Over at Our Kingdom I’ve given my view of the new Lib Dem policy paper on British governance. Broadly I think its great; but then I did have a hand in writing much of it!

That isn’t the whole story though - predictably I have an amendment to propose. Watch this space for more details.

UPDATE: I’ve now posted an article about my proposed amendment on Lib Dem Voice, and have set up the obligatory accompanying Facebook group. Please sign up!

Polly Toynbee is waging her war against local democracy once again, insisting that only centralised super-states can be socially progressive and blithely ignoring the fact that all the Scandinavian countries she worships so much are far more decentralised that we can even dream.

This week, she has come up with the bizarre hypothesis that ‘localism’ and electoral reform are two mutually exclusive proposed solutions to democratic renewal. Of course, apart from the recent Tory and Labour converts to localism, the two reforms have always tended to go hand in hand. Indeed, how can you truly claim to want to bring decision making down to as low a level as possible while defending an electoral system that tends to ignore the votes of the majority of the people?

She bases her assertion on the fact that people voted on broadly national issues in the local elections, not local ones. Leaving aside the fact that I happen to think that isn’t true - the results varied wildly from council to council - why should we expect people to vote on local issues when local authorities don’t have any power? It’s not far off from bemoaning the fact that the votes cast in the Eurovision Song Contest aren’t about the quality of the music. Yes indeed they aren’t, but as it doesn’t really matter either way, so what?

If further prove were needed that Toynbee doesn’t really know what she’s talking about, she claims that the Lib Dem’s performance in the local elections was worse than Labour’s (it wasn’t), and that her preferred model for electoral reform is the Jenkins System which, erm, isn’t actually a proportional voting system. Indeed, it makes the partially proportional system used in Wales look representative.

While we’ll never know, I’m convinced that if Roy Jenkins was alive today he would be pleading for people to ignore the proposals he drafted for Blair back in 1999. They were an attempt to fudge the issue and come up with a system that Blair and the wider Labour Party would be willing to accept at a time when they were riding high with a 170 majority. Needless to say, they failed. He was too clever by half and didn’t satisfy anyone. Yet to this day I still hear people going on about it as if it were the Holy Grail. I’m convinced that in the centuries to come, whole organisations will be established to campaign for this system which no genuinely independent review body would recommend in a million years.

Toynbee’s objection to local democracy appears to be rooted in the perceived worst excesses of Conservative councils. In this respect it is entirely tribal and rooted in the typically Fabian notion that the people should not be trusted with too much democracy. Of course, with a fair voting system, the chances of the Tories or indeed any party wielding an unassailable majority in a local authority would be remote. The idea that we should have more representative local authorities but be content to leave them as glorified talking shops is faintly obscene. At least bread and circuses sounds a little more fun.

An interview in the Guardian:

Looking colourful in a salmon pink shirt and maroon pair of braces that contrast with his grey, brushed-back hair, Mallon claims that the mayoral model is open to abuse by the power-crazy. He realised that after meeting another mayor early in his tenure - whom he refuses to name.

“I would like to suggest I am a pretty sane, balanced human being who no doubt has his quirks,” says Mallon, one of just 13 mayors in the country.

“But I am not going to abuse my power. I am not going to abuse my authority or do anything I should not. If you get a mayor who was power-mad, he could bring a town down or a city, so you can see I am not completely sold on the elected mayor idea. It works here because I like to think I am sane - though people who usually say that aren’t. It works fine here but it is unique.”

The big question is, who is he referring to?

I’ve added another comment on my Lib Dem Voice article on citizen’s initiatives, petitioning and referendums. Feedback please!

Over at Lib Dem Voice, I’ve penned a rather long article about citizen’s initiatives, and why the Lib Dems ought to embrace them.

I’m keen to kickstart a debate on this issue, so please do read it and add your own comments.

Welcome that it is that Republic have put a petition on the 10 Downing Street website, doesn’t this technically make Tony Blair guilty of sedition under the Treason Felony Act?

Perhaps Yates of the Yard ought to widen his investigation still further?

(This is my post as part of the Elect the Lords blogging event)

Despite all the Jack Straw bashing over the past week over his plans to keep hereditary peers (and one can infer life peers as well) in the House of Lords until they die off, there is no escaping the fact that he has a point. While MPs are mainly in favour of democratic reform, the House of Lords itself is at best ambivalent. Even the Lib Dems, who claim David Lloyd George’s legacy as their own and have always had policy for an elected second chamber, have a sizeable number of pro-appointment members in the Lords.

The problem goes beyond the normal “turkeys voting for Christmas” conundrum. For many peers this isn’t merely a case of not wanting to give up power. Entering the House of Lords was a lifetime commitment for them, one which has cost them a number of career opportunities and which they are financially dependent on. For a number of Lords, particularly the career politicians, booting them out of Parliament would hurt them severely in the wallet and in some cases even force them into penury.

There is something casually corrupting about the concept of life peerages. Many people may be unaware for instance that members of the House of Lords are permitted to work for lobbying companies - to be clear this isn’t a secret and must be declared. The intractable resistance to ending this practice is rooted in the fact that members of the Lords have few other employment opportunities given their obligations in Parliament. Where else in the world would Parliamentarians with unparalleled access to their fellow members be paid by companies to lobby on specific policies?

When I discussed the Elect the Lords Campaign a couple of years ago with a life peer, her first comment was “reform won’t go anywhere unless you deal with the pensions issue.” For many life peers, the Lords is their pension. Given however that any proposal to compensate retiring peers with fat pension funds is likely to go down like a lead balloon with the public, it isn’t surprising that Jack Straw is so tempted to go down the path of least resistance.

