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ONE LEGGED, LEFT HANDED, GINGER HAIRED,
SHORT SIGHTED, SYNDROME

Where did this idea that you have to have 'a bit of everything to make it fair' originate?

It cannot be achieved nor could it be USEFULLY applied if it were. Government requires individuals of the highest order of honour, integrity, competence and awareness of human failings - ESPECIALLY THEIR OWN, regardless of other specification.

What MIchael describes above, is typical Westminster window dressing; being seen to do, while doing nothing of substance.
You can add women, ethnics, the young, the old and any other denomination you care to. IF THEY ALL CONFORM TO THE CURRENT WESTMINSTER PARTY GAMES, NOTHING FUNDAMENTAL WILL CHANGE.

Damn - somebody has moved my deckchair.

Hello Michael.
Perhaps someone will mention the almost total absence of discussion of PR, since the advent of the BNP, presumably because the introduction of any of the various systems, would see the BNP well-represented in Parliament.
At what point do you think the political and media establishment will condescend to mention a 'streets-up' political party which now polls between 3% and 35% in local elections? Or will they wait until it's forced on them, with accompanying difficult questions? In the last local by-election of which I'm aware, the BNP polled 12.9%, in a ward where the skint and demoralised Govt. party failed to field a candidate.
I remember that you were very fair in mentioning pro-BNP comment on the street at Crewe and Nantwich, and it would be nice if the party was mentioned in this context.
Anyway, best from Grumpy Jon.

Re #1. For once Barrie, felt you a little harsh there; but MC can only commentate on what is (for me anyway) a failing and intentionally unresponsive system.
Anyway, cheers for the name-check in the first 2 lines.

Words like 'fair' or 'proportions' belong to geometry not politics.


such material relativists believe The Idea of the Good is to be found in racial colour, in class background, in age, in a hundred other contradictory criteria. The single biggest problem people have with the idea of the Good is their false beliefs about it.


in this case they believe just government comes from merely its composition. Which is clearly ludicrous. Does one choose a ships crew merely on racial/male/female/skin colour/age etc? Or surgeons on the same basis? or any other skilled art? No.

So why do they believe that? Where are these false beliefs coming from?

It comes from denying there is anything in existence called 'The Good'. Parmenides, a teacher of Socrates, demonstrates and predicts such false beliefs from anyone who denies the idea of 'The Good' in his 9 Hypothesis.

Have you looked at the general level of "manual jobs" available and how that has changed?
You aren't going to have many ex-miners as MPs in the future as we don't have many miners these days.

The type of MP that concerns me is those who have only ever had experience of a politically based job. Ex-journalists who focussed on economics or politics, former researchers for MPs, lobbiests, NGO workers, think-tank members. Those who have little experience outside of politics. They seem to proliferate at the top of both our major parties.

I wonder if the decrease in those who have had "manual jobs" reflects the decrease in those who've had none political jobs.

PARTY GAMES (A rider to #5)

With you all the way Count. Worth pointing out that the Party System wherein voters vote for a rosette on a rosette-stand OF PARTY PRE-CHOOSING, is the key to this situation. Parties want party fodder. Their primary concern is continued power even at the price of poor quality MPs.
SPOIL PARTY GAMES.

It should really be very simple. The party should field the candidate who is most likely to win the seat and the electorate should elect the candidate who best represents the constituency. The age, colour, sexual orientation or work background should be irrelevant. I strongly believe in the right of everyone to participate in the democratic process but I also believe that the best person should ultimately succeed regardless of any of the above. Positive discrimination mitigates against this every bit as much as negative discrimination.

Anyone who has the guts to stand on a platform that political correctness is the most insidious evil of modern times will receive my strongest support - especially if the point is made that the really important question is how we elect them. So I am with #2 - grumpy-jon. PR is a debate worth having, PC is merely a side-show.

"HE SAID HE IS NO' AFRAID" (Miliband D. on Putin)

What are we to make of a man, elevated to Foreign Secretary, who flies to another country to loftily berate a third, yet persists in the childish imitation of Blair's affected speech pattern? If he is so suggestible, in what other, more worrying ways, might he be influenced - and by whom? Should we really be comfortable with strangely motivated and afflicted personalities in senior governmental positions? There are several others who ape the 'Blair Glottal' and Gordon's fingernails are telling. While these far-from-ideal functionaries run British government (and have the gall to point accusingly at Putin's foibles) is it any wonder we are depressed, boozy and broke, with worse to come?

Why lump women and ethnics all in the same 'other' box? What a cheek!

How about , for starters, the fact that almost all ethnic groups that have come to the UK are more oppressive to women than the UK norms (We don't have a lot of Scandinavians here and just about everywhere else in the world is worse than here). So incoming cultures are, quite generally, backward in women's rights.

One dodgy thing about lumping all the 'others' - minorities - together, is that women are actually a majority.

And a common result of doing this is that you finish up with a token ethnic women, to take care of both. But that completely eliminates British women.

I note the push in Tower Hamlets to recruit ethnic magistrates. Well, as a woman, I certainly wouldn't want to come up in front of a Moslem male magistrate. They cant sort out women's rights in their own culture - I dont want that rubbish put on me.

And similarly what sort of representation would a Moslem man give me in Parliament? About as good as Galloway, whose bread is buttered by the Moslem vote, so he is as good (bad) as.

Women will only get in when men stand aside, so stop talking, Cameron, and move over.

But ethnic representatives should not be deliberately put in, if they drag things backwards socially. Where's the progress in that?

