Safe Seats and Thrones

Nick Clegg claimed that safe seats beget a tendency to dodgy expense claims. Channel 4 Fact Checked it, clarifying that there were twice as many expense villains in the seats with the strongest majorities than in those with the weakest. That's not to say that one causes the other, but it is an interesting result. I hope it is an indication of the power that voters wield.

Safe Seats are allocated by parties to those politicians with the potential to sit on the front bench, indicating the power that parties wield in the careers of candidates and the tension between loyalty to the party and loyalty to the constituency.

You can read the Channel 4 Fact Check here.

Votes Do Not Equal Seats

According to this report, in the last general election (May 2005) Labour had 35.3% of the votes yet gained 55.2% of the seats, 32.3% of the votes went to the Conservatives resulting in only 30.7% of the seats and the Liberal Democrats came off even worse, converting 22.1% of the votes into only 9.6% of the seats. Various designs of proportional representation (PR) are designed to redress this injustice. Proponents of the "first past the post" system (FPTP) say that it facilitates a strong government and avoids hung parliaments, yet history shows that FPTP can produce hung parliaments and PR can produce working majorities.

Interactive Democracy could be added to any of the existing or proposed systems, FPTP or PR, and would add greater fairness to any one of them by allowing voters to have their say on each issue. In effect it would allow us to choose the politicians we like AND the policies we prefer from each of the parties manifestos.... and give us the opportunity to suggest our own policies.

The End of Tribalism

Loyalty has always been a binding emotion in party politics. It can be seen in the party "heartlands" and the "safe seats". Interactive Democracy is a move away from that. Although it doesn't seek to subvert the parties, it is designed to enhance the debate, both its breadth and depth, in order to reach sound decisions on specific subjects. To that extent it encourages the end of tribalism in politics and allows us to choose politicians and governments, AND decide on policy.