And so we see as well why the UK will never get anything truly substantial when attempting to ‘reset’ the relationship with the EU. Brussels is very well aware that FPTP enables any ‘new’ UK minority government to undo whatever they agreed with the previous minority government. They’re sick of it. What an achievement!
100% agree, Peter. To my mind, any sincere attempt to move closer to the EU really must be accompanied - preceded, in fact - by a change to the voting system. I'm hopeful - confident, in fact - that a system that accurately translated the will of the people expressed in general elections into the power structure of the Commons would allow that process to proceed. Without it, like you, I fear no-one across the Channel will be willing to invest in any meaningful discussions.
The question then is, of course, why it all has to take so long. Labour has the majority to deal with FPTP as well as ‘resetting’ the situation with the EU. Important things being dealt with taking far too long is a peculiar English issue, in fact.
There are lots of different factors playing into this - we don't and can't know all of them. But two things we do know. First, until recently Starmer's most senior aide was a staunch opponent of both issues. All Chiefs of Staff exercise an enormous amount of influence on the issues that make it to the principal's desk. I suspect neither of these issues was ever given a fair place in the pipeline of paper delivering signals to Starmer. Second, although Labour has a huge majority in the Commons, they know that they only got 34% of the votes at the last election (on a 60% turnout). They know that is not anything close to the kind of popular mandate that provides a govt with the courage required to do big things - quite the opposite...it leaves them anxious about doing anything remotely bold. There will be lots of other factors too, for sure, but those are two of the key ones.
Thank you Mark for keeping on keeping on. I started working with Homeless people in Southampton in 1976 moving on to work in partnership with the NHS to provide their patients with good quality housing instead of hospital beds.
So, in succeeding decades I have seen, from the inside, how essential workers from abroad have been to both the functioning of the NHS and the housing and rehabilitation of so many of our poor English patients have been!
This is a huge untold story which I am only able to hint at because I do not have the intellectual resources, at present, to devote to it.
The fact that, I see, every day, my neighbours needs being met by workers who might be labelled as 'immigrants' or that I had my physiotherapy programme devised by another, just last week, shows you how dependent we are as a nation on the toil of others from overseas.
And I am just a poor English boy from Bristol which was an immigrant city before I was born back in the Forties.
Thanks for sharing that personal insight, Chris. I hear similar stories all the time. The lived experience of ordinary people tells a totally different story to the one we hear in the press and on the airwaves these days. And yet those views are never allowed to colour the thinking at the heart of government - at least partly as a result of the dynamics in this piece. I hope we can change that, and soon.
Top notch explanation, as always. You really should be steering the Government, Mark, they desperately need your insight, clarity and objective approach. The country needs you! But Starmer is too blinkered and too lily-livered to follow your thinking.
Ha! You're very kind, Aidan, but maybe your judgement is a little lacking! 😉
I will continue to work from the outside to make this change happen. While the odds are always stacked against the outsiders, once in a while, the tectonic plates of politics shift and, when they do, the aggregate power of millions of ordinary people determined to see change often carries the day. You may think I'm mad but I see one of those shifts coming in the not too distant future.
I seem to remember also that - like immigration - the EU wasn't an issue amongst the majority of British voters until one Nigel Farage and his cronies made it so.
The subsequent chaos resulting from that exercise ought to be a wake up call for anybody tempted by his snake oil salesmanship now.
The fact that The Labour Party dog - like the Tory Party dog before it - is prepared to be wagged by Reform should not entrance the electorate into voting for them.
Sadly - as Mark's article so vividly points out - it doesn't take many gullible people to create a shitstorm...!!!!
You're absolutely right, Phil. The polls from the time immediately before the referendum was announced and then during it show exactly what you refer to. We like to think of ourselves as rational people, capable of free thinking in all circumstance, but most of us are far more influenced by this cacophony of crap than we're prepared to accept - it's hard not to be when it's coming at you from every angle practically 24 hours a day.
Proportional representation is just one tiny element of everything that needs fixing. The system cannot cope with the complex world of the 21st century. It survived for the previous half-century because the UK was in the EU, so had half a decent constitution.
Here are just a few of the things that PR will not fix:
1. Scotland voting strongly to leave in May.
2. Northern Ireland exercising its right to rejoin the Irish Republic.
3. The Spanish veto that will be used to force a concession over Gibraltar when England comes to its senses and chooses to rejoin the EEA then EU.
