A typhoon is blowing through government

In the latter part of the 19th century, our legislators realised that government was seriously lagging the monumental changes to the Britain outside SW1. Britain had revolutionised but government was stuck in the past. Actually it was originally, from 1858, just SW. That postal coding in itself was one of the tsunami of reforms, legislative clearing-out, organising and administrative innovations that brought Whitehall into line with a world of trains, post, telegraphs, new towns and cities and the popular press. It all meant that the cobwebs of governance that had accumulated through centuries had to be swept away. The Palace of Westminster itself was rebuilt, and a rank of grand new Portland stone facades hubristic with Imperial pride thrust their chests out onto Whitehall. That's the scale of change it felt like yesterday - no wonder Corbyn looked so glum! Momentum is now definitely owned by the Conservatives (sorry, Owen) and when the great flywheel of state reaches speed, inertial forces will take the nation forward with stunning power. This session of Parliament may last little more than a year - by the Spring of 2021 the government aims to have enacted

• European Union Withdrawal Bill
• Agriculture Bill
• Fisheries Bill
• Trade Bill
• Immigration Bill
• NHS Funding Bill and NHS Long Term Plan
• Medicines and Medical Devices Bill
• Health Service Safety Investigations Bill
• Social Care Reform
• Education reform
• Broadband legislation
• Air Traffic Management and Unmanned Aircraft Bill
• Airline insolvency legislation
• Railways minimum service legislation
• Rail reform and High Speed Rail 2 (West Midlands - Crewe) Bill
• National Security and Investment Bill
• Science, space and research framework
• English devolution
• Employment Bill
• Housing and renters legislation
• Building and fire safety legislation
• Crackdown on terrorists
• Sentencing reform
• Serious violence measures
• Online Harms Bill
• Police powers
• Helen’s law
• Domestic abuse and divorce reform
• Extradition, foreign offenders and espionage legislation
• Victims’ law and Royal Commission
• Environment and animal welfare bill
• Climate change Bill
• Constitutional reform
• Armed forces maintenance

That's quite some programme.

Only one face looked less than ecstatic on the government benches - JRM. He looked in fact as though he'd been given advance warning that he was unlikely to survive on the Treasury bench beyond the February big Cabinet reshuffle. Or perhaps he was merely confused by all the novel regional voices behind him, some of which he could not perhaps quite understand.

Democratic reform and renewal

This follows on from the previous post. Today we have the prospect of the cerebrally inadequate John Major making an appearance in court - though not speaking - for his 12.10 to 12.30 slot. One hopes Lord Garnier, who represents this most mediocre of intellects, has made some substance of his simple-minded bigotry or we will be bored to tears.

European nations as we know them are, constitutionally, mostly infants. As I have written before, by the end of the 14th century in England (and I mean England and not the UK) serfdom had almost practically ceased to exist, the wage labourer having emerged from the Black Death. By the end of the 16th we had an independent and prosperous middle class and were developing systems of law and democracy from which we would emerge through the turmoil of the 17th to the era termed by historians 'early modern'. In contrast, serfdom and feudalism survived in Europe until the mid-19th century, and Europe's birth-pangs took a century or more of war and chaos before democracy (of a sort) emerged. Yes, they have written constitutions - but in English terms, are barely out of nappies;

Date of Constitution
Sweden	1974
Denmark	1953
France	1958
Germany	1949
Italy	1947
Spain	1978
Portugal	1976

For most of Europe, the Maastrict and Lisbon treaties - in effect the EU constitution - are just a natural progression from what are already new systems of governance.

Not so for the UK, though as commenters made clear yesterday, Brexit has exposed major faults in our system which now needs some fixing. The Lords and the Speaker are the most obvious. Allister Heath in the Telegraph does a decent job this morning of setting out the Heads of Terms -

.... the next government will have to legislate to prevent MPs from ever “seizing control” again and then repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. The power to conduct international treaty negotiations must be left solely to the executive; at the same time, the ability to prorogue needs to be codified, alongside much else.

The governance of the Commons must change radically, with the Speaker bound by clear rules. Any MP who wants to change party should be forced to call a by-election.* The House of Lords will have to be scrapped or, preferably, comprehensively reformed, with a debate about who should belong to it and what proportion should be elected and how. An English Parliament is long overdue, with tax and spend genuinely devolved to a properly federalised United Kingdom.

