Why a referendum on Lords reform is a bad idea
On 23 April 2012, the Joint Select Committee reviewing the Government’s Draft House of Lords Reform Bill released its report. Real life has not allowed me sufficient time to properly read through the entire report, available here, however I do want to take a few minutes to focus on one recommendation the Committee put forward, [...]
The Primacy of the Commons and Lords Reform
As I have previously written, the UK Government has brought forward a draft bill on reforming the House of Lords. A Joint Select Committee – meaning a committee with membership drawn from both the House of Commons and the Lords – has been holding a series of meetings hearing from constitutional and other experts. I [...]
Thoughts on “Saving the House of Commons”
Aaron Wherry of Canada’s Maclean’s magazine recently wrote a blog post proposing a series of reforms to “save” the House of Commons. Some I have previously discussed on this blog, such as changes to Question Period. Readers proposed other reforms and ideas the comments. I thought I would offer my own thoughts on some of [...]
Will MPs rebel over boundary reforms?
Since day one back in May 2010, the UK media has made predicting the break-up of the coalition a favourite hobby. Indeed, almost every controversial policy has been dubbed the issue that will spell the end of the Coalition – the budget, tuition fees, the AV referendum, reform of the NHS, the London riots to [...]
On party financing
A debate is looming in the United Kingdom concerning the issue of funding for political parties. There have been attempts in the past to address this issue, most recently in 2007, but those negotiations failed because the parties were unable to agree a cap. Current situation There is currently no limit to the amount an [...]
On party membership
I read a very interesting piece on declining membership in political parties in the United Kingdom. The numbers are rather astounding. According to the author, Brian Wheeler, just over 1% of the UK population are card-carrying members of a political party, which Wheeler indicates is low by European standards, but alas, fails to provide any [...]
Some interesting links
1. Time to salute the post-2010 election Parliament BBC parliamentary correspondent Mark D’Arcy has a good column providing an interesting overview of the current UK Parliament and an assessment of some of the many reforms introduced in the dying days of the previous Parliament and at the outset of this one: “So I’m afraid, as [...]
Democratic legitimacy vs parliamentary efficiency
Former Prime Minister John Major’s recent speech to the Ditchley Foundation attracted media attention because of his proposals for Scotland, which I’ve written about here. However, Major also put forward some very interesting proposals for reforming how Parliament works. This got brief mention in the press – primarily his idea of appointing to the House [...]
More on open primaries
In a previous post proposing ways to increase the role and power of backbench MPs in Ottawa, I suggested that parties use open primaries to select their candidates in each constituency. By this I meant letting all registered voters in the riding vote for which candidate they prefer, rather than limit the vote to members [...]
Members leaving the House
As similar as are the UK and Canadian parliamentary systems, there are some very interesting differences. One of these is the fact that British MPs can’t resign their seat the same way Canadian (and Australian and New Zealand) MPs can, as I blogged about in this post. Similar to that, Lords can’t resign either. Lords [...]
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On procedure and politics by Radical Centrist is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