4. Donors buying policies.
5. Lobbyists pushing their wares.
6. Erosion of rights and criminalisation of protest.
7. Financial engineering to pick the pockets of British citizens - a major contributor to the cost of living crisis that nobody understands.
8. The House of Lords, a farce that has no power because the government uses its Commons majority to reverse its defeats. The Lords' only purpose is for the government to quietly fix its legislative errors.
9. The Privy Council, another farce.
10. Royal Assent, an extreme farce, because the King does what Westminster says to override the three national legislatures.
11. Excessive power in the Treasury. "Treasury Brain" is a contributing factor to failure to invest.
12. Lack of community power, local authorities have been merged into remote bureaucracies.
13. Culture of lies.
14. Good people will not come forward for fear of character assassination in the media.
15. Lack of interest by the public because they know they can do nothing to change the UK.
16. No right to put topics on the democratic agenda. Campaigns take 25 years (hereditaries) to a century (women's emancipation).
17. Culture of secrecy and cover-up.
18. No parliament can bind its successor, so laws get made then overturned as one or another ideology comes to the fore.
19. Any group of MPs numbering half the government's majority can hold it to ransom, e.g. the ERG.
20. Worst of all, absolute power corrupts. Need to turn it upside down.
All in my book Reinventing Democracy, and what to do about the mess.
PR will not fix everything.
A holistic solution is required, because the system has failed.
An interesting list, David. But I would say two things: one, how on earth could you achieve all of that at once? We campaigners often try to eat the elephant all at once - it is better to consume it in digestible chunks. And two, following from 'one', if we are to focus on a small, achievable subset of those things, would we not be wise to choose the thing furthest upstream, the thing that, once changed, makes many of the other things on the list easier to accomplish? A change of voting system won't fix all our problems overnight, but it will make it much more likely we can fix them over time. That is the philosophy we follow at Open Britain.
Sadly this approach would lead to the break up of the United Kingdom. The 7th May Holyrood elections are likely to show that Scotland will not wait an eternity. Even without an upset in five weeks from now, Northern Ireland may well exercise its right to a referendum on rejoining the Irish Republic within a decade. How then can Scotland be refused?
It's better to start from an honest admission that the system of two tribes fighting for absolute power, settled in 1662, cannot cope with the complexity of the 21st century. For 49 years until December 2020 Britain had half a written constitution, and throwing that away has revealed a complete system failure.
People are now utterly disillusioned with British "democracy" and the absolute power of government to do as it likes. An honest admission would stand politicians and campaign groups in good stead. Campaigns should be to attract enough support for a referendum to change the law. (I propose 10% of the electorate). This would nullify the establishment's "Divide and rule" strategy which is so successful that it has captured many.
Your second point is in effect an admission of defeat, becasue the efflux of time will result in England alone, long before serious change can be achieved. England alone would have to face a Spanish veto over Gibraltar if it wished to rejoin the single market (EEA) or the EU. With Scotland in the EU and Wales possibly following, that would cause hard borders within Great Britain. "Hard" as in passport and customs checks, including trains quarantined for 20 to 30 minutes at Berwick and Carlisle, which used to be the case on the Swiss borders before Switzerland joined Schengen.
It's time for you to honour your promise to "check it out" and actually read some new ideas. If you are prepared to do so, I can let you have the current text of the second edition of Reinventing Democracy which goes to legal review on 20th April, so I would need your feedback a week earlier. There are three contact forms on the web that can reach me. Or you can just read the first edition; the e-book and pdf have some corrections and additions that are not in the on-sale print edition.
Excellent 20 points, I pick number 4 because it’s a subject I know about. I was joint head of fundraising for Labour from 1993 to 1995 with Jon Norton (he married the blessed and true hero of the Good Friday Agreement, Mo Mowlam). I resigned when B Liar brought in Michael Levy. I told the then Labour General Secretary, Margaret McDonagh ‘if someone gives you £100k they want something, if they give you £1m, they demand it and I want no part of that’.