The civil service is in desperate need of an overhaul: ministers should become CEOs, with staff working directly for them. In a world where special advisers have become so important, we ought to discuss whether more ministers should be directly appointed, or belong to the upper rather than lower chamber.

The next government must take to heart Lord Sumption’s Reith Lecture, perhaps the best political analysis of the year, and row back on the "rights culture". There has been too much mission creep, and too many decisions have been taken by the courts, rather than left to democratically elected politicians. This doesn’t mean that we mustn’t continue to protect rights: on the contrary, I would argue that we need a robust British Bill of Rights to replace our membership of the ECHR.

Add a general power of recall with a threshold high enough to prevent vexatious abuse and an overhaul of local government and electoral health measures and there you have a legislative agenda for the greatest reforming Parliament for over 150 years.

I hope and believe we can do all this without a written constitution. Just as statute law sits happily alongside common law and precedent, we can achieve change without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As Blair found to his frustration and chagrin, you cannot abolish the Lord Chancellor.

It's really no longer just about Brexit. It's about re-forging our nation for the benefit of future generations, a legacy of love. 

*Allister is thoroughly wrong about this particular point; MPs represent their constituents, not their parties. It's the constituents who should have the right to force a by-election, not the judges. A power of recall would cover this.  

The Post-globalist Capitalist revolution is coming

Back in 1910, I'm quite sure, the equivalent of the political adviser was penning essays on the ways in which London could deal with the disposal of horse-dung; no doubt special rail sidings, dung-trains and dung-mountains beyond the suburbs were involved in options to clear the stables and streets of horseapples, designed so that by 1940 London would remain clear of millions of tons of equine product. So mired were they in a world of exponentially increasing horse-traffic in London they became deaf to the noise of the motor-car, blind to the cinema and the early aircraft in the skies. 

I was reminded of these early dung-managers when reading a piece on Conservative Home by Nick Hargrave, former Number 10 SPAD who made policy for both David Cameron and Theresa May. More State, more Spending, more Spin and more Tax are Hargrave's recommendations - thus exhibiting an almost wilful blindness to the reality of the world today, taking refuge in the comfortable horse-dung of an imagination limited to the past. Hargrave is unaware that without radical change there will be by 2040 neither a Welfare State nor an NHS in the UK.

From 1971 onwards, when the effects of Bretton Woods in managing national competitive advantage by regulating national capital flows were removed, globalism in place of international trade became possible. During the past twenty years globalism has been in the ascendant, as Daly wrote in 1999

The classical economists like Ricardo, were nationalists, and that is why they were so devoted to comparative advantage. We are presumably beyond that now. We are cosmopolitan individualists on a global scale, interested in maximizing global product. Comparative advantage, because of its premised constraint on capital mobility, does not maximize global product. But absolute advantage, by relaxing that constraint, does. We are simply not interested in the national distribution of gains and losses from global trade.

That neglect of the distributional effects has given us the Elephant - global gainers including the people of India, Vietnam and particularly China, and global losers including a vast mass of middle and working class citizens in the developed world, who have lost income, status and job security in a period of rapid change in which the balance towards fairness and social cohesion built by a century or more of painfully-wrought agreements on the relationship between Labour and Capital have been junked, skipped and disregarded. The real gainers are the global 1%, whose wealth and income has increased exponentially.

The biggest myth is perhaps that global markets are free markets. They are not. The global corporates use market power, intellectual property and trademark rights, data power and the de facto granting of 'knowledge' monopolies by state actors. Supranational authority that imposes systems of regulation and over-regulation that favour the oligopolistic globals - whether the EU or the UN - at the expense of non-global competition is an ally of globalistic advantage.

The harmonisation of standards through bodies such as the EU and UN is also paradoxically of national disbenefit to the developed world, as Daly explains

When different national markets with different rules for the internalization of external costs merge into a single market, then the different rules of cost accounting present a big problem. Under globalization the market left to itself will resolve the difficulty by standards-lowering competition -- the way of counting costs that results in the cheapest product will prevail......

Under the traditional comparative advantage (internationalist as opposed to globalist) regime, each country could indeed adopt its own separate rules of cost-accounting, reflecting its own values and traditions, and not worry about harmonization. As long as capital must stay at home countries are not forced into a standards-lowering competition to attract and keep capital. Goods and services can be produced and freely traded according to comparative advantage even when trading partners have totally different ways of measuring costs.

