Making the most of the coming hung Parliament

Clare Short does not need to campaign for a hung Parliament, since it is going to happen anyway, and she probably just wants to claim some credit when it does. But when it does, will there be the "change in the electoral system" that she wants? I sincerely hope not: the prospect of permanently dividing England into equal numbers of safe Labour, safe Tory and safe Liberal seats does not exactly appeal.

Instead, in the course of each Parliament, each political party at national level should submit a shortlist of two potential Leaders to a binding ballot of the whole electorate. At constituency level, each party should submit a shortlist of two potential parliamentary candidates to a binding ballot of the whole constituency electorate.

And each branch of each party (including branches of affiliated organisations in Labour's case) should suggest up to three policies, with the three receiving the highest numbers of votes from each branch going forward. The ten highest scorers nationwide would then go out to a ballot of the whole electorate, with each voter entitled to vote for up to two, and with the top five to be included in the subsequent General Election Manifesto, with all the pressure that particularly popular policies would thus put on the other parties.

Furthermore, each MP who takes his or her seat should be given a tax-free allowance of a fixed sum of money, publicly transferable to the registered political party of that MP's choice, conditional upon matching funding by resolution of a membership organisation (the name of which would then appear in brackets on the ballot paper after the party designation next to that MP's name), with party spending limited to twice the number of MPs multiplied by the amount of that allowance.