Socially-distanced Parliament offers chance to shake up our voting system

From: John Riseley, Harcourt Drive, Harrogate.

THE prospect of votes in Parliament being cast remotely and registered and counted electronically (to facilitate social distancing) lifts one psychological barrier to a novel form of Proportional Representation.

In conventional PR we would vote for a political party which is then awarded a number of seats in proportion to its share of the votes. The party allocates those seats to its preferred candidates.

In the novel form we could vote, just as now, for an individual candidate appearing on the ballot paper for our local constituency. On this ballot paper, we would have the alternative of writing in the reference number for a candidate from a nationwide list.

Candidates would then have a vote in Parliament weighted according to the number of votes they themselves received. This weighting, cumbersome if performed manually, becomes seamless when the system is already digital. Potentially, all candidates could then participate in parliamentary votes.

If thought necessary, a threshold could be set for having this right, though this might involve the complication of allowing voters to select a backup candidate in case their first choice doesn’t reach the threshold.

Alternately, a deposit could be taken (as now) and partly or fully refunded depending on how many up to a set number of votes the candidate receives. The deposit would, in effect, double as a fee for the vanity of being self-representing in Parliament. The highest polling candidate in each constituency would, as now, hold the title of MP for that constituency. Other candidates with a correspondingly high tally of votes would be titled MP but without a constituency designation.

Other thresholds would define eligibility for various levels of salary (down to none) and for being admitted to Parliament unconditionally or on a weighted lottery basis, with those not present able to vote remotely.

The system would achieve the virtues of PR without making the parties monolithic.

From; Peter Rickaby, Selby.

Hearing in Parliament Anneliese Dodds, Labour’s newly appointed Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer (whose ideology is state control) advise a capitalist Chancellor of the Exchequer (Rishi Sunak) on how best to support private enterprise was a kaleidoscope of economic ignorance.

Labour still has a lot to learn about financial prudence.

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