I was prompted to do so after collecting a £1m cheque (say £2.5m today) from the great and good Brian Davies the Welsh-born Canadian activist who founded the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). The huge donation brought Labour focus to hunting with dogs and the prohibiting act was duly brought in 10 years later. I agreed with the Act but I found the power of money offensive. I now see it as devastatingly corrupting and responsible for so much that is wrong from underfunding of regulatory agencies to the current war with Iran - I also advised the Israelis through BIPAC in 1982 and am ashamed to have done so. AIPAC is now an evil force in US (and, therefore, UK) politics. I commend Peter Malinauskas to you. He leads by 78pc to his nearest rival’s 14pc. The people know that private political funding is crooked it just takes a politician with Peter’s courage to do something about it. https://youtu.be/NLcASMeydtM
Also, Mo Mowlam was a bit of a hero of mine back in the day. She once told a room full of Bill officials that I had cheated her out of £5 winnings by persuading the Chief Whip in the Lords (for whom I worked at the time) to extend his speech at the end of a debate so that business went past the end time she had selected in our regular sweepstake and on to the time I had chosen! (For the record, I had not!) A great and very funny woman.
Adoration isn’t strong enough. I had dinner with her and Teddy Kennedy at Hillsborough Castle. He was a creep. Mo took her shoes of and after the second glass of wine threw her wig into the corner. I tried to work up the courage to ask him how to spell Chappaquiddick. Sadly I never did so and I haven’t stopped kicking myself. A truly great woman. Undermined by B Liar (copyright Victor Lewis Smith) who zoomed in to take all credit. Another creep.
Completely agree with your point about the poisonous effects of big money in politics, Brian. It is naive to think that someone who donates £1m or more to a political party - especially those who have made their money in business, where transactionalism is one of the keys to success - will not expect something in return. They often say they just want to support a healthy political environment but I've often wondered how many of them would donate those big sums if they were allocated to a random political party on the spin of a wheel (Wheel of Fortune style), where there was as much chance of the money going to Reform UK as there was of it going to the Green Party. I suspect none.
You are correct, and you only elaborate on one of my twenty points. There are many more points covered in my book Reinventing Democracy, which shows the scale of change needed (and that cannot be achieved one campaign at a time, see Mark Kieran's reply and my subsequent comment).
Are you willing to let me use most of your reply as supporting material in my second edition? If so, please get in touch via a contact form on either my business website or my publisher's website. Thanks, DK
Use anything you like,David. I try only to comment upon that which I know about. Funding is one, campaigning is another. Pick a single issue and go hard for it. Bring in others as you get traction. Egregious though Farage is, he’s been smart in locking onto racism, under the fig leaf of immigration. He’s now bringing in his real objectives, low taxation and low regulation. That’s what his rich funders are paying for.
This is the sharpest illustration of what happens when policy is driven by partisan competition rather than evidence. 62% want it easier for NHS workers to come. The government does the opposite. Why? Because the party system forces them to compete with Reform on optics rather than govern on evidence. Independent representatives accountable to their constituencies, not to a party machine calculating electoral advantage, would never produce this policy. The system is the problem.
Absolutely right, Paul. And we are slightly naive to think that those inside the system will ever change it. Not because they are inherently bad people but because they are constrained and driven by the perverse incentives that system applies to them. As when Formula 1 racing became unfair when the big teams were able to use their money to exploit weaknesses in the rules, or when the oligarchs brought a similar dynamic to football, it requires an external force to reform the rules of the game and bring fairness and function back into the competition. In those cases, the governing bodies - the FIA and the Premier League - intervened. In the case of democracy, it's actually the people of this country who hold that authority and that duty. We must make enough of them see that, and enough of them act on it.
Thanks, Paul. That is the guiding philosophy at the heart of Open Britain's new campaign (launched in the next few weeks), "Bigger Than Politics". I'll be looking out for your name on the supporters list when it goes live! 😉
Thanks. I must admit I wasn't aware of the way FPTP can distort government policy but what you say makes sense. I always wondered why immigration is at the top of many politicians' agendas and nowhere on the agenda of anyone I know.
Glad you got something from that (long!) piece. If you get the chance, dig out what Andy Burnham has to say on this. He is someone who has been through both systems and he talks powerfully about the cultural change that comes with a change of system, with the change of incentive structure that system applies to candidates. Under FPTP, where the winner takes all, there is a strong incentive to knock the other party out of the race, because if you do, you never have to deal with him again on anything like equal terms. Under a more proportional system, you might be reliant on doing a deal with that party six months down the track, so you better maintain at least a reasonable working relationship with them. Mark Drakeford too speaks powerfully on this.
The best and clearest analysis of the situation I have read so far. Please keep it up, Mark. I too am weary of stating the obvious, wich I have been doing since I first got the vote in 1966. Some vote! In all that time it never counted, but I continued to place my cross on the ballot paper because it seemed more responsible than not taking part. How long, O Lord, how long...