I don't want to get mired in theory about globalism. The reality is that if we have not as yet reached Peak Globalism then we are fast approaching it; Trump, Brexit, the Gilets jaunes, Italy and the fast-approaching Eurozone recession are already with us. The reactions and anticipation of outcomes will increasingly define political alignments - I can detect a coalescing of opinion around several divergent standards

Progressives 
Those looking to help design the successor to globalism; Internationalists, Localists, committed to democratic outcomes and social equity. Radical reform of tax and welfare systems, renewal of political identities, utilising capitalism to generate wealth but in control of its effects, recognition of the deep and fundamental changes that AI and technology will bring, committed to achieving a Durkheimian social integrity and coherence in contrast to a globalist anomie

Primitives
Those committed to global government, a world-wide constitution and harmonisation of everything, open borders, unrestricted global economic activity, worldwide legal, judicial and justice systems, abrogation of personal freedoms to a class of benign appointed experts who will act in the general good, the growth of the 'citizen of everywhere', the rule of benign technocracy over 'old fashioned' democracy, the supremacy of supranational State authority.

Philistines 
Those of all political colours in denial that massive change is underway; the managers of horse-dung, political nostalgics, the patrician elite and the dags of globalism, neo-liberals, the political class and the old fourth estate, all those threatened by what they term 'populism', the 1% and the winners from globalism who just want everything to stay the same. Plus the naive zealots - those who believe that anthropogenicmorphic global warming / Moslem immigrants / 12 foot alien lizards / secret Zionist conspiracies / American hegemony and suchlike are actually responsible for what's happening.

Change is coming. We need people of vision and ability, not managers of yesterdays horse dung.

Reform and renewal - new forms of democracy

In the days following the 2016 referendum result, I posted the meme below on Twitter. It reflected the shocked reaction of the political establishment that we had not done as we were told, despite them having spent twice as much as the 'Leave' side on campaigning. It was meant as a joke - but too many on the establishment side have taken it as received wisdom. Leavers are too ill-educated, too ill-informed, too plain stupid to be entrusted with a vote on a matter as complex as EU membership - we've heard that so many times in so many variations not to understand that they actually believe it. 

Our system of representative democracy allows us to elect MPs and Councillors as representatives, not as delegates. Our representatives are independent. Parliament is supreme. Our strength comes from having universal suffrage, the secret ballot and the right to associate and campaign for political change. There's a saying that hard cases make bad law; using the Brexit mess to force changes to an essentially sound democratic system would be a mistake. Nonetheless, there are moves on both sides to do so. 

We have already looked at options to strengthen Parliament in holding the government to account, and as uncomfortable as it seems, the protracted Brexit approval process is actually an effective Parliament in action. Let's then look at the main contenders to augment or replace our current system of representative democracy

Deliberative Democracy
This is the favourite of the Remain side, who think that voters in their natural state are not fit to make important decisions. The schemes on offer vary, but all involve some sort of 'sortition' - the use of a voters' panel, a bit like Blair's focus groups, to make decisions on behalf of the rest of us. But only of course after being lectured by experts on the right choice to make. The experts would be neutral in the same way that the BBC is neutral. 

To me, this all sounds too much like the pointless design Charettes I have encountered. The architect generally conducts them to convince planners / clients that his or her ideas have community support. They involve the architect talking to a room of people for a very long time with tons of slides and display boards and then asking them at the end which shade of Farringdon Grey, of the three offered, they would like as a finish to the front door?

Direct Democracy
This is essentially about referendums. Referenda are valuable democratic tools that can engage the attention of the public in deciding important matters that have a binary choice. The Swiss in particular use them at all three administrative levels, national, cantonal and municipal. Swiss electors can challenge new Acts of Parliament in two ways, either by gathering 50,000 signatures out of 5.4m registered voters (0.93% - equal to about 420,000 signatures in the UK) or by 8 Cantons protesting. However, referenda in Switzerland - which I think work well -  are clearly intended to augment and scrutinise the normal system of representative democracy, not to replace it. The political power able to be exercised by the people is enhanced, not transformed. 

I really cannot imagine that a constant process of referenda on every matter that must be decided by local authorities is in any way feasible. School admission arrangements, planning consent for a chip shop, capital expenditure approval for a new public lavatory. A dozen referenda a week. You simply can't replace Councillors and a system of representative democracy by anything that doesn't degrade and lessen our democratic power. 

Referism
This is Richard North's idea for an annual, national referendum on the government budget. He's right in seeing that a government can't function without money - taxes - and wants to move the approval of that money from Parliament to the people. 

