The perfect political system

There's a bit of a perceived swings-and-roundabouts thing with first past the post elections versus proportional representation. I think by changing a few things that other people don't seem to have considered changing, we can create a system that's the best of both worlds.

The advantages of first-past-the-post are:

• Everyone has a representative that's for 'their area'
• Representatives can be held to account by their constituents
• Increased odds of stable governments (I'll assume this is a good thing, but see below)

The advantages of PR are:

• Everyone's vote matters equally
• People in safe seats don't feel enfranchised
  
• Minority parties are given a voice
• There's no need for complex 'tactical voting'; you simply vote for who you want.

My marvelous voting system combines the benefits of the 2 by the simple method of abandoning the principle of 1 member 1 vote actually in the commons. Here's how it works. (Initially, we'll consider a system that's equivalent to 50% PR, so produces moderately stable governments, but gives minorities a bigger say than they have now in the UK. But not as much as a say as in a classic 50% PR system. We'll consider other variants later)

• Everyone elects an MP, just as they do now. In addition, everyone votes for a party in a national vote.
• MPs are elected, just as they are now. Each MP is initially given 100 votes in the commons. (Let's assume there are 650 MPs, like there are now. That gives 65,000 commons votes in total from this stage)
  
• The party votes are then counted up. The votes for any party that got no MPs in the constituency election are ignored. 65,000 votes are then allocated to the remaining parties according to their share of the vote.
• These votes are then shared evenly among all MPs in that party.
• Obviously, we need some sort of electronic voting system in the commons; I would suggest oyster-style readers by the lobby doors, so MPs still get the exercise of walking into the lobbies to vote.

The effect of all that is that the LibDems and other minority parties will have more votes per MP, to reflect their support in other parts of the country, but all MPs are answerable to a constituency that elected them, and you'll have the same set of parties in the commons, so minority parties that don't have any regional strongholds (such as the greens) are still out. The minority parties are much more powerful per-MP than the majors, but they're still under-represented compared to their true popularity in the country.
As I say, this is 50% PR, but could be tweaked by altering the number of votes issued in the 2 phases. I'll come back to that point in a second.

There obviously needs to be some rules about how to get onto the national party ballot paper. This is arguably a detail, but it might be best to say that a party has to stand for at least so many seats to appear. You could also allow a party to pay a (fairly large) deposit in order to appear. This is returned if they get any MPs elected. Allowing this deposit would mean that independents who stand a good chance of being elected (people like Martin Bell) could end up being enormously significant people in the commons. I'm not quite sure if that's a good thing or not.

A possible tweak to allow a small party list. The justification for this is to let parties like the greens in, and because senior ministers arguably do a useless job of representing their constituency. This would work as follows:

• Votes are cast, MPs elected and the 65,000 party votes are divided as before.
• Each party supplies an odered list of 10 names.
• The party votes are initially allocated 100-at-a-time to people on the list, and then the remainder are shared out among all the MPs (list and constituency). e.g. if a party had 250 party votes, the first 2 people on the list would become Ms then 50 votes (the ones left over after giving 100 to each of the 2 list MPs) would be allocated among all the party's list and constituency MPs. If a party had 2,000 votes, 1,000 would be used electing all 10 list names, and the other 1,000 shared amongst all the party's MPs.

As well as letting the greens in, this would probably let the BNP in. As far as I can see, for many people the goal here would be to invent a system to let the greens in and keep the BNP out. I'm not playing that game since the BNP always sound utterly stupid when they talk about any subject except the fact that everyone persecutes them (which is mostly what they talk about when non-nutters are likely to be listening). Therefore the solution to the BNP is to stop persecuting them, and let them be revealed for the stupid people they are.