I do so agree (including on attitudes to the EU. The problem is, why are Keir Starmer and the Home Secretary apparently so obtuse. I write letters, I demonstrate, but it's like water off a duck's back. Things never change.
I totally agree with you.I have believed for a long time that we should have PR like so many EU countries.I don't understand why a Labour Government is against it
So what does Labour do about FPTP? Nothing, in the hope a quirk of fate makes it possible to get them back in Westminster as they landed there now. Labour more than anything proved you don’t need the Reform types to get a silly, incompetent government that falls in every trap on its path. So, tell me who can more or less be trusted?
Just another thought after writing the piece below. It might happen that no party has a majority of seats next time. Might this be a route to change. Geoffrey Bailey.
I understand this. How do we get the argument to those who are misled ? I think there is a large number of people, often with pretty limited education, who act according to their gut feelings, and it seems difficult to use that route to give them a clear, logical view of the world. It needs a lot of dedicated activists to go amongst these "emoters" and turn them into clearer thinkers. Geoffrey Bailey
With the present politicians at both sides of the aisle busy attempting to save their minority political arses by giving a voter minority what they think might be what those voters want, as long as 1 percent more than the ‘other’ side ensures that they still have a job after the coming elections, we start to understand what Brexit was all about. We understand what the immigrant issue is about. The wrecking of the NHS, the demise of decent public transport etc. etc. We understand that it explains why so much that happens in present day Britain (well, England really) makes such a cheap, tawdry, ghastly, foul smelling and soiled impression. To someone who grew up nine years after the battle in the Arnhem area, where the image of Britain was revered long after that fateful battle, this is a real and painful loss.
And so we see as well why the UK will never get anything truly substantial when attempting to ‘reset’ the relationship with the EU. Brussels is very well aware that FPTP enables any ‘new’ UK minority government to undo whatever they agreed with the previous minority government. They’re sick of it. What an achievement!
100% agree, Peter. To my mind, any sincere attempt to move closer to the EU really must be accompanied - preceded, in fact - by a change to the voting system. I'm hopeful - confident, in fact - that a system that accurately translated the will of the people expressed in general elections into the power structure of the Commons would allow that process to proceed. Without it, like you, I fear no-one across the Channel will be willing to invest in any meaningful discussions.
The question then is, of course, why it all has to take so long. Labour has the majority to deal with FPTP as well as ‘resetting’ the situation with the EU. Important things being dealt with taking far too long is a peculiar English issue, in fact.
There are lots of different factors playing into this - we don't and can't know all of them. But two things we do know. First, until recently Starmer's most senior aide was a staunch opponent of both issues. All Chiefs of Staff exercise an enormous amount of influence on the issues that make it to the principal's desk. I suspect neither of these issues was ever given a fair place in the pipeline of paper delivering signals to Starmer. Second, although Labour has a huge majority in the Commons, they know that they only got 34% of the votes at the last election (on a 60% turnout). They know that is not anything close to the kind of popular mandate that provides a govt with the courage required to do big things - quite the opposite...it leaves them anxious about doing anything remotely bold. There will be lots of other factors too, for sure, but those are two of the key ones.
Thank you for this imformation. I wonder if there was a vote in the commons on PR,what the result would be? I would hope for a yes
Good old British adversarial way of doing things. I forgot the creepy influence of that issue.
Thank you Mark for keeping on keeping on. I started working with Homeless people in Southampton in 1976 moving on to work in partnership with the NHS to provide their patients with good quality housing instead of hospital beds.
So, in succeeding decades I have seen, from the inside, how essential workers from abroad have been to both the functioning of the NHS and the housing and rehabilitation of so many of our poor English patients have been!
This is a huge untold story which I am only able to hint at because I do not have the intellectual resources, at present, to devote to it.
The fact that, I see, every day, my neighbours needs being met by workers who might be labelled as 'immigrants' or that I had my physiotherapy programme devised by another, just last week, shows you how dependent we are as a nation on the toil of others from overseas.
And I am just a poor English boy from Bristol which was an immigrant city before I was born back in the Forties.
Thanks for sharing that personal insight, Chris. I hear similar stories all the time. The lived experience of ordinary people tells a totally different story to the one we hear in the press and on the airwaves these days. And yet those views are never allowed to colour the thinking at the heart of government - at least partly as a result of the dynamics in this piece. I hope we can change that, and soon.
