Thursday 28 May 2009

The West Lothian Question



First posed by Tam Dalyell in 1977, The West Lothian Question, as it came to be known, asked about the imperfect and unfair voting rights of Scottish and Welsh MPs over laws meant for England when English MPs had no equivalent in the Scottish Parliament or the Welsh Assembly.
Interactive Democracy provides a system that partly solves this problem as votes are linked to a postcode and therefore, a region. However, it does not separate the voting rights of English, Scottish and Welsh MPs in the House of Commons when they vote on the development of viable bills. In my view this would be easy to fix, if there was the will to do so, simply by defining which MPs could vote on regional or national issues.

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