A National Ballot

As it seems that some form of agreement between the Tories and Lib Dems may be emerging, democrats must maintain the demand that electoral reform has got to be part of the political reform.

The need is straightforward. We need legislation in the first Queen’s Speech that provides a national ballot within months in which the following alternatives are offered to the electorate:

1. A Conservative preferred option which might be expected to be the maintenance of First Past The Post, but with a smaller number of MPs and equal sized constituencies.
2. A Labour preferred option which is likely to be the Alternative Vote System.
3. A Liberal Democrat preferred option which would be the Single Transferable Vote System that they included in their election manifesto.
4. No change to the existing system.
5. An additional choice proposed by the Electoral Reform Society if they wish to present one.

As the Conservatives are the largest Party and they are adamantly opposed to fair votes, it may be that the Lib Dems will cave in and agree to allow the Tories to govern without a commitment to give the voters this choice. If that is the case, we must demand that those people who argued for fair votes before and during the election should stand by their commitments and present a Bill to Parliament for a national ballot on the above lines. There is actually a majority in Parliament for reform of the electoral system and that should allow such a bill to pass into law. In the event that a minority Conservative Government prevented this Bill from being presented to Parliament or obstructed it being passed into law, they should face a vote of no confidence and another election be forced.

Democracy in Britain must be modernised and the current opportunity presented by the lack of an overall majority by a single Party must result in genuine electoral reform being offered to the public.

Electoral Reform

Opportunities for meaningful political change do not come often, but there is one now and it must be seized.

The situation is clear although it is complicated. The Tories did not win the right to form a government, but Labour most definitely lost the election. The bizarre effects of a First Past The Post (FPTP) election means that many people who do not support Labour or the Tories either do not have any opportunity to vote for a party that they do support or they vote tactically for one of these two in order to keep the other out.

This means that although the Lib Dems (LD) had 28% or 29% popular support before the election, only 23% of voters turned that support into a real vote. In addition to this, the LD vote was more evenly spread than that of the two major parties so they had lower chances of their votes being converted into seats. The consequence is that with 23% of the vote the LDs have only 10% of the seats. That is profoundly undemocratic and it is worse when you consider that 28% of voters may have wished to vote LD.

For Libertarians, the situation is far worse. We are in the position that the Green Party were in a generation ago. Despite the Greens standing hundreds of candidates and having a massive public profile for their policies, they have only just been able to secure a single seat in Parliament for their leader. This is a democratic disgrace.

For a new party with good, clear policies that would appeal to many voters, but lacking big financial backers and the army of backers of the big institutional parties, FPTP prevents any chance of even the smallest success in either national or local elections. That is not democracy and it must change now.

The Labour Government has taken this country into such massive debt that our economy is on the brink of collapse with all the terrible consequences that are beginning to unravel in Greece. This means that we must have a new Prime Minister and the prospects of reasonably stable government in the short term established very early this week. If that is not achieved, there will be great volatility in the currency markets and it will become harder every hour for all of us to be saved from very serious damage to our quality of life and financial future.

The tasks for today for our political leaders are these:

Gordon Brown.

Resign immediately. You were never elected as leader of the Labour Party, you were never a legitimate Prime Minister, your performance in office has been disastrous and in the only leadership election you have ever faced you have conclusively lost. The Labour Party cannot maintain any credibility so long as you remain Prime Minister and the interests of the country require Labour voters to be adequately represented in the negotiations to form a government.

Nick Clegg

Do not make any deal that does not include a commitment to the introduction of electoral reform with a timetable for completion before the end of this year. You stood on a platform of fair votes and your present bargaining position owes everything to that undertaking. Failure to deliver electoral reform would be a betrayal of the worst kind and would not be forgiven.

David Cameron

You did not win a mandate to form a government and the economy of this country is in such a perilous position that you have a duty to reach agreement without delay on the formation of a government that can command a clear majority in Parliament so that effective decisions can be taken without delay. There is no Parliamentary majority among parties of the political right. Differences between Tory and LD memberships mean that a coalition is unlikely and a supply and confidence arrangement will be fragile. In these circumstances you should present a simple draft Queens Speech and emergency budget to all Parties and seek agreement to them being allowed to pass. Despite the opposition of your party to PR, there is clear demand from the public for electoral reform and it must be offered within a strict timetable that does not extend beyond this year. All other Parties should allow your minority government to function until a reformed electoral system is in place and a new General Election can be held.

