If comment is free, then my comment is that you're a bunch of morons

[the0lady]

 
Seriously. The Grauniad have launched a new section on their website: "A New Politics: Blueprint for Reforming Government". They say this is "in the wake" of the expenses "row".

So let me get this straight. When Alistair Darling was giving away FIFTY BILLION POUNDS of OUR MONEY to a bunch of incompetent, mendacious, infantile, off-with-the-

Comments

[the0lady]

I meant pluralism in the sense that there should be more than one opinion on any given topic in the House. At the moment, we've effectively got a 2 party system; so the only options are a) what the government party wants to do, and b) the opposition opinion. The latter is always that whatever the government party wants to do is crap, so you never get more than one option to choose from on any issue. I'm not sure how you reform that, but getting rid of FPTP is key I think.

As for the upper house, the fact that it's got some checks and balances and occasionally manages to more or less work in an acceptable way is not an argument in favour of its continued existense. Every other democracy with an upper house has a fully elected one, and I don't see them collapsing in a heap of incompetence. The Senate, with people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in it, was one of the only effective checks on Bush lunacy during the early 2000's (before the Dems got Congress back).

To you last point, I agree with your analysis of why this issue has caused such an explosion. But I'm very pessimistic about the outcome, especially in view of how the media are driving this. By the time people stop pearl-clutching about the most recent expense excesses I'm willing to bet the normal state of apathy will reassert itself, and electoral and parliamentary reform will snk back into the black hole it's been languishing in.

[worst_witch]

Ok so I'm with you on the pluralism, the House of Commons has become a sham of both main parties seeing who can shout the loudest to be in accordance with what they perceive public opinion to be. And then when they're not doing that the Government is quietly passing the Bills that we really ought to know about with shockingly little opposition from the Opposition.

I wouldn't hold up the US as a beacon of functioning democracy. Their system is at least as bad as the British, yes they have two fully elected Houses but they also sanction filibustering and any system that allows the use of a presidential 'pocket' veto has no right to be calling itself fully democratic. The democratic process in the US effectively bars any but the rich from gaining any real power, you end up in the main with career politicains who have never had to live in the real world or people who end up beholden to sponsors and whose political integrity is therefore weakened. No democratic system is without it's flaws, some work better than others and some have their flaws more immediately apparent, but they are none of them perfect.