And who, pray, is supposed to pay for UKIP's local referendums on any and everything?
It really is very high time to get over referendums. Totally foreign and deeply flawed. Their advocacy by ostensible defenders of parliamentary sovereignty, or of any sort of distinctively British political culture, is as utterly Pythonesque as such people's advocacy of directly elected mayors or directly elected sheriffs.
The aim should be better parliamentarians and better councillors, although neither of those is the same thing as parliamentarians or councillors who would give the saloon bar foghorns whatever they happened to want to rant about that week.
Key to this must be the restoration of the proper powers both of Parliament and of local government.
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"The aim should be better parliamentarians and better councillors, although neither of those is the same thing as parliamentarians or councillors who would give the saloon bar foghorns whatever they happened to want to rant about that week."
ReplyDeleteWhich why someone like you is kept out of power thank goodness. Constitutional checks and balances - who can beat that.
With reference to another of today's posts, you are certainly as native-born as can be. No one else writes English that badly.
ReplyDeleteTea-making duties over already? The people who matter have presumably taken the whole week off.
"It really is very high time to get over referendums. Totally foreign and deeply flawed."
ReplyDeleteWhat a xenophobic and misanthropic attitiude. Parliament is only sovereign because it has the authority of the people. But what if the people disagree with parliament or their views are not represented (EU membership, Human Right Act, bombing of Libya)? Referenda give sovereignty to the people, cutting out the middle men (MPs). What's not to like?
Mob rule.
ReplyDeleteMore precisely, I think the issue is that referendums aren't valid tools in situations where the main lobbying groups are free to lie to the people, thereby vitiating the outcome.
ReplyDeleteLisbon 1 is a good example of this in Ireland, where the main opponents of the treaty spread a host of lies about it and its proponents struggled to keep up, playing whack-a-mole with falsehood after falsehood. A national survey afterwards showed that more than a quarter of those who'd voted against the treaty had done so as they knew they couldn't understand it. The majority of the remainder had voted no for reasons wholly unconnected with the treaty but which they'd been tricked into believing were part of it.
The No2AV campaign, which we all know to be a Tory front with BNP backing, and some prominent Blairite assistance to provide broad credibility, has been lying through its teeth about transferable voting from the start.
The claim that irks me most is the nonsense about AV only being used far away in the purple part of the Risk map. It's used in Ireland, in presidential elections and in parliamentary elections when only one seat is at stake. My first time ever to vote at home was in an AV election, using the precise version of AV on offer here.
Why does this matter? Firstly because the opponents of AV, in claiming AV is too complicated, are implicitly saying British people are far more stupid than Irish and Australian ones. And secondly because if they admitted that Irish people are familiar with this system, they'd make it easy for people to turn to Irish neighbours and friends and ask them whether the No Campaign's claims about transferable voting are true.
And, of course, they're not, not least because the system is easy to use and easy to count, second and third preferences are meaningful, it's very possible to use transferable voting to eject unpopular governments, and strong governments are pretty much the order of the day.
--- The Thirsty Gargoyle