On procedure and politics

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined

Scottish Consultation on Independence Referendum

As mentioned in an earlier post, the Scottish Government launched its own consultation on a referendum on Scottish independence, which you can view here. The consultation runs until 11 May 2012. The Scottish Government is looking to hold said referendum in the fall of 2014. This time frame is to allow for the responses to [...]

The debate on Scotland indepedence heats up

Debate on the issue of independence for Scotland has heated up again this past week in the United Kingdom. On Tuesday (10 January), the Government launched its consultation on “facilitating a legal, fair and decisive referendum on whether Scotland should leave the United Kingdom”, which you can download here. The “legal” bit seems to be [...]

Some interesting links

1. The Big Society The Canadian media has recently been reporting that the current Conservative Government is considering emulating the UK Coalition Government in adopting David Cameron’s Big Society. Some of what has been written here in Canada is critical of this, which is their perogative, but I found that they often failed to adequately [...]

Canada’s first voter-initiated referendum

In a much earlier post, I wrote about the Canadian province of British Columbia’s Recall and Initiative Act. This act provides a mechanism to recall sitting Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) and to bring citizen initiatives before the Legislature or to province-wide referendum. As discussed in that post, which focused primarily on the recall [...]

The new independence – devolution-max?

Michael Moore, Secretary of State for Scotland, stated yesterday that independence for Scotland would require two referendums. The first would be an advisory referendum, which would seek a mandate for the Scottish government to negotiate with the UK government at Westminster to work out an agreed position. Any settlement deal reached would then also need [...]

On secession

The May 5 elections for the Scottish Parliament returned a majority Scottish Nationalist Party government. Party leader Alex Salmond quickly announced that a referendum on Scotland’s independence from the United Kingdom would be held during the SNP’s term in office, and recently clarified that it would be held in 2015. For a Canadian, this immediately [...]

Important Political Resources

I admit to being somewhat surprised by some of the keyword searches that bring people to this blog. It seems that too many people have no idea where to get key information – somehow they end up on this blog rather than on the sites they should be visiting to get the information they want. [...]

STV is not the problem

Liberal Democrat Voice carried an op-ed piece by Anthony Butcher arguing that the Liberal Democrats need to drop their support for the Single Transferable Vote because “the perceived complexity of AV was a significant factor in its rejection by the public. The whole concept of preferential voting has now been tainted for a generation as [...]

A referendum if necessary but not necessarily a referendum

To no one’s surprise, the UK referendum on the Alternative Vote was lost 69% to 31%. I’ve not yet waded through the myriad opinion pieces in the British press asking “Why did AV lose?” It doesn’t really matter, in the end. I was livestreaming the BBC’s election coverage yesterday, and at one point, one of [...]

How the AV referendum killed the republican movement

In an earlier post, I wrote that referendums aren’t very useful means of deciding key policy issues and that the entire referendum campaign on the Alternative Vote has been rather disgraceful. This view has only been reinforced following news today that the No side admits it used completely made-up figures when it claimed adopting AV [...]

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