Top notch explanation, as always. You really should be steering the Government, Mark, they desperately need your insight, clarity and objective approach. The country needs you! But Starmer is too blinkered and too lily-livered to follow your thinking.
Ha! You're very kind, Aidan, but maybe your judgement is a little lacking! 😉
I will continue to work from the outside to make this change happen. While the odds are always stacked against the outsiders, once in a while, the tectonic plates of politics shift and, when they do, the aggregate power of millions of ordinary people determined to see change often carries the day. You may think I'm mad but I see one of those shifts coming in the not too distant future.
No, of course I realise you are making your point from the 'outside looking in' - probably the only way to be objective.
I just wish that Mr Starmer could open his ears/eyes/heart to your irrefutable logic, and make the necessary changes!
I seem to remember also that - like immigration - the EU wasn't an issue amongst the majority of British voters until one Nigel Farage and his cronies made it so.
The subsequent chaos resulting from that exercise ought to be a wake up call for anybody tempted by his snake oil salesmanship now.
The fact that The Labour Party dog - like the Tory Party dog before it - is prepared to be wagged by Reform should not entrance the electorate into voting for them.
Sadly - as Mark's article so vividly points out - it doesn't take many gullible people to create a shitstorm...!!!!
You're absolutely right, Phil. The polls from the time immediately before the referendum was announced and then during it show exactly what you refer to. We like to think of ourselves as rational people, capable of free thinking in all circumstance, but most of us are far more influenced by this cacophony of crap than we're prepared to accept - it's hard not to be when it's coming at you from every angle practically 24 hours a day.
Proportional representation is just one tiny element of everything that needs fixing. The system cannot cope with the complex world of the 21st century. It survived for the previous half-century because the UK was in the EU, so had half a decent constitution.
Here are just a few of the things that PR will not fix:
1. Scotland voting strongly to leave in May.
2. Northern Ireland exercising its right to rejoin the Irish Republic.
3. The Spanish veto that will be used to force a concession over Gibraltar when England comes to its senses and chooses to rejoin the EEA then EU.
4. Donors buying policies.
5. Lobbyists pushing their wares.
6. Erosion of rights and criminalisation of protest.
7. Financial engineering to pick the pockets of British citizens - a major contributor to the cost of living crisis that nobody understands.
8. The House of Lords, a farce that has no power because the government uses its Commons majority to reverse its defeats. The Lords' only purpose is for the government to quietly fix its legislative errors.
9. The Privy Council, another farce.
10. Royal Assent, an extreme farce, because the King does what Westminster says to override the three national legislatures.
11. Excessive power in the Treasury. "Treasury Brain" is a contributing factor to failure to invest.
12. Lack of community power, local authorities have been merged into remote bureaucracies.
13. Culture of lies.
14. Good people will not come forward for fear of character assassination in the media.
15. Lack of interest by the public because they know they can do nothing to change the UK.
16. No right to put topics on the democratic agenda. Campaigns take 25 years (hereditaries) to a century (women's emancipation).
17. Culture of secrecy and cover-up.
18. No parliament can bind its successor, so laws get made then overturned as one or another ideology comes to the fore.
19. Any group of MPs numbering half the government's majority can hold it to ransom, e.g. the ERG.
20. Worst of all, absolute power corrupts. Need to turn it upside down.
All in my book Reinventing Democracy, and what to do about the mess.
PR will not fix everything.
A holistic solution is required, because the system has failed.
An interesting list, David. But I would say two things: one, how on earth could you achieve all of that at once? We campaigners often try to eat the elephant all at once - it is better to consume it in digestible chunks. And two, following from 'one', if we are to focus on a small, achievable subset of those things, would we not be wise to choose the thing furthest upstream, the thing that, once changed, makes many of the other things on the list easier to accomplish? A change of voting system won't fix all our problems overnight, but it will make it much more likely we can fix them over time. That is the philosophy we follow at Open Britain.
Dear Mark
Sadly this approach would lead to the break up of the United Kingdom. The 7th May Holyrood elections are likely to show that Scotland will not wait an eternity. Even without an upset in five weeks from now, Northern Ireland may well exercise its right to a referendum on rejoining the Irish Republic within a decade. How then can Scotland be refused?
