The Other Sarah

Tag: Democracy

  • AV or not AV? That is the question.

    The answer is “Yes”. And a kick in my shins for such a terrible joke.

    Let’s digress for a minute. In truth, I am a supporter of the Single Transferrable Vote. My ideal voting system is one that is proportional (i.e., a party with 20% of the vote should get 20% of the seats) and representative (each legislator is answerable to a distinct group of people, hopefully a local community). But more on that in a few posts time; this is about AV.

    AV is not my desired system, but it’s a good one nonetheless. It’s representative, and does mean that half the voters of a constituency will definitely prefer him over another candidate. True, it’s not proportional, but it makes it easier to change to a proportional system: for STV, by merging five constituencies into one five-MP constituency; for AMS, the top-up system works in tandem. And one of the big reasons I want a change in the system is where parties other than the Tories and Labour became more popular, but lost seats (or didn’t get any). Such a situation should be untenable.

    Let’s go through No2AV’s arguments, shall we? (more…)

  • e-Petitions: bad for democracy?

    So, the Coalition have announced the return of the e-Petitions system previously in effect under Blair and Brown, with one clear change: petitions will be more readily be debated by Parliament. This is touted as a welcome change, where very few, if any, petitions under Labour actually changed government policy. The most notable one that did was a 2-million strong petition against the proposed system of road pricing in 2007, where Blair changed from “we support this” to “we still support it but we admit we’re not going to enforce it”. But with any sort of public consultation like this, it often falls by the wayside because of people being just uninformed on issues, such as a 250,000-strong petition to oppose a supposed “mega-mosque” in the London Borough of Newham that hadn’t even been proposed. And then there are the silly ones, like a 50,000-strong petition to make Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson the Prime Minister. Under the proposed rules, Parliament would probably have been forced to debate the latter two with a hard and fast rule of 100,000-supporters-means-debate-in-Parliament, wasting time that should’ve been spent passing actual laws. (more…)