William Wallace: The system is broken... but our politics can work again

The combination of Britain's voting and constituency systems

nevertheless gave Labour a clear majority in Parliament – enabling it to appoint 150 ministers, whips and parliamentary private secretaries, so locking up nearly half of its MPs in government patronage.

As we've experienced, it's a system that promotes government by instant initiatives and media stunts, invites small-scale corruption and gives the Prime Minister even of an exhausted governing party the power to resist all attempts to remove him.

Worse than this, it has given us the most centralised government in the democratic world, in which ministers announce changes in local administration and teaching hours, while powerless MPs spend much of their time competing with local councillors in answering constituents' complaints.

Ministerial announcements are translated into new laws, without

effective parliamentary scrutiny. There have been 15 new Acts on law and order issues since 2005. One of these, in 2007, pushed local probation services into a National Offender Management Service, imposing major costs and strains in the reorganisation. Already the Commission on Prisons, chaired by Cherie Blair, has recommended its abolition as a failure.

The rate of turnover of both senior and junior ministers has risen to scarcely 12 months in any post – not enough time to learn one job

before a prime ministerial reshuffle pushes them on to the next. Ministries have themselves been repeatedly reorganised, at great expense and at real cost to the effectiveness of their work. The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, for example, was created for Peter Mandelson, just as the now-defunct Office of the Deputy Prime Minister ran large parts of local government to suit John Prescott. This is bad government, both wasteful and inefficient.

You might think that David Cameron would say about our political institutions what he says about our public services: "We can't go on like this."

Yet what we see in the small group who have captured the Conservative Party is very similar to the group that captured the Labour Party under Tony Blair: friends committed to gaining power, paying little attention to the members of their own party, raising money from wealthy Londoners and running a tightly-controlled campaign through the London-based

media.

I've heard an MP close to Cameron respond to a question about how to persuade party members to accept the new "liberal conservatism" with the dismissive comment: "You needn't worry about the Conservative Party. We've taken it over."

The A-list of approved parliamentary candidates that has been forced on to target constituency parties takes political centralisation further. No longer can good local councillors, or bright local activists, hope to graduate to the Conservative benches at Westminster. Their place is being taken by people the leadership likes, trusts, and parachutes into seats. Yorkshire has suffered this from Labour already: our current MPs include as many former Islington councillors, ex-parliamentary advisers to Blair or Brown, as it has Labour MPs who are rooted in the region. A Cameron government would behave very much like the first Blair government: young men in a hurry, determined to push through their preferences fast, enjoying to the full the limelight of media attention and unconstrained executive power. So Britain would go on as before, with the same style of overactive centralised government, this time dominated by a southern English bias.. The majority of Cameron's Shadow Cabinet represent the rural counties and suburbs of the South-East. Not one sits for a city constituency; William Hague is the only

representative from Yorkshire and the North-East.

This is why Liberal Democrats insist that political reform is not a boring or unimportant issue. It's central to effective government, and to rebuilding popular trust in government. We will use whatever

influence we have after the election to limit the power of any clique to dominate British politics, to strengthen parliament against the Prime Minister, and to strengthen local government against central control. Slower government would make for better government: fewer initiatives, fewer reorganisations, fewer ambitious career ministers jumping from one post to another every few months.

Can you imagine what British politics would be like if ministers had to persuade Parliament, rather than drive proposals through by patronage and whips?

Can you imagine how much better we would be governed if we moved away from instant initiatives timed to catch the evening headlines, towards more considered discussion and debate before each important decision?

Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister, recently said that as the leader of a minority administration he has to govern through "the strength of persuasion, rather than the persuasion of strength". Brown, it is clear, can only bully his opponents into submission. Could others learn to govern in a different, more open and democratic, style?

Lord Wallace of Saltaire is a Lib Dem peer.