It's better to start from an honest admission that the system of two tribes fighting for absolute power, settled in 1662, cannot cope with the complexity of the 21st century. For 49 years until December 2020 Britain had half a written constitution, and throwing that away has revealed a complete system failure.
People are now utterly disillusioned with British "democracy" and the absolute power of government to do as it likes. An honest admission would stand politicians and campaign groups in good stead. Campaigns should be to attract enough support for a referendum to change the law. (I propose 10% of the electorate). This would nullify the establishment's "Divide and rule" strategy which is so successful that it has captured many.
Your second point is in effect an admission of defeat, becasue the efflux of time will result in England alone, long before serious change can be achieved. England alone would have to face a Spanish veto over Gibraltar if it wished to rejoin the single market (EEA) or the EU. With Scotland in the EU and Wales possibly following, that would cause hard borders within Great Britain. "Hard" as in passport and customs checks, including trains quarantined for 20 to 30 minutes at Berwick and Carlisle, which used to be the case on the Swiss borders before Switzerland joined Schengen.
It's time for you to honour your promise to "check it out" and actually read some new ideas. If you are prepared to do so, I can let you have the current text of the second edition of Reinventing Democracy which goes to legal review on 20th April, so I would need your feedback a week earlier. There are three contact forms on the web that can reach me. Or you can just read the first edition; the e-book and pdf have some corrections and additions that are not in the on-sale print edition.
Kind regards
David Kauders
Excellent 20 points, I pick number 4 because it’s a subject I know about. I was joint head of fundraising for Labour from 1993 to 1995 with Jon Norton (he married the blessed and true hero of the Good Friday Agreement, Mo Mowlam). I resigned when B Liar brought in Michael Levy. I told the then Labour General Secretary, Margaret McDonagh ‘if someone gives you £100k they want something, if they give you £1m, they demand it and I want no part of that’.
I was prompted to do so after collecting a £1m cheque (say £2.5m today) from the great and good Brian Davies the Welsh-born Canadian activist who founded the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). The huge donation brought Labour focus to hunting with dogs and the prohibiting act was duly brought in 10 years later. I agreed with the Act but I found the power of money offensive. I now see it as devastatingly corrupting and responsible for so much that is wrong from underfunding of regulatory agencies to the current war with Iran - I also advised the Israelis through BIPAC in 1982 and am ashamed to have done so. AIPAC is now an evil force in US (and, therefore, UK) politics. I commend Peter Malinauskas to you. He leads by 78pc to his nearest rival’s 14pc. The people know that private political funding is crooked it just takes a politician with Peter’s courage to do something about it. https://youtu.be/NLcASMeydtM
Also, Mo Mowlam was a bit of a hero of mine back in the day. She once told a room full of Bill officials that I had cheated her out of £5 winnings by persuading the Chief Whip in the Lords (for whom I worked at the time) to extend his speech at the end of a debate so that business went past the end time she had selected in our regular sweepstake and on to the time I had chosen! (For the record, I had not!) A great and very funny woman.
Adoration isn’t strong enough. I had dinner with her and Teddy Kennedy at Hillsborough Castle. He was a creep. Mo took her shoes of and after the second glass of wine threw her wig into the corner. I tried to work up the courage to ask him how to spell Chappaquiddick. Sadly I never did so and I haven’t stopped kicking myself. A truly great woman. Undermined by B Liar (copyright Victor Lewis Smith) who zoomed in to take all credit. Another creep.
Love it! 👏👏👏
Completely agree with your point about the poisonous effects of big money in politics, Brian. It is naive to think that someone who donates £1m or more to a political party - especially those who have made their money in business, where transactionalism is one of the keys to success - will not expect something in return. They often say they just want to support a healthy political environment but I've often wondered how many of them would donate those big sums if they were allocated to a random political party on the spin of a wheel (Wheel of Fortune style), where there was as much chance of the money going to Reform UK as there was of it going to the Green Party. I suspect none.
You are correct, and you only elaborate on one of my twenty points. There are many more points covered in my book Reinventing Democracy, which shows the scale of change needed (and that cannot be achieved one campaign at a time, see Mark Kieran's reply and my subsequent comment).
Are you willing to let me use most of your reply as supporting material in my second edition? If so, please get in touch via a contact form on either my business website or my publisher's website. Thanks, DK
Use anything you like,David. I try only to comment upon that which I know about. Funding is one, campaigning is another. Pick a single issue and go hard for it. Bring in others as you get traction. Egregious though Farage is, he’s been smart in locking onto racism, under the fig leaf of immigration. He’s now bringing in his real objectives, low taxation and low regulation. That’s what his rich funders are paying for.
