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My personal take is that the House of Lords needs no reform while MPs for the House of Commons should simply be selected by sortition. That would certainly make the Commons far more representative than what the present electoral system provides.

The Lords have no real power save to stall bills for a couple of sessions and quite frankly many of them are far more decent than the useless prats that get elected in the Commons. The Commons as is is a borish postribolo of ayesayers and bench warmers that have little else to do but write letters home and go into rut during question time.

GB is nothing more than an electoral dictatorship, a nation run by a first lord of the treasury with his old cronies while a fistful of vain arses pride themselves in being perfectly useless members of the good Queen's Cabinet.

by de Gondi (publiobestia aaaatttthotmaildaughtusual) on Wed Jun 27th, 2012 at 05:31:43 PM EST
a pungently accurate analysis!

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Wed Jun 27th, 2012 at 05:49:27 PM EST
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The difficulty is that members of the House of Commons, on the whole, think the system that elected them is perfect. There was little support amongst them for the recent AV proposal. A minor change to the method of election, which might have led to a small number of the existing MPs losing their seats, was unacceptable. Think how ferocious the opposition would be to sortition, which would mean all the existing members losing their places.
by Gary J on Wed Jun 27th, 2012 at 06:11:18 PM EST
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Sortition would do away with parties and their obsessive war chest intrigues. Any sort of representation is presently mediated by the health of the party kitty, certainly not those straggling few that show up to vote now and then.

Not to say that British politics is all very lively and puts on a good show for the media but once you've gotten past the cheesy grins it boils down to an amazing amount of power concentrated in very few mittens.

Sortition of course is never going to happen.

by de Gondi (publiobestia aaaatttthotmaildaughtusual) on Wed Jun 27th, 2012 at 06:45:42 PM EST
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