Simply, my problem with this is that the budget cannot be a simple binary choice. Only binary choices are referendable (if there's such a word). Public expenditure is too complex and priorities too personal to make this a helpful or constructive option. 

Power of Recall
Brexit has brought to the fore the problems of a Parliament based on representative democracy now we have moved to fixed-term Parliaments. Many constituencies are now faced with representatives in Parliament who vote precisely the opposite way to the majority of their electors, and there's nothing that voters can do about it for five years.

When I think of the options, I think about capital punishment, to which I am personally deeply opposed, but which I know would probably be approved by a national majority. MPs, as representatives, have consistently acted in opposition to the national mood in banning it. However, the bar would need to be high to enable a constituency's voters to unseat their MP on such a difference of opinion. 

On balance, I favour a Power of Recall, on the simple basis that 'The voters of xxxxxxx have lost confidence in the ability of xxxxxxxxxxxx to represent the constituency in Parliament'  BUT with a high enough bar to exclude vexatious motions.

Internet voting
Those of you reading this will by definition be part of a group able to use the internet to access democratic options and make choices. As a way of augmenting our fundamental democratic rights, the internet is invaluable. However, to extend it to replacing those rights is simply not possible. On just the matter of the secret ballot, how do you ensure secrecy in a household with just one computer? Or how, as a member of such a household, can someone explain that they want to walk down to the local primary school to cast a secret vote rather than click an on-screen box with the rest of the family? Think Tower Hamlets. 

Finally, the Power Inquiry pleads for the nations'  Electoral Quotients to be brought into line with the minimum standard for developed nations of + / - 5%. This was a problem in 2004, and it's still a problem. The nation has been here before; there was a time at which Oxford University elected two MPs but not a single one was returned by the whole of a newly-industrialised and vastly grown Manchester. The problem is the Labour Party - the Oxford University of the 21st Century - which will simply not relinquish its corrupt and anti-democratic seats. In its refusal to do so it insults British voters and degrades our democratic institutions. 

Recommendation 21: Text voting or email voting should only be considered following other reform of our democratic arrangements.

Recommendation 22: The realignment of constituency boundaries should be accelerated.

Reform and Renewal - party funding

Two more posts to finish this re-examination of the 2004 Power Inquiry, then back to real-time. Today, Party funding. Tomorrow, new forms of democracy.

I think sometime around 2010 - 2012 was the nadir for UK party memberships, the total number of members combined for the three largest parties having fallen below 1% of the UK electorate. Fewer than 450,000 members between them. With Labour dependent on Trade Union money, and the Conservatives dependent on wealthy donors, we looked as if we heading for a political duopoly of two central, Statist, metropolitan parties with money but no members. The Lib Dems were already in trouble, and paradoxically had depended on the state funding they got as an opposition party. From 2010, in coalition, they would actually be worse off, though party luminaries with their bottoms in government such as Vince Cable got a chauffeured Jag as a consolation prize. 

From 2007, first under Hayden Phillips then under Christopher Kelly in 2011, the political establishment - the grey men who really run the central state - sought a way to nationalise the two traditional parties, to convert them from democratic concerns run by their members into quasi-constitutional organisations. They could see clouds on the horizon; for Labour, a grassroots groundswell out of tune with the corrupt fraternity of fat officials, elsewhere the rise of UKIP, signs of dissatisfaction and a potential populist uprising. Both Phillips and Kelly pushed the same deal; a cap on both Union donations and large private bungs, and in place of those a State subsidy of up to £3 per year per vote won in the previous GE, provided the party had at least 1 MP in the Commons. It was a clever way to institutionalise incumbency - only Labour, the Conservatives and the LibDems would be effectively funded, and they would be secured for ever as the semi-official Parties of State. It's the job of the grey men - a self-appointed task - to create what they see as political stability. And bugger democracy. 

The Irony of course is that had the original Phillips / Kelly proposals gone through in time for the 2015 election, UKIP would have gained State funding of £12m a year - Douglas Carswell's defection in 2014 providing the single critical sitting MP to qualify. The final published version raised the bar to two sitting MPs.

However, things don't stand still in politics. The insurgency feared by the grey men is happening, Parliament is in turmoil and critically unstable, Labour has increased its membership to around 550,000 whilst the Conservatives and LibDems level-peg with about 120,000 each. The battleground has shifted to social media, the role of the printed press in kingmaking has become marginalised and circulations are crashing. 

