Overwhelming support for electoral reform – in the UK
A ComRes poll for The Independent released today finds that almost 80% of voters in the United Kingdom support replacing First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) with a “system that reflects more accurately the proportion of votes cast for each party”. Only 18% disagreed. As well, support for changing the electoral system was strong across party lines. Unsurprisingly, support [...]
Yes Deputy Prime Minister
The position of deputy prime minister in Westminster parliamentary systems varies from one jurisdiction to another. For example, in both Australia and New Zealand, the position has become an official ministerial portfolio, since 1949 in New Zealand and since 1968 in Australia. In Australia, the duties of the Deputy Prime Minister are to act on [...]
The Salisbury Convention
One interesting thing I’ve recently learned about thanks to my new-found fascination with UK politics, is the Salisbury-Addison Convention. Since Labour’s landslide in 1945, the House of Lords has not opposed, on second reading, any bill that can claim authority from the winning party’s manifesto. For the uninitiated, an election manifesto is what we in [...]
Political Realignment
This post comes with a huge caveat: I am not an expert on UK politics. I do have a general sense of the parties, but I don’t follow goings-on in the United Kingdom very closely. Or rather, I haven’t until this most recent election. Consequently, some of what I say here may be very simplistic [...]
No one voted for this
One of the most common complaints about the coalition government in the UK, going by online comments left on various news articles and op-ed pieces, is that “no one voted for this” – this being the Liberal Conservative coalition and its recently released platform. There is some truth to that statement – indeed, no one [...]
Fixing election terms and political stability
While fixed term elections are commonplace in some countries, such as the United States, one of the vagaries of Westminster systems is that it remains the prerogative of the Crown to dissolve parliament. A parliament may not last more than 5 years from the date it was first elected, but there is nothing that prevents [...]
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On procedure and politics by Radical Centrist is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
