Reply from Helen-Mary Jones AM

Dear Andrew,
Thank you for your message.
I am, of course, fully aware of the exact constitutional position, but it is rather hard using the term "the UK parliament legislating on England only matters"' or "the UK government acting on England only matters" each time one has to make a distinction between England only policies and those of devolved governments. English Parliament or English government is useful shorthand.
I cannot speak for other nationalists on this but it is my personal belief that it is most unfair for MPs from Scotland to vote on matters that have no effect on their constituents and only on communities in England. I will feel the same way about MPs representing Welsh constituencies if the referendum on March 3rd is passed and the National Assembly's lawmaking powers are effectively clarified. In this context I am pleased with the decision of my colleagues in Westminster, the Plaid Cymru MPs who have not spoken or voted on England only matters since devolution. I support the idea of an English Parliament in principal, though I can understand that at this point there would be some difficulty in putting this in to practice because the current model of devolution is so asymmetric, with each of the three devolved administrations having such different powers. Hopefully that will change.
I hope this clarifies position on this matter.
Yours sincerely
Helen Mary Jones AM
Sent from my BlackBerry

In defense of PR

Further to my one-before-last post, in which I advocated voting for the Liberal Democrats in order to help bring about a situation where a hung parliament might lead to the introduction of PR, and in light of the fact that both Labour and Conservative campaigners have been frantically highlighting the perceived dangers of hung parliaments (and therefore, by implication, of PR, which tends to lead to a hung parliament [or, more positively, a balanced parliament]), I intend, in this post, to address the main criticisms that I have heard people make about the concept of proportional representation as a means of electing the national parliament.

Criticism 1: PR is less likely to deliver an overall majority to any party, and therefore leads to coalition governments which are both weak and impossible to vote out.
- One of the advantages that many people claim for the first-past-the-post system is that it usually delivers a government with a majority of seats in parliament, thus enabling it to get its planned programme of legislation enacted into law without too much difficulty. But surely the notion of one party holding a majority of the seats in parliament is only justifiable if that party is supported by the majority of the electorate. If it is not supported by the majority of voters then effectively what we have is a group of people representing a minority of the population, forcing their will onto the majority. That doesn't seem very democratic to me. A coalition government may be weak, in the sense that no one party within the coalition may be able to achieve everything it would like to, and in the sense that its actions must involve negotiation, bargaining and compromise, but that is inevitable in a situation where politicians are representing a public with a diverse range of political viewpoints, and must surely be preferable to one party lording it over the legislative chamber without a genuinely democratic mandate from the voters. Decisions arrived at through negotiation and compromise may even sometimes be better than those which originate with one party and then enjoy free passage through parliament by virtue of a majority. As for the argument, which is sometimes made, that a coalition government can never be voted out, this is only true to the extent that the electorate can never be 'voted out'! A coalition government, elected using proportional representation, needs to hold the confidence of a parliament which reflects the political 'shape' of the electorate as a whole and, unlike the zero-sum game of first-past-the-post elections - where the representatives of one part of the electorate hold total power for a period and then lose all power, to be replaced by the representatives of another part of the electorate - under PR a coalition government, while it may not necessarily be so easy to vote out, will, if it wishes to continue in power, change it's composition to reflect the changing political demographics of the electorate. Of course, if a large enough part of the electorate become completely disenchanted with the coalition government then, following a general election using PR, the new government (whether it was a coalition or not) would, no doubt, look very different to the previous one.

Criticism 2: PR would lead to political stalemates, with governments unable to act because of the lack of a clear parliamentary majority.
- This is really a very similar criticism to the last one and, while it's true that under PR it is often harder to get legislation passed, this is, in my opinion, no bad thing. It is felt by many people that there are already far too many laws on our statute books and, as mentioned in my previous answer, the need for negotiation and compromise is an important way of ensuring that any legislation which is passed is as acceptable as it can be to the public as a whole. In the devolved parliaments and assemblies of the UK the various parties involved in coalition governments are learning to thrash out compromises and come to agreements which, though they sometimes do take a long time to arrive at (eg. the decisions involving the handing over of police powers to Stormont) do, as a result of the compromises involved, tend to have the support of a broader section of the electorate than they would do had they been foisted on the public by a government which, while not being supported by the majority of voters, nevertheless held a majority in parliament.

