What we need is government by compromise and negotiation - Yorkshire Post Letters
From: Gareth Robson, Kent House Road, Beckenham.
Lord Blunkett’s essay (TYP, March 14) rejects the case for a better voting system for electing our MPs to the House of Commons. He suggests that the two-party system of the last 100 years would be replaced (under a more proportional system) by a two-block system (a right-wing grouping and a left-wing grouping) taking us back to square one.
His thinking is still trapped in the adversarial us-and-them mindset (reflected in the very structure of the House of Commons, an overgrown sixth-form debating club, in which the two sides sit facing each other on opposing benches).
What we need instead is government by compromise and negotiation between all the major strands of thinking which exist in our population. Laws are urgently needed in order to determine the process of forming a government after a general election - parties should be given cabinet seats in proportion to their share of the votes (for approximately 20 cabinet seats in government, each seat would need a party to have 5 per cent of the nationwide votes. Plus a guaranteed seat for the leader of the largest party in Scotland, Wales and the top two from Northern Ireland.
If tomorrow we had an election and the results turned out similar to the opinion polls this would mean a government balanced between Reform, Green and Labour (with perhaps a few rump Conservatives). Who would referee the resulting cabinet bun-fights? Well, until we have an elected head of state, it would have to be the king. Time for him to try to show us why he thinks he's worth keeping.
Oh and to accommodate this new consensus-style politics we should move them all out of the decaying Houses of Parliament, put most of the debates into written form, a few of them online, and for the set pieces like the state opening of parliament we could borrow large assembly buildings on rotation around the country. Get things away from London for once. Put the MPs back in their constituencies without having them festering at taxpayers' expense in ludicrously expensive private flats in London.
How sad that we don't hear any of these practicalities from the supposedly mould-breaking Reform - that's because they aren't interested in reforming the system, they just want to be the ones with their snouts in the trough instead of the current lot - and they also have sinister links with insane US think-tanks.
As to the choice of voting system - well we could implement the above laws right now, without needing to change the system; but if we do ever change then the AMS system as used in Scotland, Germany and New Zealand is a pretty good choice.
Simple enough that it can be explained in less than a minute; reasonably proportional; and a single named MP for each constituency as now. But above all, the big goal must be the way we construct the cabinet (ie the government) - consensus please, no more unlimited power for one side or the other to inflict its vandalism on the country for up to 18 years at a time.