Quartz
If this will be your manifesto I’m voting for you:D
The value of having an unelected House of Lords is that they don’t have to go through the "Baby kissing"routine when considering important issues.
Most elected politicians will say or propose anything that will put them in office, no matter how impracticable.
Also there should be some sort of basic intelligence test to be able to vote.
What system? Getting a knighthood is not much different from getting a medal from the President, confers no political power or wealth, and is not hereditary. As for the House of Lords, only a small proportion of them are now hereditary peers, and if the Commons ever agree to further reforms that will probably be the end of hereditary peers all together. Even now, by no means all Earls, Barons etc. are members of the Lords. Most Lords are ex-politicians, industrialists, people like that, rather than “nobility”.
I’m still interested in the proposal for multi-member districts in the Commons. Forget the U.S. Senate. Anyway the analogue to the Commons is the House of Representatives? Why wouldn’t multimember district be a magnet for electoral mischief? Frankly I don’t see any real benefit to them, unless there are enough members elected from the district to support an intradiatrict form of PR.
It’s my impression that multimember district were a feature of the rotten boroughs that had to be dealt with in prior electoral reforms.
And I would be interested in more detail on the concept of “uniform size” of constituencies. What is the basis of measure? I hope it’s not geographical area.
I would have it as population. Going purely by geographical area is a no-no, of course, but there has to be some respect for it.
If the measure is population then howdo you show “respect” for geographical size?
By allowing some flexibility. For instance, if you decide on a population per MP of 100K, you may have to compromise it when you note that the population of the Orkneys & Shetlands is less than half that and you can’t really group them with anything else. Similarly for the Isle of Wight with a population of 140K. Contrariwise, you could group the Hebrides with other islands.
You need to have sufficient flexibility to allow 5-10% variance from parity.
But let’s be fair, how many UK electorates could you not drive (walk?) around comfortably in a day?
Compared to say Kalgoorlie Covering an area of 2,295,354 square kilometres (886,241 sq mi) (an area the size of France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland and Great Britain combined), Durack, Lingiari, O’Connor & Kennedy.
Of course to to keep electorates +/- 10% there are also several less than 40 square kilometres. If the UK has what 650 electorates vs Australia with 150 so they’re about the same average number of voters.
Obviously, you try to keep the districts as compact as possible, and following existing city limits, neighborhood boundaries, etc. when you can.
But in the US House of Rep’s, the restriction is that a district can be no larger than an entire US state. Thus you have the entire state of Wyoming being 1 district, with a population of only 490,000; while the average is about 650,000, and the largest is 900,000.
A (normally) powerless figurehead is a real and useful job. It gives you someone who is uninvolved with the practical day-to-day business of government but is available to do most of the of the ribbon cutting/ship commissioning ceremonial duties.
And at the same time, and even more importantly, it keeps the Head of State job (and the respect and deference that always seem to come with it) out of the grubby hands of elected politicians.
If you want to be** really **smart about it, you can do what Canada does and make the Queen of Canada live in the UK and have a much lower profile local representative of the QoC (picked by the PM) on-hand for the ribbon cutting.