The chaos of queues outside polling stations as polls closed; the disgrace of stations running out of ballot papers; the nonsense of an unelected second chamber and the absurdity  of not having fixed term Parliaments, all contribute to Britain being seen as a country with third world election standards and grossly outdated democracy. All our leaders have an urgent responsibility to resolve these matters with the urgency that is necessary to prevent us collapsing into a third world economy as well.

Vote for David Kirwan in Wirral West

Libertarians are not like the big Parties. We do not want to force a party line onto anybody. We recognise that as individuals everybody is entitled to make up their own mind on all issues and that applies to MPs as much as everybody else. The Party whipping system is a big part of the cronyism and secrecy that has given us claims for duck houses and moat cleaning along with all the other abuses of this disgraceful parliament.

David Kirwan is an anti-sleaze candidate who has committed himself to the complete openness that is necessary to clean up Parliament and restore trust in politics. David is a Wirral Councillor who left the Conservatives to be free to represent his constituents without the constraints of a failing Party interested only in its own interests. From this independent perspective he has read the LPUK manifesto and found that he agrees with us enough to be able to work together. Having met David Kirwan and discussed what motivates us I can say his views meet the basic criteria that I would require to give support to anybody. These are simple:

• A recognition that Government usually creates problems rather than solving them and that there must be a return to much more individual responsibility, stronger families, stronger communities and an end to state snooping and interfering into so many aspects of private life.
• A determination to eliminate the secrecy, corruption and waste that comes with our system of patronage government and the armies of Quango’s and consultants that squander our tax money to bully, coerce and cajole us into New Labour clones. Cameron’s Blue Labour would be no different.
• An understanding that it is not possible to export democracy to other countries any more than it is acceptable for our values and culture to be crushed under a welter of stupid laws and PC multiculturalism. Decent values and respect for others comes from behaving decently and not by beating people into submission if they have different opinions from your own.
• Knowledge that prosperity and wellbeing for everybody depends on the enterprise and initiative that we have in abundance in this country. Our economy is crippled with massive debt because of the crazy spending by Brown’s government as he tries to buy his way to a fourth term of ruinous Labour Government. The companies that could provide the jobs to bring people out of poverty and hardship are being strangled by ridiculous laws and red tape from Whitehall and Brussels.
• Like Libertarians in all our varieties he wants respect for individuals who are responsible citizens; safe streets brought about by simple laws that are firmly enforced; low taxes that allow people to use the money they earn in the way that they choose; a country that is respected in the world for its defence of its own interests without interfering in the legitimate affairs of others.

For the cause of Liberty to gain from this election we need only to show the big parties that we will not allow ourselves to be dragged any further into the sovietisation of this country. A hung Parliament would be a big step in the right direction and an Independent MP for Wirral West is an important element in achieving that objective. Libertarians should vote for David Kirwan

Reform Parliament Now

The present expenses scandal highlights the need for fundamental reform of the British political system. Devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland was a necessary and partial improvement and we now need to move on from that. Key reforms which should take place are:

Reduce the number of MP’s to about 400 from the present 650.

Establish a form of proportional representation for voting with fixed term four year parliaments.

Scrap the House of Lords and replace it with a directly elected upper chamber of 100 members with a fixed seven year term.

Abolish all county, district and unitary councils and replace them with directly elected regional assemblies with fixed four year terms. The assemblies to have similar powers to those in Wales and NI.

Allow towns and parishes to have local councils if they wish. No national or regional finance for them. All money they need to be raised within their own community.

All elected members to be subject to recall if demanded by 3% of their electorate.

Sixteen year olds should be able to vote in elections

We have made long, slow progress towards universal franchise. At each stage there has been resistance. It was said that those who did not own land did not have the responsibility to be able to vote sensibly in elections. Then it was women who could not be trusted to take part in the democratic process. The last stage was that sufficient maturity to cast a vote was conisdered to be eighteen rather than twenty one.

Well, sixteen year olds are considered mature enough to no longer be forced to attend school. They can legally have sex, buy cigarettes and go off to work to pay taxes. As far as I am concerned, that is enough responsibility and assumption of maturity for it to be accompanied by an entitlement to vote for the people who are making these rules. I don’t think this should be a rigid limit for all time. As we have seen, the franchise has been continually extended as democracy has itself matured. We have different layers of government and it seems reasonable that young people should be introduced to the democratic process by having entitlement to vote for town or parish councils at fourteen years of age, for example, and for district and county council elections at fifteen.

