a whole society isn’t easy, is it?
I’m not surprised the Soviets failed.
But that can’t be helped, the manifesto has to be public and we’d have to fall back on general laws around interfering with the process.
Exactly … I was really only raising the issue to highlight the complexity of the task of remodelling the nation’s electoral system 😉
Exactly, I’d say no limits and hope for the best — it’s the only fair solution. Then there’s no need for first-come-first-served basis, only the best of bad options.
Dunno … I’m really not sure that unlimited is an option.
Who’s gonna pay for it?
Suppose all the inhabitants of Penzance decide to run?
Do you want to pay for them as well as your own constituency’s modest twelve candidates?
Definitely, a local petition or something.
Some official mechanism, yes.
Maybe even a vote, if the petition reaches a sufficient percentage of the total voters.
But, again, it has to be universal — no local bigwigs who ‘own’ the town as the single largest local employer being in a position to exert more influence than their Parliamentary colleagues from other regions, thereby ensuring they can’t be removed, whilst they then machinate to foment unrest where another MP (who regularly votes against their motions) is from.
Indeed, I was still thinking Old World. If there’s no government to bring down, why have an early election?
I wonder if we’d get that American problem of not being able to pass a budget. Of course there it’s exactly the kind of partisan posturing we’re hoping to eliminate, but the House could genuinely be undecided on something that could not just be shelved.
Maybe the solution is to have an odd number of MPs, so that there can never be an impasse.
Maybe that’s a call of a second chamber, some representative of councils or something? I think it’s usually a good idea to get a second pair of eyes on anything, anyway.
I’m undecided about that.
Again … if we’ve done away with the partisan nature of the system have we not thereby already eliminated the need for a brake on an overrepresented and, therefore, overpowerful executive?
If we have a second chamber though, how is it to be populated?
As a republican by conviction, I have found myself almost at odds with myself over the course of the last ten-to-twenty years. I think it really came to a head when the time came for the selling of the woodlands and forests (Land Enclosure 2.0) and it was the Lords (I think) … possibly even the Royals … that turned around and said “It’s not actually in your gift to do so — it’s private property” … thereby defeating the spivs and latterday robber barons, we had elected to manage the nation on our behalf, whilst we got on with the everyday business of keeping the Economy going.
Lifelong peers don’t have to worry about tenure, so they can act according to conscience. It’s not a guarantee of propriety (no matter how much they have, some always want more), but it’s something. The question, of course, is how the decision is made, who is worthy of such tenure.
And then what is its remit and what power does it have to enforce it?
Perhaps there needs to be a limit to the number of votes cast (5?, 10?) by each person, regardless of the field.
No … then their vote is as meaningless as it is in a ‘safe seat’ now — you have no say with regard to the electoral chances of all candidates.
There has to be a way to keep it manageable … we just need to figure it out.
If voters actually have to go through lists of thousands, they’ll be in the booth all day. But as there’s no such thing as objective vetting (do they have a manifesto? but no judgement on its contents) how to deter the chancers is still a work in progress.
It can’t be thousands … or even hundreds … there has to be some mechanism to keep it within a sensibly manageable range.
Maybe the dreaded multi-round runoffs … I don’t know.
Perhaps there should be some quota system, whereby the makeup of the candidates represents the socioeconomic makeup of the constituency: if millionaires/billionaires want to stand then there can only be as many such candidates as there are as a percentage of the constituency’s population — similarly, if only 20% of the constituency earns £50K per year then only 20% of the candidates may be drawn from that group. I don’t know, I’m just throwing ideas out and seeing if any of them stick to anything.
