Clare Short has become the latest political figure to suggest that a hung or ‘balanced’ Parliament would be a very positive thing.
In a pre-recorded an interview which was broadcast on the Today Programme this morning, she described Parliament at ‘broken’ and suggested that a hung Parliament could be way to begin to fix it. She also highlighted the importance of ‘independents’ and independent thinking. Central to her argument was that the Commons needed to be more effective and have more power over the executive. A hung Parliament she said, would help to deliver that.
The interview is available here (At 1hr 48 mins) on BBC i-player: HERE
Coming from Clare Short this is important. Sitting latterly as an independent after she resigned the whip, she has 27 years experience of what it is like both inside and outside a party in the House of Commons. She has seen things change too during this time.
This is a bit of what she said:
“The state of the Commons is terrible. No one goes in the Chamber. Everything is guillotined. You can’t get any time to make a substantial speech. No one is listening to anybody. It’s miserable. It’s in a very bad shape.
“I think a hung Parliament would be terribly good for us because it would bring power back to the chamber.”
“I think if the majority is small or dependent on some kind of agreement with the Liberal Democrats which is very likely, people will be stuck in the building – votes will be close. The executive instead of being arrogant will have to be nice to people and keep people on board. And that will change things all to the good.”
Meanwhile, Glimmer of Green hope on Englland’s south coast
Beyond that, Lucas, 49, claims that within a few elections her party will be in a position to force its way into coalition governments as Greens have already done in Germany, Ireland, Finland, Belgium and France.
“The length of time it took between the election of Britain’s first Labour MP at the beginning of the 20th century and the first Labour government was just 24 years,” she says. “Given that we have got an environmental crisis and people are much more politically aware now than they were then, you could halve that timeframe.
“I really think the Greens will be taking over from Labour, which has lost its way in a fairly catastrophic way.”
Getting that first breakthrough is much tougher in Britain than elsewhere in Europe, where proportional representation systems make it easier for minor parties to be elected, and it is even a bigger challenge than that faced by Greens and other minor party candidates running for Australia’s House of Representatives with its preferential system.
Meanwhile, abolish the states…
FOUR in 10 voters favour abolishing state governments, seeing them as the least-effective level of government and increasingly looking to the federal government to fix health and other problems.
The findings of a Newspoll survey conducted last month for Griffith University’s federalism project and reported exclusively in The Weekend Australian today point to what constitutional lawyer George Williams calls “a crisis of confidence in state governments”.
Federalism project director A. J. Brown, a professor of public law, says that unless the structure of government is addressed seriously, the inevitable result of current trends is that the states will continue withering away as effective partners in the federation.
Read more HERE
Earlier on Tasmanian Times: Steve Biddulph: They’re all minor parties now, HERE
