UK Election: The Comedown.

Last Thursday (7/5/15) the British public - through their own freewill - voted for the Conservative Party to rule over them for the next five years. For the first time in 18 years this will be done without the moderating influence of the Liberal Democrats or even the Monarchy. One of the Conservatives' first acts was to appoint pantomime dame Micheal Gove as Justice Secretary tasked with - and I quote - "Getting of rid of the human rights."

Therefore I can't help but feel that the British public have badly let themselves down and we need to collectively look for the reasons behind this failure. I think one particular problem area has been the utter collapse in political discussion in this country which has been led by the TV media which is the main way in which people access political debate.

I am just about old enough to remember when the TV political interview was something of an art form. A skilled interviewer would build a rapport with their subject and use it to gradually bring out their true feelings on an issue. David Frost was a particular expert at this with his famous interviews with disgraced US President Richard Nixon taking some 28 hours over 4 weeks to complete.

Then along came Jeremy Paxman who although an astute journalist had a much more confrontational style. In 1997 Paxman was interviewing the then Conservative Home Secretary Micheal Howard over possible plans to dismiss a prison governor. As politicians tend to do Howard evaded the question so Paxman simply and politely repeated the question. After being asked the same question for the 12th time Howard stormed out of the interview with his reputation in tatters although the question was never answered.

Since then British TV interviewers have become much less interested in actually getting answers to questions and much more interested in producing their own "Paxman moment" where they're seen to give a politicians a rough time. One of the worst offenders in this has become Channel 4 News which will frequently invite an interviewee on the pretext of asking them questions about a certain subject only to ask them about a completely different subject. When the interviewee blusters unable to answer a question on a subject they know nothing about the interviewer will delight in barracking them for not giving a straight answer.

This dumbed down mentality has even found its way into the House of Commons with Marget Hodge formally the Chair of the Public Accounts Select Committee being by far the worst offender. The purpose of select committees is to gather information to suggest improvements to proposed laws before they are voted on by Parliament. As such they have no real power. However every time a big scandal breaks such as with the hated banks or energy companies Hodge would call senior figures before the committee basically to give herself the opportunity to insult them live on TV. Obviously none of her questions get answered, no action is taken and the problem doesn't get solved but if you only saw the highlights on the evening news you would think that Hodge was really getting tough with the baddies.

This death of political debate has really killed "Question Time" which is the BBC's flagship political discussion show. I do not watch Question Time for the simple reason that I have an interest in and understanding of politics. It is quite clear to me then that Question Time simply is not politics. On the rare occasions I have tuned in it seems to designed to give an uniformed member of the public an opportunity to share their uniformed opinion on some issue which in turn gives the politicians on the panel an excuse to launch into unrelated personal attacks on each other. In short it gives me a headache.

With political discussion in the UK being so dumbed down it shouldn't be a surprise that when the Conservatives made a up a scare story about people needing to vote for them to keep the Scottish National Party (SNP) out of power many people in Britain were actually stupid enough to believe them.

The other issue to come out in the wake of the election is calls for reform to the voting system. This is an issue that is raised by the losing side following every election and there was actually a national referendum in May 2011 on the issue. I opposed it at the time and I would do again because the Alternative Vote system suggested did away with the "One Person, One Vote" principle that underpins democracy and replaced it with a system much more weighted in favour of those who had the skill and resources to calculate very complicated tactical voting strategies. In short my neighbours would cast one vote while I would be able to vote six times. The system also undermines the important secrecy of the ballot by making it much easier to identify which specific individual had submitted each specific ballot paper.

However I have been thinking recently about the party list system that is used in a number of democracies - most successfully Israel.

Essentially under the party list system voters don't vote for an individual candidate but for a party. The votes are then added up nationally and the parties are allowed to designate their own MP's from the party list. So if a party wins 20% of the vote they get 20% of the MP's and so on. The problem is that in the UK the electoral system is very much focused on picking the individual who will best represent the interests of your local area. As a result there are a number of MP's - Jeremy Corbyn springs to mind - who keep getting re-elected not because of the party they represent but because they are actually very good at looking out for the interests of the local area they represent.

However for a nation that is slightly smaller then the US state of Oregon the UK has a lot - 650 - of local areas represented. In the London borough of Croydon where I vote there are actually three distinct constituencies - Croydon North, Croydon Central and Croydon South. Therefore I'm sure it would be possible for the Croydon Central constituency to be eliminated and for people to only vote for MP's to represent Croydon North and Croydon South. However people would also be able to cast a party list vote for the whole Croydon area much like they do in the European Parliamentary election. So you end up with 2/3rds of MP's being selected as individuals and 1/3rd being selected from the party list.

This has the added advantage that people would be able to vote for an MP locally but a different party nationally. Plus they would also get two MP's they could complain to if the one they may not have voted for is particularly useless.

17:15 on 12/5/15 (UK date).