Wednesday, February 10, 2010









Fair Votes-
Has Nick "Mini Me" Clegg made a big tactical blunder?

After weeks of careful positioning by Nick Clegg that his party were not in Labours pocket, last night the entire Liberal Democrat contingent filed through the voting lobby with Labour in a shabby attempt to alter the voting system.

The Liberal Democrats have sought a change to the voting system ever since they were formed but they want Proportional representation. The system proposed by Labour is in many ways the opposite, alternative vote has a tendency to exaggerate the advantage held by the winner, it would have given Labour even more seats in 1997 and 2001 than they already had, for instance.

As Mike Smithson, the Lib Dem blogger from PoliticalBetting.com puts it:

"The general presumption is that Labour hopes that Clegg and his party will now look at Labour more favourably in the unlikely event of a hung parliament. But hasn’t the aim been much more short-term than that?

For the form of what’s described as “electoral reform” that’s represented by AV is an abomination to the Lib Dems. It doesn’t deal with their main concern that the numbers of MPs each party gets should be in line with how the nation voted. In many way AV makes that worse"

Yet Cleggs party went along with the stunt - and apparently this is in the name of trying to repair public trust in politics!

Public anger at the expenses scandal is part of a deeper frustration with our whole political system.

Labour have had 13 years to mend our broken politics. But Gordon Brown is just not capable of doing it.

He has tried to block the publication of MPs’ expenses, he has dithered over reform and it took days of Conservative pressure to force him to take away the whip from three Labour MPs facing prosecution over expenses.

After avoiding a leadership election and bottling a general election, Gordon Brown is trying to fiddle the electoral system to save his own skin, it is as simple as that.

It’s clear he will say anything to cling on to power.

We can’t go on with five more years of Gordon Brown’s old politics. We need change and real reform of the political system.

An incoming Conservative Government will fix our broken politics with a sweeping redistribution of power: from the state to citizens; from the government to Parliament; from Whitehall to communities; from Brussels to Britain; from judges to the people; from bureaucracy to democracy. We will ensure that MPs can never use parliamentary privilege to evade justice, and reform lobbying laws so ex-ministers can’t use public resources for private gain.

To get real political change we need a change of government.

1 comment:

Richard Green said...

People were startled by the expenses furore but now they are fed up with the media re-hashing it time and time again. All it needs is for a set figure to be given to MP's and then told that is all you can have and if you need more because you have not used what you were given sensibly then it comes out of your pocket or you adjust your costs again. They should also be allowed to hire/pay relatives as apart from anything else there is more security of information within a family loyalty situation.