 A few countries have extended the franchise to sixteen year olds. It is time for the UK to follow.

A Written Constitution for Britain

 Today Jack Straw has expressed his support for Britain moving towards a written constitution and that is welcome although I think I mean more by that than Straw does..

 Britain needs a written constitution placing it properly in an international framework of democratic and legal standards.

Above all, it is needed now because of the continual erosion of individual rights . Whether it is the continual extension of detention without charge on the excuse of the threat of terrorism, or the progressive sovietisation of our society through politically correct restraint on freedom of thought and speech.

Many people will say that we already have a written constitution through the mass of reference documents and Acts of Parliament that mould the decision making process of our executive and legislature. This really misses the point. For a constitution to be properly effective it needs to be contained in a single document widely known and understood by the public. It must also have its provisions entrenched sufficiently that it cannot be easily overridden or changed by a simple majority vote in parliament.

British Parliament Approves Nuclear Power

No new nuclear power stations have been built in the UK for about 25 years and the existing ones are moving quickly towards the end of their operational lives. Since that generation of nuclear power, safety standards have improved and newreactors are more efficient. Nuclear energy is now the safest, cleanest and most efficient means of generating electricity that we have.

Suggestions by some environmentalists that future energy needs should be met by reducing the amount of energy that we consume and relying on renewable sources for new power generation simply will not work. Energy saving through low energy light bulbs, better insulated houses, etc. are tiny in comparison with total consumption and imagining that peopole will completely revolutionise their lifestyles to make more radical reductions are complete fantasy.

Renewable energy resources do not have the capability to produce much more than about twenty percent of our electricity requirements. Wind turbine, which is the main renewable system being produced at the moment, is very inefficient and hopelessly variable. Wind farms are being built with massive public subsidy (absurd and immoral in itself, but a subject for another post), but in some cases they produce little more energy than they consume and there will always be periods of low wind when they are unproductive. A considerable proportion of of electricity generation has got to be contnuous for it meet the need.

Future technologies can expect to capture a lot of the carbon produced by fossil fuel powered generating stations, but that is still a decade or two away and we must take account of diminishing stocks of fossil fuel causing higher prices and risk of insecure supply. Political instability in the Middle East and elsewhere also mean that our electricity supplies should have diverse sources of energy to provide resilience in the event of failure of any particular source.

fears of nuclear power stations being unsafe are unfounded. The common perception that radioactive waste is a major problem is also wrong. The French produce a very great deal of their electricity from nuclear energy and they have had no problems with long term storage of waste. It can be permanently stored by vitrification and deep burial in geologically stable areas. The only thing that prevents this being done is lack of decisiveness on the part of governments. It should be left to commercial producers to make proper, safe arrangements and pay the full costs involved.

It is not for government to produce electricity, or any other energy, itself. What is needed is for there to be proper competition between different sources. This requires an immediate end to the multitude of subsidies in the market and an allowance for energy companies to produce our power from a variety of different sources.

Repeal the British Blasphemy Laws

A Thinking Man whose interesting blog is linked under my blogroll has called for his Member of Parliament to vote in favour of an amendment which would abolish the blasphemy laws in Britain. I agree with him very strongly. I will write to my MP and I urge others to do the ame.

The reasons he gives are very well put and I see no reason to add anything. They are as as follows:

• The law of blasphemous libel purports to protect beliefs rather than people or communities. I accept there may be the need for laws to protect particular groups concerning things that they have no control over – race, gender, age, ability. But a religion is a choice. Those who make that choice should argue and defend it. Its defence should not be enshrined in the law of the land.
• If god is god, she or he does not need the protection of the law.
• It serves no useful purpose other than to allow partisan organisations or well-funded individuals to try to censor broadcasters or intimidate small theatres, print media or publishers.
• It is discriminatory in that it only covers attacks on Christianity and Church of England tenets. It therefore fosters an expectation among other religions that their sensibilities should also be protected by the criminal law (as with the attempt to charge Salman Rushdie) and a sense of grievance among minority religions that they do not benefit from their own version of such a law.
• The Church of England no longer opposes its abolition on principle.
• In 1985 the Law Commission recommended its repeal, because it is uncertain in scope, it doesn’t allow merit or lack of intention as a defence, and it is unlimited in penalty.
• It is in clear breach of human rights because it is discriminatory and unnecessarily limits free expression.
  
• In the end, no one is likely to be convicted under it. (Nobody has been since 1921.)