A Capitol Future

“With a public option it can’t pass by the Senate, but with one it can’t pass the House.” The Senate and the House are both controlled by the same party, to which the President also belongs.

Once open primaries, which really do seem to have struck quite a chord, have become the norm both for selecting candidates and for electing Leaders, then we, too, can look forward to parliamentarians who are most concerned to answer to the primary electorate back home that to the whips at Westminster.

A second chamber elected on a county basis, while the House of Commons was still elected on a constituency basis, would also reflect the current situation in America, in that extremely “conservative” Republicans and extremely “liberal” Democrats are unusual in the Senate, but routine in the House. Such a person may be able to win a primary in an individual District (or constituency), but not in an entire State (or county). But they can still get in as Congressmen, and they could still get in as MPs.

Furthermore, primaries could and should accompany electoral reform. Let the country be divided into one hundred constituencies, each with an equally sized electorate. We would each vote for one candidate by means of an X, and the top six would be elected at the end. By the same means, each of the 99 units that are the English ceremonial counties, the Scottish lieutenancy areas, the Welsh preserved counties and the Northern Irish counties would elect six Senators, with a further six, who would have to be Crossbenchers, thus elected by the country as a whole. Prominent newspaper columnists? Well, why not?

We also need to introduce a ballot line system. Voters would be able to indicate that they were voting for a given candidate specifically as endorsed by a smaller party or other campaigning organisation, with the number of votes by ballot line recorded and published separately. That might be the endorsement of a Left party, a trade union, a co-operative, a peace and disarmament movement, a civil liberties group, or an environmental campaign. It might be a campaign for Crown and Commonwealth, for national sovereignty, for the countryside, for traditional family life, for the Armed Forces, or against expensive and socially disruptive wars where no British strategic interest was at stake. Or it might be any of a whole host of other things.

We need to require all political funding to be by resolution of membership organisations. Parliamentarians’ staff should also be appointed from lists maintained by such organisations, in return for payment of at least half of those staff’s salaries. These reforms would require politicians and parliamentarians to have links to wider civil society. Those links might be to trade unions and co-operatives. They might be to agriculture, manufacturing, small business, and organisations campaigning for conservative causes. Or, again, they might be to any of a whole host of other things.

And speaking of money, quite apart from the fact that a fortune could be saved by conducting primaries at polling stations and using the electoral registers that parties own anyway, there is a reasonable case for them to be held at public expense where, say, the party in question has a majority of ten thousand or more, or took more than half the votes cast last time, or has held the seat continuously through four General Elections, or is within a very slim margin of taking it.