The question is therefore, if we don’t want to spread reform out over a 50 year period, what do we do instead? To start with, we need a structured plan. Last year, Labour politicians were openly talking about a “gradualist approach” whereby Lords reform would be spread out over several years, at each stage subject to a new vote in Parliament. Can you imagine anything worse? Under this plan, we would have had a major debate in each cycle about whether to up the elected quota or alternatively go back to appointment, with no clear end destination in place.

Far better we decide where we want to go now and give people a clear sense of what to expect. That isn’t to deny that reform may have to take place over several years, but it is to say that the people involved should be entitled to know what to expect. Kick a life peer with no independent source of income out of the Lords tomorrow, and you would be morally obliged to offer them a much larger financial package than you would if you gave them 12 years notice.

If, as appears to be the growing consensus, the second chamber were to be elected by a third at each general election, we would have such a model. A third would be replaced in the next general election, then another third and then the remainder. Just as we had when the bulk of hereditary peers were removed, an internal ballot could be held to decide who would go when.

This way, the first wave of life peers would be removed by the next general election, while the remainder would be gone by the end of the next decade, a much tighter window than Jack Straw’s vision of unelected doddery old men and women still holding on in the 2050s.

There’s no escaping the fact that a significant amount of public money will have to be spent on pensioning these people off, and this will prove unpopular. But instead of trying to evade this fact, the government should be making the alternative case. If we don’t remove life peers, they will continue to be entitled to receiving an attendance allowance, paid for by the taxpayer. We either pay for them to stay in the chamber, and weaken our democracy, or pay to remove them. It really is that simple.

Comment here.

My boss has written a nice post about the last episodes of the West Wing last night, linking it with the House of Lords Constitution Committee’s report this week on Royal prerogative.

For me, the “choke” moment of the two episodes was the bit when Bartlet gave Charlie his copy of the US Constitution. But then it got me thinking: not only do we not have a document with similar meaning in the UK, but for our government such rules are problems to be got around, not sacred limitations of their power.

Both America and the US Constitution have their faults, and the iconic status many Americans grant the Constitution occasionally strikes one as bizarre. I would certainly take issue with the way some treat it as if it were written on tablets of stone - constitutions have to be able to slowly evolve over time. But I take far more issue with those, including its current non-fictional president, who act as if it is a legalistic buffet that you can pick and choose from to suit your agenda.

In the UK, we desperately need a written constitution; the last five years of repeated assaults by Labour on our civil liberties prove that. But going hand in hand, we need a culture that values constitutional documents.

Yet the nearest thing we have to a constitutional document, the Human Rights Act, is continually under attack. We are told we have a “human rights culture” - the truth is we have anything but. A human rights culture is a culture in which people instinctively understand what rights are, not one in which the police claim the HRA forces them to give perps Kentucky Fried Chicken on demand.

The problem is, for constitutions to have that sort of ownership or resonance - for them to be able to convey that West Wing “choke factor - they tend to be borne of war or revolution, neither of which are things liberal democrats (small-l, small-d) should wish on the country. The real problem with the HRA is that it was drafted by ministers and civil servants while the rest of us were shut out. It should have been drawn up in a more open fashion and should have been ratified by a referendum - back in 1999 Labour could have easily won such a thing. If we are to have a written constitution, it has to be written by the people, for the people, and nothing less than a Citizen’s Convention will do.

At the risk of having my comments filled with swivel-eyed loons with an penchant for calling everyone who doesn’t agree with them a “c***”, I just thought I’d recommend Jonathan Freedland’s article on the Tories’ daft proposals on breaking up the UK.

There are however, the points in this I take exception to:

1. You don’t need to go back as far as Prussia to find an example; a more contemporary example of what happens when you create an assymmetric union of nation states can be found in the form of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
2. I don’t actually accept Jonathan Freedland’s view that Scotland and Wales “civilise” the English and that without them we will simply drift to the right, although I accept that most Tories probably think that.

If the latter were true however, I think the case for breakup would be much stronger than it is: if our cultures are so sui generis, why not go our seperate ways?  In fact, what we’ll find quite quickly is that instead of all this moaning about the West Lothian Question, the feeling that the North of England is being subjugated by the South will become even more acute.  Over time, we’ll probably end up federalising England in exactly the way the Tories most fear, but with a lot more unpleasantness and a lot more time and energy wasted.  The Tories haven’t just given up on Scotland and Wales; they have discovered that by simply concentrated on a few voters in the Midlands and the South, they can use the electoral system to orchestrate a coup, and are using the Scots as convenient scapegoats in the hope that the North won’t notice.

The real problem is the massive centralisation of England; the West Lothian Question is a trainspotter’s obsession (coming from me, that’s saying something) and a serious distraction.

I’m usually quite sceptical of a lot of the schemes you read about on tinternet for solving our problems with democracy in this country, but this idea is at least worth debating:

I want to see political parties get penalized for a low electoral turn out. In other words, if we are fed up with them to the back teeth, I want to make our voting abstentions count. My proposal is somewhere along these lines:

If the national turnout at a general election is lower than 60%, then the next general election must be called within 4 years.

If the national turnout at a general election is lower than 55%, then the next general election must be called within 3 years.

If the national turnout at a general election is lower than 50%, then the next general election must be called within 2 years.

If enough people like this idea, then we have a hope of getting it through. As a suggestion, you could visit www.writetothem.com and ask your elected MP what they think of this idea. My guess is they probably will not like it! So maybe someone out there can think of other ways to push for it.

Not sure I’d have all those different tiers, but the basic idea has appeal. What does the panel think?