You're doomed anyway you do it. You have to change the environment the parliament operates in - which means the ideological and media environment.
Not to mention that a larger "voting district" probably means you need more money for ads, flyers or election staff in an election.
And of course fewer MPs means that interest groups need to "influence" fewer people to advance their interests. Coupled with the larger " voting districts" mentioned above this seems to be a recipe for larger "interest group" influence.
Just look at the US Senate.
I think there is a place for some career politicians but we are totally overwhelmed by them at the moment.
If we have enough people who are in politics because they genuinely want to serve the public and they are motivated by their own experiences and personal insights of inequality, then maybe they stand a chance of not becoming totally institutionalised and removed from their experiences and those of others.
New ideas will come in if we get new people in - people who will be willing to find ways of persuading the public that messages from the 'Spirit Level' are the ones to listen to and act on, and not the continuing Thatcherite rhetoric. Ad astra per aspera
The problem is that they are 'trained' in quite a narrow way along the lines of a particular ideology and a particular way of working and after time, if personal experience or insight into the experiences of others doesn't show them other alternatives or consequences, then they get stuck in a narrow minded way of thinking. You need people outside of that arena to help influence the evolution of ideologies, the construction of social problems and their causes and from that the development of solutions that may actually work.
If politics consisted only of people who had nothing more than 'real life' to go on and no firm political training, that would be equally disasterous! Ad astra per aspera
I know plenty of talented civil servants, but some very obstructive (or just plain useless) ones too. The remit is different and it is up to politicians to choose how much they rely on the civil servants and how much they use their own brains to think through the issues and provide leadership. Ad astra per aspera
But one thing I have noticed with my Open University degree is that they are very progressive in the way they define issues and teach social policy. I imagine other courses could choose differing ideologies as a base for discussion and I have heard complaints from people who think the OU course is too 'left wing'. ie the examples used to critique different theories and perspectives and conclusions drawn within the structure of the course may differ depend on the leanings of the authors of the syllabus. Ad astra per aspera
Monoculture is bad, because it permits diseases to spread rapidly once they have adapted to the monoculture environment. This is doubly true for diseases of the mind, because they are being actively cultivated and weaponised and various belief tanks.
And, not to put too fine a point upon it, most university grads don't know shit about how things work (or not, as the case may be) for people who do not have the advantages bestowed upon academics.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