It is not a good time for the central State establishment to relaunch State funding for a third try. 

I wrote to Kelly in support of Recommendation 20 from 'Power' in place of his own blatantly unbalanced suggestion. They rejected 'Power' on the grounds that having two forms / two votes in the polling booth would be too complex for most voters. This after the 2004 elections in which most voters in London had coped with three forms for five votes (first and second preference) for Mayoral, Assembly and Euro elections. 

I still think Recommendation 20 is the best and fairest suggestion if there is to be any State funding; it allows those opposed to public funding to withhold their £3 a year, and for voters to vote for one party whilst granting money to another. It achieves in other words exactly the opposite of what the grey men want to achieve.

Recommendation 19: Donations from individuals to parties should be capped at £10,000, and organisational donations should be capped at £100 per member and subject to full democratic scrutiny within the organisation.

Recommendation 20: State funding to support local activity by political parties and independent candidates to be introduced based on allocation of individual voter vouchers. This would mean that at a general election a voter would be able to tick a box allocating a £3 donation per year from public funds to a party of his or her choice to be used by that party for local activity. It would be open to the voter to make the donation to a party other than the one they have just voted for.

Reform and Renewal - Voting

This is the section of the Power Inquiry that gives me the greatest problems. In the 2015 GE, UKIP came in third, with 3.89m votes, 12.6% of the votes cast, and won not a single seat. The injustice of this was felt not only by the millions who had voted for the party - including me - but many non-voters and supporters of other parties. It seemed an incredible outcome to those in other nations, but was just one of the anomalies of the First Past the Post system in the UK. However, the shock of that 2015 result catalysed Cameron into enabling the 2016 referendum - so UKIP actually won it for us, after all.

And it's not as if the voters of Britain didn't have a chance to change it; a referendum in 2011 proposed going over to an Alternative Vote system. It was defeated 68% to 32%. And coincidentally also has its own 'Remainer' movement in the Electoral Reform Society; the majority against AV in 2011 didn't dent their commitment one iota, and they campaign today as though the vote had never happened. 

Recommendation 12 was about a change to a Single Transferable Vote system, and was overtaken by this poll seven years after Power was published. 

Recommendation 13 would prevent national parties from parachuting candidates into constituencies to receive safe party-based votes - and thus would reduce central Party power and increase local power. Why wouldn't we support it?

Recommendation 15 is an early example of virtue-signalling. Yes, we can all agree that the Commons should better reflect our wider society; cohorts of chums from the top public schools, of men and women who have never had a real job other than politics in their lives, of self-selecting self-servers and narcissists who want to be MPs for what it can gain them are all shiny arses we would want reduced as far as possible from the Commons chamber. But more important than colour or gender (silly, superficial and irrelevant characteristics) we should encourage more men and women of virtue, humility, talent, altruism, passion and ability to enter parliament. These are the qualities most obviously lacking in the present make-up. 

Recommendation 16 is about reducing voter age. Its effect would be to create a more credulous voter base, one less capable of balanced judgement and one more likely to be swayed by unicorn promises. Why would we want to do that?

Finally, since the report was published in 2004, we have made great strides in clearing-up a corrupt and third-world standard voter registry. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky estimated that before the changes, there were 3m on the electoral rolls who should not have been there and 3m missing who should have been. IVR and stricter controls for postal voter identity, together with voter ID at elections, should be very effective in restoring the probity of the national electoral register to first-world standards. We should do nothing that would degrade the probity of the register.     

Recommendation 12: A responsive electoral system should be introduced for elections to the House of Commons, House of Lords and local councils in England and Wales.
Recommendation 13: The closed list system to have no place in modern elections.
Recommendation 14: The system whereby candidates have to pay a deposit which is lost if their votes fall below a certain threshold should be replaced with a system where the candidate has to
collect the signatures of a set number of supporters in order to appear on the ballot paper.
Recommendation 15: The Electoral Commission should take a more active role in promoting candidacy so that more women, people from black and minority ethnic communities, people on
lower incomes, young people and independents are encouraged to stand.
Recommendation 16: Voting and candidacy age should be reduced to sixteen (with the exception of candidacy for the House of Lords).
Recommendation 17: The introduction of automatic, individual voter registration at age sixteen. This can be done in tandem with the allocation of National Insurance numbers.
Recommendation 18: The citizenship curriculum should be shorter, more practical and result in a qualification.

