No More Remploys

The matter of the closure of Remploy drags on.

Imagine if we had one hundred parliamentary constituencies, with each of us able to vote for one candidate, with the six highest scorers elected at the end, and with each party having at least one sixth of seats in the House guaranteed one sixth of seats on each of the (much more powerful) Select Committees, one sixth of Select Committee Chairmanships, one sixth of Ministerial positions generally, and one sixth of Cabinet positions specifically.

A dozen or more parties would survive and thrive under such a system, so that there would always be plenty of opposition (unlike in the Northern Ireland Assembly, where all parties are in government all the time, so that no one is asking any questions). But permanent powers in the land would be a High Tory party, an Old Labour Left party, an Old Liberal party, a morally and socially libertarian party of neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy, and an economically social democratic party of morally and socially conservative British and Commonwealth patriotism.

Any one of those could quite probably, and any two of them could certainly, insist on anything it liked as the price of anything else wanted by one or more of the others, regardless of whether or not there was any connection between the two propositions.

There would be no closure of Remploy in that case, just as Farepak would have been sorted out rapidly and satisfactorily, or just as there would have been no British invasion of Iraq, or just as there would be no hunting ban, or just as there would be no Son of Trident, or just as there would be no Lisbon Treaty, or … well, make your own list.

And imagine if there were there were a ballot line system, with small parties and campaigning organisations (including, for example, trade unions) entitled to endorse candidates and to be listed alphabetically on the ballot paper after the candidate’s party of the word “Independent”. The number of votes per ballot line would be counted separately and, although all those for a given candidate would be added together in order to give his or her final and determinative result, published separately.

There would be no closure of Remploy in that case, just as Farepak would have been sorted out rapidly and satisfactorily, or just as there would have been no British invasion of Iraq, or just as there would be no hunting ban, or just as there would be no Son of Trident, or just as there would be no Lisbon Treaty, or … well, make your own list.