Agreed and thanks.
Pleasure.
This is the sharpest illustration of what happens when policy is driven by partisan competition rather than evidence. 62% want it easier for NHS workers to come. The government does the opposite. Why? Because the party system forces them to compete with Reform on optics rather than govern on evidence. Independent representatives accountable to their constituencies, not to a party machine calculating electoral advantage, would never produce this policy. The system is the problem.
Absolutely right, Paul. And we are slightly naive to think that those inside the system will ever change it. Not because they are inherently bad people but because they are constrained and driven by the perverse incentives that system applies to them. As when Formula 1 racing became unfair when the big teams were able to use their money to exploit weaknesses in the rules, or when the oligarchs brought a similar dynamic to football, it requires an external force to reform the rules of the game and bring fairness and function back into the competition. In those cases, the governing bodies - the FIA and the Premier League - intervened. In the case of democracy, it's actually the people of this country who hold that authority and that duty. We must make enough of them see that, and enough of them act on it.
That F1 analogy is perfect. The drivers aren't the problem. The rules are. And only someone outside the race can change them.
Thanks, Paul. That is the guiding philosophy at the heart of Open Britain's new campaign (launched in the next few weeks), "Bigger Than Politics". I'll be looking out for your name on the supporters list when it goes live! 😉
Appreciate the reply. I’m interested to see how you frame it and where you take it.
Thank you for posting this. You're saying what needs to be said…
Thank you, Tez. Much appreciated. 🙏
Thanks. I must admit I wasn't aware of the way FPTP can distort government policy but what you say makes sense. I always wondered why immigration is at the top of many politicians' agendas and nowhere on the agenda of anyone I know.
Glad you got something from that (long!) piece. If you get the chance, dig out what Andy Burnham has to say on this. He is someone who has been through both systems and he talks powerfully about the cultural change that comes with a change of system, with the change of incentive structure that system applies to candidates. Under FPTP, where the winner takes all, there is a strong incentive to knock the other party out of the race, because if you do, you never have to deal with him again on anything like equal terms. Under a more proportional system, you might be reliant on doing a deal with that party six months down the track, so you better maintain at least a reasonable working relationship with them. Mark Drakeford too speaks powerfully on this.
helpful and clear. The current visa system is already causing problems with staffing in schools I know.
The best and clearest analysis of the situation I have read so far. Please keep it up, Mark. I too am weary of stating the obvious, wich I have been doing since I first got the vote in 1966. Some vote! In all that time it never counted, but I continued to place my cross on the ballot paper because it seemed more responsible than not taking part. How long, O Lord, how long...
I do so agree (including on attitudes to the EU. The problem is, why are Keir Starmer and the Home Secretary apparently so obtuse. I write letters, I demonstrate, but it's like water off a duck's back. Things never change.
Jane Parsons, Warton, LA5 9QJ
I totally agree with you.I have believed for a long time that we should have PR like so many EU countries.I don't understand why a Labour Government is against it
So what does Labour do about FPTP? Nothing, in the hope a quirk of fate makes it possible to get them back in Westminster as they landed there now. Labour more than anything proved you don’t need the Reform types to get a silly, incompetent government that falls in every trap on its path. So, tell me who can more or less be trusted?
Just another thought after writing the piece below. It might happen that no party has a majority of seats next time. Might this be a route to change. Geoffrey Bailey.
I understand this. How do we get the argument to those who are misled ? I think there is a large number of people, often with pretty limited education, who act according to their gut feelings, and it seems difficult to use that route to give them a clear, logical view of the world. It needs a lot of dedicated activists to go amongst these "emoters" and turn them into clearer thinkers. Geoffrey Bailey
With the present politicians at both sides of the aisle busy attempting to save their minority political arses by giving a voter minority what they think might be what those voters want, as long as 1 percent more than the ‘other’ side ensures that they still have a job after the coming elections, we start to understand what Brexit was all about. We understand what the immigrant issue is about. The wrecking of the NHS, the demise of decent public transport etc. etc. We understand that it explains why so much that happens in present day Britain (well, England really) makes such a cheap, tawdry, ghastly, foul smelling and soiled impression. To someone who grew up nine years after the battle in the Arnhem area, where the image of Britain was revered long after that fateful battle, this is a real and painful loss.