Reform and Renewal - Localism

This is the most understated section in the Power Inquiry, and I have omitted number 11 as it deals with our membership of the EU, which is simply no longer relevant. 

The excuse most often made for the shape of British government - a highly centralised State that determines 96% of all taxes, a lower tier of government tasked with the rationing decisions of a proportion of those taxes on local services (determined centrally), with the poorest rate of democratic representation in the developed world - is that it is both efficient and effective. Utter spew. 

The central power grab is just a century old, born of emergency war powers that were never reversed. Before 1914 just about everything - water, power, gas, health, hospitals, almshouses, welfare, roads, lighting, transport, planning, public health, licencing, education and policing - was taxed, designed and managed locally by democratically accountable members and bodies. 

Arguments about economies of scale - that a public body can only economically collect waste, police the streets, licence building and so on at a certain size is an absolute fallacy. My own small gemeinde here provides 2,500 souls with water and sewerage at a quarter of the cost I paid in London for those services. Look back in this blog and you will find a similar analysis of the small town of Vail in the US, which maintains its own police force in addition to providing all local services. Cheaply. There is no objective, scientific reason for the shape of local government in the UK except for the convenience it offers to its masters in Whitehall.  

Once you accept that arguments for scale are pretty much spurious, and accept also that all public administrative functions should be carried out at the lowest level possible in order to maximise democratic control and accountability, you cannot excuse the gross insult to democracy that exists in the British structures. 

As we all know, in Switzerland, functions are split roughly into thirds between the central State - including the army, air traffic control, law and justice and suchlike, functions that can only be done nationally - and the Cantons and Municipalities. Each tier has independence in levying and collecting tax for its functions. If the UK did the same, we could shrink Whitehall and the Treasury by two-thirds and remove an irrelevant burden from the hands of our national legislature and its unaccountable NDPBs and fake charities. 

The phrase 'postcode lottery' is a quite brilliant con perpetuated by globalist sympathisers seeking to impose a homogeneous system of taxation, spending and services across all lands and peoples. UK Corporation Tax lower than France's? Postcode lottery! they cry - the EU must impose a harmonised rate of CT across the Union, to make things 'fair'. It's rubbish. It's fallacious. It's risible nonsense. And yet it's one of the excuses that Whitehall globalists make to justify their own existence. If my gemeinde, unlike others in the area, wants to impose a local and punitive tax on certain types of commercial activities that its voters find undesirable, it's not a postcode lottery, it's democracy.

The 'Big bang' decentralism required in the UK to free our nation from the malign grasp of the Whitehall authoritarian central Statists is far, far beyond the feeble recommendations made in 'Power', but here they are nonetheless:

Recommendation 6: There should be an unambiguous process of decentralisation of powers from central to local government.
Recommendation 7: A Concordat between central and local government setting out their respective powers.
Recommendation 8: Local Government to have enhanced powers to raise taxes and administer its own finances
Recommendation 9: Government should commission an independent mapping of quangos and other public bodies to clarify and renew lines of accountability between elected and unelected authority.
Recommendation 10: Ministerial meetings with representatives of business including lobbyists to be logged and listed on a monthly basis.

Democratic reform and renewal - Parliament

Back to the key heads for the reform of our damaged democracy. Firstly, Parliament. If the Brexit process has shown nothing else, it has exposed the confusion that exists in exactly where responsibility lies in our constitutional system for international treaties. May's government had wanted to proceed on the basis that all such business was the prerogative of the executive - but was challenged both in court and by Parliament itself. Even now as we approach the 'Meaningful Vote' - Parliament's approval of the most important post-war treaty in our lifetimes - the HOC seeks to explain the constitutional anomaly

"Although foreign affairs and treaty-making is normally the preserve of the Government under the Royal Prerogative, it holds that position by virtue of commanding the confidence of the House of Commons."

The Power Inquiry made the following recommendations -

PARLIAMENT  
Recommendation 1: A Concordat should be drawn up between Executive and Parliament indicating where key powers lie and providing significant powers of scrutiny and initiation for Parliament.

Not a written constitution, note, nor a radical overhaul of Parliament.

Recommendation 2: Select Committees should be given independence and enhanced powers including the power to scrutinise and veto key government appointments and to subpoena witnesses to appear and testify before them. This should include proper resourcing so that Committees can fulfil their remit effectively. The specialist committees in the Upper House should have the power to co-opt people from outside the legislature who have singular expertise, such as specialist scientists, when considering complex areas of legislation or policy.