If people want a more anti-BNP system, we just add a floor percentage of votes below which party votes are ignore. (Any party that gets under the floor of say 3% is ignored, just as parties that got no MPs were in the original system were ignored)

We probably want to shrink the number of constituencies to allow space for all these list MPs, but that's a detail. (We also might want to shrink the number of constituencies because there are far too many MP but that's another story)

To make life slightly more interesting, we could allow factions to appear on the party list. A faction is like a sub-party. To prevent things getting too interesting, I would allow each candidate to be a member of only 1 faction as well as a party. A faction appears on the party ballot paper if it satisfies the requirements for a party above (more than so many candidates, or pay a deposit). I can't quite decide if list candidates are allowed to be members of factions; I'm minded to say no. Faction votes are counted and allocated exactly like party votes, apart from the fact that factions certainly don't have their own lists. An MP who's a member of a faction gets 'party votes' from his party and from his faction. This has no impact on the overall electoral sums; the number of votes given to a party if some people vote for factions is the same as if they voted just for the party. However, they are biased towards the end of the party that has more popular support.

Cross-party factions should probably be banned.

As a final tweak, this has the interesting property that it's possible to change the effective PR-ness after the election. This property could be used to try and move towards fixed term parliaments while basically keeping the british constitutional system. To do this, we remove the prime minister's right to ask for an election. Usually, elections happen some fixed time (4 years) after the last one, and initially happen with a bigger bias towards PR (say 32,500 constituency votes in the commons and 65,000 party votes, although it could even be 0 constituency votes). If a confidence vote fails, the monarch should firstly attempt to find another prime ministerial candidate capable of winning a confidence vote, but to do that they are allowed to change the number of constituency and party votes. This effectively creates a 'new commons' which may have a different balance of power, but which was still arguably democratically elected by the same election. A minor detail is how to prevent governments from deliberately failing confidence votes in order to get a more first-past-the-post system (and hence a stronger real majority), but I'm sure that would be possible.

Failure, or Interpreting my tent-packing instructions as a parable

In my tent-folding instructions (last post), people are likely to be drawn to step 4. That's where all the action seems to be. That's where all the pseudo-mystical ideas are introduced that clearly lead on to the miracle in step 5.

That's wrong.

The most important is step 3 After step 3, all you need to do is gain the understanding and fold the tent. Before step 3, that is impossible.

Step 3 involve failure, but without failing in exactly that way, you can't succeed. The fact that failure is sometimes vital is what many people fail to understand when they're too concerned with success.

How to pack up an easy-to-unpack tent

You can get these tents where the poles are a single long loop that gets wrapped up a bit more when you fold them up. They're in the shape of a large disc when folded, and are marketed as being easy to erect. This is true. You just take them out of the bag and they spring into shape before you can do anything about it.

However, arguably they should be marketed as tents whose packing up will be a character-building experience. Certainly it takes much longer to pack them up than to unpack and pack up a normal tent, so they don't save any time at all in the long term. I've watched and helped with packing one up twice now, and so I offer these instructions on how to pack one up. As far as I can make out, this is the only way of folding these tents. There is no possibility of taking any short-cuts; you need to follow these instructions to the letter.

1. Make sure you have a large audience. You won't see the funny side of what's about to happen but I assure you it's hilarious. It would be a pity for all that hilarity to be wasted.
2. Start by trying to follow the instructions that came with the tent. Do this a few times. Each time you will get three-quarters of the way through before reaching an instruction that makes no sense. At that point, you will pause to think, and the tent will spring back to its fully-unpacked state. By now, the audience will be declaring this the most fun they've had on the entire camping trip.
   
3. Abandon the instructions. Try to do your own thing. Fold it in your own unique style. Try numerous variants. Each time, you'll fold it into a nice neat circle that's between 2 and 3 times too big for the bag, with no way of making it smaller.
4. Having no-where else to turn, and increasingly losing face in front of your rapidly-growing audience, return to the instructions. Meditate on the instruction that makes no sense. Try to imagine it from all possible directions. In desperation, consider it more of a zen koan than an instruction.
   
5. Having done this, fold the tent to the point before the instruction that makes no sense. Holding the tent in this position, meditate once more on the instruction that makes no sense. Become at one with the instruction that makes no sense. Don't understand it, since that is impossible. Just be it. Now jump on the tent.
6. Observe that you've now got the tent into the shape needed for the next instruction, and the rest is pretty trivial really. Put the tent in the bag rapidly. Accept the adulation of the crowd. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED IN STEP 5.