Today is polling day for national elections in Wales & Scotland, council elections in much of England, the Leicester South by-election, and the Referendum on a new electoral system for the House of Commons. As all the political commentators are saying, it is the first major electoral test of the coalition; and all the parties…
This Tuesday from 10am to 8pm there will be the welcome opportunity to elect a member of the House of the Lords. Naturally it is completely bizarre that only candidates who would have been eligible to be hereditary peers may stand, but that was the nature of the compromise needed to remove hereditaries from the…
Electoral systems are means to an end. The ends can and do differ, so one selects an electoral system appropriate to the end. We have, as others have already mentioned, the Alternative Vote (AV) system for electing a replacement peer when an hereditary peer in the House dies. My objection is to ends rather than the…
I don’t often so strongly disagree with Baroness Murphy below but I do on this issue. The core is not the referendum on AV – that is the easy bit and if the Bill had been split into parts as it should have been then that could be back in the Commons now. The problem…
Rumours began to circulate last week that the Government was going to introduce a guillotine on House of Lords business for the first time in its history. I still don’t know how serious or real the threat was but it is now virtually certain that they will force through a constitutional Bill (the Parliamentary Voting…