Again, these recommendations were written when Brexit was not on the horizon; last year we saw select committees with a Remain chair and and and overwhelming Remain bias seeking to use their powers to sabotage Brexit. If select committees are to have greater powers - and it's not a bad idea - then impartiality becomes absolutely critical. Select committees embody the powers of the British people in a small group of their representatives and already have extraordinary reach - it is absolutely essential that select committee chairmanships and memberships are not abused for Party or Personal interests.

Recommendation 3: Limits should be placed on the power of the whips.

This is inextricably entwined with the role of political parties. The role of whip is not a constitutional office, but a party appointment. If all MPs were independents, there would be no whips.

Recommendation 4: Parliament should have greater powers to initiate legislation, to launch public inquiries and to act on public petitions.

Government sets the business of the House, but there is always room for Private Members' Bills. Likewise, the parliament petitions website came into effect two years after 'Power', in 2006. So far the most popular petition debated was in opposition to the Trump visit, garnering over 1.7m signatures. Again, 'Power' was written at a time when Blair's War was an unhealed wound - the Chilcot Inquiry did not start until 2009. I'm neutral on  recommendation 4 and can be swayed either way.

Recommendation 5: 70 per cent of the members of the House of Lords should be elected by a ‘responsive electoral system’ – and not on a closed party list system – for three parliamentary terms. To ensure that this part of the legislature is not comprised of career politicians with no experience outside politics, candidates should be at least 40 years of age.

Brexit again has brought Lords reform to the fore. At the time of 'Power' the upper house was perceived as a Tory stronghold, liable to sabotage the actions of a Labour government. It's now seen as a stronghold of the patrician establishment, pro-remain and determined to frustrate the will of the British people. I agree wholly to the desperate need now to reform the upper house - though I'm not committed to any one solution. I do know, however, that the hereditaries are an undervalued resource - and would like to see any reformed house retain around 100 of their number, selected amongst the hereditary peerage by themselves.  

The Electoral Quotient - a big issue with a boring name

The faux outrage of Labour, Welsh or Scots MPs at the publication of the Boundary Commission's final report is theatrical, at least in part. Conformity of constituency boundaries with a uniform number of voters in each - the EQ, or Electoral Quotient - has long been outside developed nation standards. An EQ of +/-5% is just about acceptable, but advanced democracies such as New Zealand achieve +/-3%. For years we have been way outside even the farthest limits, with the vote of an elector in one constituency being worth the votes of two voters in another. Any complaint at correcting this anomaly is an anti-democratic whinge. The threat to democracy is not from having a fair and robust democratic system but in gerrymandering voters equality to pander to the self interest of MPs who don't want to lose their jobs. 

Let's be clear. MPs are expendable; lose one, and there's a thousand more individuals neither less nor more capable ready to take their place. As individuals they are unremarkable and replaceable. It is the form and function of the parliament, the way the Commons works that is important. As Churchill noted, the confrontational layout of the chamber is vital, two sword lengths apart, as is the small size. Churchill opined that a chamber that never had seats sufficient to sit all members at once was an advantage -

... a conversational style of speaking, which has long been held to be the model of English Parliamentary life. How much better this is than foreign assemblies, where they all sit in a semi‐circle, and everyone has a place, or even a desk, which he can bang when he is displeased, and where every speaker goes up to harangue an audience scattered through a large arena. The essential of keen debate is the sense of a crowd, clustering together, craning forward, gathering round the speaker, with the cheers flung back from side to side.

The total number of MPs is also fairly critical. Proposals to reduce the number of seats from 650 to 600 featured in both the 2015 and 2017 Conservative manifestos. The essential elements of the Parliament would be preserved, and representation would not be diminished beyond comparative standards of democracy in the advanced nations.

Two matters however must be addressed. One is the social worker role that has fallen to MPs, who now spend much time intervening in social welfare and immigration disputes between their constituents and the State. This is not a beneficial or useful use of their time and attention, which should be devoted to the business of the legislature. Secondly is the sheer number of government posts, including the scores of junior appointments that bind an ever increasing number of MPs to the government, hobbling the scrutinising function of the House.  

Correcting the EQ is the last of the measures taken by Conservative governments since 2010 to correct the drift of our democratic systems under Labour into crookedness and democratic corruption. We will all be better off for it.