Unfortunately, for all this talk, the makeup of Parliament will be dependent on area populations, and some areas cannot now, in terms of voter numbers as a result of strategic concentrations, go any other way.

What a stupid thread. By a long way, Westmidden has the least democratic system in the EU and you worry about how ethnically and sexually diverse it is rather than how undemocratic?

Why on earth not let the electorate decide who they want to vote for and introduce STV so that they have some chance of being represented? Why have a GBP 500 deposit as a barrier instead of having a set number of proposers?

In any event, so long as the quasi-democratic 1872 plurality voting system lasts it will be the big parties who choose the mix of the MPs not the people.

Michael,

Forget women. Sisters are doing it for themselves. This is an old flogged issue 20 years past its sell-by-date. Why not raise husbands rights instead?

If you'd like to raise a REAL big current issue about under representation at the 'love-in of luvvies' at The Hansard Society raise the issue of smoking.

Approx. 10-12m people smoke (1 in 4-5 of the adult population). They're rights were removed in a 3 hour 'debate' (the foxes got over 30 hours) against a 70% public survey against an all-out ban.

This is a new apartheid. A new social exclusion based on the junk science pushed by extremist minority groups that passive smoke is a danger to public health (it isn't).

The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ (and media) have totally failed to give voice to smokers rights for over a year and Labour recently ignored their plight and that of the Pub trade at the 1 Year review last month.

If you want to address real gritty issues take up this issue with your philisophical fancies.

No, don't forget women, and this isn't a stupid thread. Well done, stayingcool. You are quite right: we are a majority not a minority.

South African apartheid, which denied their rights to black people, was rightly condemned by the world, and pressure was brought to bear on the regime by sanctions, etc. Countries and creeds which deny their rights to women face no such sanctions - why not?

.

I wouldn't describe the thread as "stupid" "strange" would be a better description.

Within the weird UK Parliamentary system, MPs only matter in selecting the PM, and keeping him/her in power.

Thereafter, with no effective checks and balances the PM, using the Royal Prerogative and Parliamentary Sovereignty, does what s/he wants. Elected on a minority of the vote, the successful party leader then claims a "mandate" to shove through whatever ill thought out policies, their personal advisers have dreamed up.

It doesn't matter what the characteristics of an individual MP are, they are largely ciphers.

#13 oldnat

Yes, "strange" fits the bill better - I should have engaged brain before fingers in my #10.

But the Marquess of Salisbury's Tories did get 50.3% of the popular vote in 1900, and it might just happen again in the next century or two.

I am steadfastly for PR despite the view that it would give some people like the BNP a voice. The kind of comment that the BNP would be well represented under PR is however baseless. This is the kind of comment similar to "the BNP website gets more hits than all of the other parties put together". Hence they will win the next general election and won't be shunned as their councillors are as pariahs.

The Searchlight website has it right:

""...we explain why the BNP are the same old nazis they always were. We broadcast a video, shot only four years ago, which shows leading BNP officials singing racist songs and giving a Nazi salute. We reveal the nazi and terrorist links of the BNP leadership and we explain, in the "Us and Them" section, just why the BNP does not stand in the great British tradition of tolerance, equality and compassion.

In a new section, we also reveal the nazi links of BNP leader Nick Griffin.

The BNP is dedicated to imposing apartheid-style rule in Britain. It wants to create a system that is based on the nonsense that white people are superior to all others. Black and Asian people would become second-class citizens under the law. "

So because only one Lib Dem MP comes from a background in manual labour, they no longer believe in a PR electoral system. Michael, I am a big fan of your work, but that is utter nonsense.

The 'democratic' system we have in Britain is flawed in so many ways that I don't really believe it can be called democratic. Politicians from the main two parties are scared stiff of doing ANYTHING with our electoral system, and despite any of the rhetoric, they simply can't claim to believe in democracy.

Apathy among voters will just continue to get worse, when we don't even have an electoral system that barely resembles a democracy. Ok, there are lots of problems with British politics, but the fact that we don't even have a proper democratic process and many of our politicians don't even give a damn is by far the worst.

#15 thegangofone
I agree that the BNP won't be in government anytime soon even with PR, and most PR systems put fairly high hurdles against "small" parties.

The trouble is that society is already so discriminatory in many ways (and NuLab want to make it more so) that it's difficult to use the law against them without offending some other group.

#16 NickThornsby
Good post. This thread is simply trying to divert attention to the real problems of our Buggins' turn "system". Mind you, the way the polls are going for NuLab we may be on the verge of a Tory one-party state, at least for Westmidden. Another triumph for the "mother of parliaments".

I have nothing to do with the BNP, but the distraction concerns me.

The BNP haven't killed thousands of Iraqis. That has been the Labour Party, supported by the Tories.

The BNP is not going to zoom into government, and inflict their policies. (The Tories probably are!)

When people propose extreme action about 'getting rid' of a party in a supposed democratic system, I wonder - are they talking about the core official party? or everyone who votes for them? or what? Somewhat Fascist?

Surely the question for anyone with at least half a brain is not 'how to get rid of the BNP' (whoever they are), but why people are (increasingly?) voting in that direction, even when they know there is some dodgy stuff in there. What are their concerns, which no one else is listening to, that are forcing them in that direction? Dont they matter?

For people who claim to be on the Left - these are working class people generally. So denigrate them and what do you support?

For me, the 'far right' is transnational capital which, in case you hadn't noticed, LOVES cheap labour migration undercutting working conditions, lobbies for it, and gets its own way - well supported by the 'Lets all go fight the BNP cos everything else is too difficult ' mob.

These are my Left political perspectives.