Criticism 3: PR would allow minority parties, such as the BNP, to hold a disproportionate amount of power.
- It's true that under PR a situation could arise where a minority government might need to strike a deal with an unpopular minority party in order to get a proposed piece of legislation passed through parliament. This does mean that small parties could potentially hold a very small amount of power (though only to the extent that the more mainstream parties would be prepared to compromise with them - the more extreme ideas of parties like the BNP would almost certainly not be up for discussion) but it would not be a disproportionate amount of power. The ability any small party had to influence decisions made in parliament would be in direct proportion to the level of its electoral support, and that is how it should be in a democracy, even where parties representing those with deplorable and offensive views are concerned. The proper way to address the problem is to work to eradicate racism and other offensive attitudes and viewpoints from society; then there will be no chance of them having any influence in the realm of politics.

Criticism 4: PR takes away the connection between MPs and local areas as MPs do not represent particular constituencies under PR.
- This is, in my opinion, the strongest argument against PR but also the most easily dealt with. The system of PR which I am most in favour of (and which is, I believe, the one favoured by the Lib Dems) is the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system, which delivers a result which is both proportional in party terms and keeps the connection between individual MPs and local constituencies. For a detailed explanation of how STV works, see here.

Money too tight to mention

I don't follow the news as closely as I perhaps should these days, much of my time being taken up with work and family commitments, so I'm probably displaying huge political ignorance here, but there are some things that have been puzzling me as I think about the issues involved in this election campaign.
As a country, we owe huge amounts of money; according to some of the panel on this week's question time the national debt amounts to the equivalent of £90,000 for each household in Britain, or £1.1 million for each day since the birth of Christ!
Whenever he's questioned about the financial mess we are in and the consequent need for public spending cuts and savings (the scale of which, many commentators say, are currently being hidden from the electorate by the three main parties) Gordon Brown rightly points out that we are in a global financial crisis which originated in America and affects the whole of the worldwide economy (as he did, for example, on tonight's interview with Jeremy Paxman).
But wasn't the global financial crisis originating in America originally referred to as a 'credit-crunch'? And didn't it largely consist of banks losing lots of money through dodgy investments (mainly in the sub-prime mortgage market) and in some cases going out of business, while those that remained batoned down the hatches and became extremely cagey about lending money to businesses? It wasn't about national debt.
So the huge debt we're saddled with is not directly connected to the global financial crisis - unless, of course, it was incurred as a result of the extremely costly bailouts that the government so generously undertook to prevent crucial businesses from going bust as a result of the worldwide crunch. But the recipients of those massive bailouts were, almost exclusively, the banks.
In which case, from whom did we borrow these vast sums needed to effect the bailout?
Presumably, from other banks! Ones that, clearly, weren't in such dire financial straits at the time. In which case, why couldn't the struggling banks have just borrowed the money directly from the financially healthy banks? Why did the government (and, ipso facto, the taxpayer) have to be involved at all? And anyway, if these apparently financially robust banks existed, why was it so crucial to the economy that the failing banks didn't go under? Okay, some bank customers might have lost their savings, but the government could far more easily have bailed those customers out rather than racking up huge debts getting the whole banking sector back up and running, fat salaries, hefty bonuses and all.
Anyway, like I said, these are probably stupid questions born of ignorance, but they've been puzzling me so I thought I might as well mention them.

Why I'm going to vote Lib Dem

I'm not particularly keen on the idea of voting for Gordon Brown's New Labour, but as a low paid worker in receipt of Working Families Tax Credits I don't trust the Tory party either, even with their new 'non-nasty' image. The obvious solution is to vote for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, but it would be nice if there were more choice available other than the big 2 and slightly less big 1. There are other parties of course, but a vote for one of the smaller parties would seem like a wasted vote as they have very little chance of electoral success under the current voting system.
But it's precisely because of this last point - the notion that to vote for a small party (ie. any party other than Labour or Conservative or apparently, now, the Lib Dems) is to waste one's vote - that I have decided to vote for the Liberal Democrats; not necessarily out of a desire to see that party form the next government but in the hope that, in the event of a hung parliament with the Lib Dems holding the balance of power, they will use that power to push for a system of Proportional Representation to be brought in for future general elections. I voted Lib Dems in 2005 for the same reason, only this time I think there is far more chance of this actually coming to fruition. The introduction of PR would completely change the nature of politics in this country and would break the stranglehold of Labour and Conservative, making room for those who dissent from the views of the major parties to have their own ideas and opinions taken seriously within the political arena.
In other words, people such as myself, who might, all things being equal, be inclined to vote for one of the smaller parties, should, in my opinion, give serious thought to refraining from voting for the natural party of their choice in this election and consider instead voting tactically in order to bring about what would be far more amenable circumstances for said party at the next general election. Call it an electoral investment, with a very worthwhile dividend to be reaped in 4 or 5 years time. A vote for the Liberal Democrats in 2010 could be the springboard for a far more meaningful vote for one of the smaller parties in a few years time.

