Anybody visiting my website over the last few months would be excused for thinking it’s a running website. There was a time when I was motivated to write more about politics, and to write more about technology (the original purpose of this weblog). All that’s fallen by the wayside in the face of my training for the London Marathon, my focus on Glasgow parkrun, and running my own business. But my political mojo has, to some extent, returned of late, helped by the farcical situation with MP expenses and all that’s come from it. I don’t think I have anything particularly radical or novel to write, but I’ll write it anyway.
The way some MP’s have behaved has certainly been deplorable, and the biggest damage isn’t so much the waste of public money and the arrogant way with which it was treated by our representatives, but the damage it’s done to an already weak confidence in the political process.
Sadly the only beneficiaries will be the ‘fringe’ parties of the right, which seem to gradually be gaining more airtime and print space. As I write this, in Somerset, I can see a UKIP poster, and that’s pretty much the only poster I’ve seen close to home. But then this area has always been either a Tory or LibDem area. I just wish there were strong, alternative, centrist voices to compensate: The Lib Dems are mired in the same mess (more by association than headline-grabbing expense idiocy some Labour/Tory MP’s seem guilty of) Green party perhaps springs to mind, but they seem to be drowned out in collective hand-wringing at the BNP and UKIP’s PR campaigns. It almost feels like the fear of their doing well is causing more attention to be paid to them, creating a feedback loop that brings us the very thing we don’t want.
Electoral reform has also been on the agenda of late. And about time too. But I just hope it’s not a knee-jerk reaction. It does need time and a proper, balanced, debate. I’d much prefer a PR system that maintained the constituency strong link, and led to a more representative parliament (in both houses). The Scottish System works very well in my view. Sadly the establishment seems to forget they serve us, and not the other way around. They are only there at our sufferance, and goodness knows the country’s patience has been tried in the last month or two.
A General Election is tempting, but I side with the ’sort your house out THEN go to the people’, rather than booting them out and getting the next lot in. This Autumn would work well in my view. A fixed term parliament is certainly the best proposal I’ve heard from the Tories in a long, long time (even if it’s not in the slightest bit new, good to see them adopt it). Of course, it’s now inevitable we’ll get a Conservative administration. On the whole I’m not too bothered – If anything I’m a big believer in the need for a periodic change (be nice if we could limit administrations to a couple of terms!) – but my biggest fear is not the politics of economics, education, defence, etc, but the ‘conservative’ (small c) moralising we’ll risk getting.
Ironically, perhaps, the best thing is that it has at least energised people into paying more attention to what our representatives are up to. Sadly it’s very negative and alienating right now, but I hope this will eventually lead to considered and effective reform, and a greater demand for freedom of information, and openness in the corridors of power. Political parties have to do a much better job of seizing this moment and delivering what, I think, people are demanding.
I’d suspected the next General Election would be quite interesting even before the MP Expenses and financial crises hit. Gordon Brown can’t expect anything other than a resounding kicking (deserved not least for simply failing to deliver on the hopes so many of us had), but if the Tories – very much mired in the problems themselves – don’t find a way to propose the radical changes now being demanded of our politicians and political system, there’s a real danger of even more radical change being forced on them.
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May 28th, 2009 at 10:02 am
I am concerned that PR creates split parliaments, weak governments (look at Italy – although admittedly their problems go beyond PR) and gives fringe parties an (ironically) disproportionate influence.
I agree that a “snap” election is a bad idea and encourages people to vote out of spite on a single (not hugely important in the long run) issue without thinking about who or what they are voting for.