All bar the Tories want constitutional reform. Another reason to keep them out
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Version 0 of 1. The spectacle of seven party leaders in a row at television debates – eight if the incandescent DUP gets its way – will look as if there is a broad, healthy democratic choice on offer from far-right to far-green. But for most voters it’ll be like going into a restaurant with a long menu outside only to sit down and find just the same old two dishes on offer. They are as different as can be – but there are just two. Pick one of the others and the waiter will still bring you one of the only two on offer, but you won’t have chosen which. Millions throw away their menu choice without affecting one iota who enters Number 10, or worse, affecting it by bringing about their least favoured result. Maybe this time they will finally wake up to the full monstrous injustice of our first-past-the-post voting system. That denial of fair representation is more grotesquely unjust than most other excrescences and weirdnesses of our constitution. But parties are highly selective in what they choose to find outrageous. David Cameron and Nicola Sturgeon are at war over the constitutional question of English votes for English laws, Sturgeon stirring the pot by threatening to ride to the rescue and vote to save the English NHS if need be, with the firepower of her expected big increase in seats. Tories are outraged. But on all sides there is shadow boxing going on here. Sturgeon pretends that Scots can vote SNP and still get a Labour government, though every seat lost to Labour makes Cameron’s victory more likely. Plainly it would suit her purposes far better for the Tories to win, almost certainly causing the final great rift at the border that she seeks. Never mind that meanwhile it means further hardships imposed on her people by Tories in Westminster: that’s a price worth paying. Meanwhile, for all their patriotic unionist traditions, growing numbers of Tory backbenchers think nothing would so become the Scots as their departure: what’s the point of Scotland? It’s just an electoral drain on Tory chances. Bogus indignation about selective bits of our constitution fills the air. The Tories seize only on those aberrations that suit them – so they want boundary change to equalise constituencies, but only because it favours them. They didn’t want even the alternative vote, let alone proportional representation (PR), which opens the door to new parties. Both Tony Blair and Ed Miliband are genuine pluralists, supporting PR: older Labour dinosaurs blocked it out of tribalism, or the old fear you would never get a left government, only a permanently grey centrism. The opposite is now the case, where opening the door to further left parties increases the chance of a more left-tinged coalition. Nick Clegg’s party always supported it, assuming they would gain, though psephologists now think they may lose out if it was not necessary to vote Liberal Democrat tactically in some seats. Tories wrecked Lords reform, of course, because they always dominate the second chamber, as most so-called crossbenchers lean that way. Besides, the lever of Lords patronage is even more politically useful than the shed-loads of party funds solicited in the hope of a peerage: there are now 850 peers, and the last Lords intake contributed £7m between a few of them. Twenty-six bishops as law-makers, along with 91 hereditaries voted for by those in the pages of the peerage takes Britain out of the ranks of civilised democracies. Party funding is a corrupt disgrace, only sustained by the Tory press drumming up sham pro-Tory indignation at the idea that taxpayers might pay for democracy instead. The five-year fixed terms cobbled together in the coalition-making panic has proved deadly – far too long before a chance to throw the scoundrels out, with Betty Boothroyd now protesting that MPs have nothing to do in this last fag-end year. What of devolution to the cities and regions, once Scotland gets so much more? As voting sinks to new lows among an alienated electorate, all the parties – except the Tories – are calling for a constitutional convention. The mind boggles at the process, the rows, the special interests, but anything that airs the derelict state of British democracy and tries to arouse the apathy of voters about “dry” constitutional questions has become a pressing necessity. Another reason to prevent Cameron – committed to no change, or only those changes that suit his party – returning to power. |