Votematch

Three cheers for the 'Expenses Crisis'

Okay, so it turns out that most of our politicians are brazen chancers with their snouts well and truly buried in the taxpayer-funded trough - what a surprise that is! But far from being all doom and gloom for UK politics, there are actually some good things about the so called 'expenses crisis': for one thing, with the BBC's 'Question Time' moved to peak viewing hours and civic halls packed to the rafters for public meetings with constituency MPs, the British public have not been this animated by politics for decades! Admittedly there seems to be a Jerry Springeresque element to the masses' new found passion for politics - the thrill of venting righteous judgement on the low-life miscreant squirming on the public stage - but the fact that the issue of financial corruption and the waste of public money seems to have become so important to the British electorate can only be a good thing for democracy and for the idea of widespread political engagement. And for smaller parties the massive level of public contempt for the three main parties should also be a massive boost. But perhaps most important of all is the fact that the corruption has not been allowed to continue indefinitely and the public still have enough power that the politicians have had to sit up and take very serious note of public outrage. This says a great deal for our political system and indeed, the very fact of public outrage at the greed and underhandedness of many members of our political class is a healthy sign for our political culture; in many countries, the use by politicians of public money to feather their own nests is reluctantly accepted as a fact of life.
Finally, it's very reassuring to see one of the vital checks and balances of our political system in action and working extremely well - an institution without which the whole scandal would never have been brought to light in the first place; namely, the free press.

Regional devolution for England

In this post I will argue that the best solution to the so called 'West Lothian Question' (ie. the constitutional anomalies arising from the devolution settlement that was implemented in the UK in the late 1990s) is the adoption of a system of regional government for England.
As I commented in my first post on this blog, a parliamentary system of 'English Votes on English Laws' would introduce as many new problems as it solved by potentially creating a parliament within a parliament, with one party being in power in the larger body (the official UK parliament) and another holding the majority in the smaller entity (the de facto English parliament.
The establishment of an actual English Parliament could also lead to problems, as the population it served would be about five times the size of that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together and its geographical territory would also be larger than that of the others. The Unted Kingdom would have become a type of federation, with one of its members dwarfing (and thereby, very likely, dominating) the other three.
By giving powers to regional authorities (perhaps the same powers as the Welsh Assembly or even the same as the Scottish Parliament, with a Government and a First Minister for each region) not only would the 'West Lothian Problem' be solved but also the power of each citizen would have increased as government would have been brought that much closer to the people.
The main arguments that I have heard or read against regionalisation are (a) that it is undemocratic and would involve regional agencies appointed by central government, (b) that it would 'break up' England into a number of small administrative units, instead of having a unified national parliament like Scotland and (c) that it would create a situation whereby various parts of the UK are forced to compete with each other for favour or funds from central government.
Objection (a) has no bearing on my argument, as I am arguing for regional authorities which would be elected by the populations they serve and be accountable to their electorates (as well as being under the ultimate authority of the UK Parliament, which is itself, of course, accountable to the UK electorate).
As for objection (b), by bringing in regional government we would be in a situation where there was no overall government for England, but where all parts of the UK were subject to the ultimate authority of the UK Parliament. This is basically the situation all of the UK was in for almost 300 years until 1999 and most people in England didn't have a problem with the fact that there was no one political body representing England during that period. It is only the democratic anomalies resulting from devolution in Scotland and Wales that have led to the desire of some people for an English parliament as a way of addressing the perceived unfairness. With the democratic deficit resolved by powers similar to those of the Scottish Parliament being given to the English regions, I believe that any existing demand for an English parliament would fall away once again.
As for objection (c), that regional government would lead to competition for favour or funding from the UK Government, well, isn't that what already happens with local government? And don't different parts of England already compete for these things, anyway, through their elected representatives in the UK Parliament? Competition isn't necessarily always a bad thing anyway, and much of the problem could be resolved by giving the power to raise taxes to the Regional Parliaments, enabling them to be largely locally funded rather than having to get money from Westminster, although there would be a role for central government in guarding against any glaring regional inequalities and in helping to prevent the tendency of resources to be concentrated in and around London and the South East.
I'm not in favour of central government imposing regional devolution on the population of England against their will and I realise that the people of the North East overwhelmingly rejected the idea of regional government when John Prescott tried to sell the idea to them. However, I think the objections may have been in part to do with the fact that the form of regional government that New Labour were proposing involved taking powers away from local councils and also with the perception that this was another tier of politicians being imposed on people, with a concomitant burden of bureaucracy and taxation. In principle though, I see no reason why people might not be persuaded to support a truly democratic, fair and accountable system of regional government for England, with powers migrating downwards from central government towards the regional bodies, as a way of returning a sense of fairness to the UK constitution post devolution.