conumdrum

now i confess i started writing this a few days ago. then it was somewhat more topical and there was even a touch of humour in it (i know i know – but i thought hey why not try something new). for some odd reason (laziness) i never finished it and now it has been voted for and carried through.

oh sorry i haven’t told you what it is i am on about.

a few days ago gordon brown made the surprising and, slightly, radical proposal that members of parliament would vote on a proposal to change the method by which we elect parliament. the idea is that we would move from the current ‘first past the post’ system to the alternative voting method (basically you rank candidates in order of preference, if someone gets more than 50% they are elected, if no one has reached that target the candidate with the lowest vote is eliminated and their second choices are distributed among the remaining candidates. this is done until the magic 50% is achieved. simple).
parliament passed the vote today, february 9th, and the plan is that the public will now get a referendum to choose between the two methods.

of course the announcement was greeted with the usual level of derision and scorn. the liberal democratic saw it as a ‘deathbed conversion’, albeit a small step in the right direction. the liberals want full proportional representation; it is their only hope of touching power. the conservatives talked about how brown was trying to fiddle the system (they don’t say how, they just say ‘fiddle’ – which is a nice word and carries the implication that gordon brown is a thief and untrustworthy). the conservatives are happy with the ‘first past the post’ system, i tend to agree with them (i know a bit of a shock there).

one of the reasons for this proposed change, according to gordon brown and jack straw, is an attempt to let the electorate know that politics and politicians are aware that their standing is pretty low and that they are prepared to change in order to win back public confidence. another reason given for this change is that it is a sop to the liberals, a shout out that tells the lib-dems that labour cares about electoral reform, so if there is a hung parliament you know who to work with.

ok, ok i can hear you muttering where is the conundrum, where is the humour, what is the point of all of this.
i first heard about this proposed change on the radio. one of the commentators on the change was from one of the, seemingly, many organisations who are concerned with/ interested in electoral reform and they said something along the lines of ‘without troubling the public for their views, ministers hand-picked the voting system they favour’.
and this is where the conundrum and an irony pop up.
the irony? a bunch of self-selecting unelected and unaccountable talking heads can pontificate about electoral methods. quite why i should favour their opinion over those who are elected is beyond me.
the conundrum? their basic criticism (aside that the preferred option isn’t one that they chose) is that a decision has been made, an option presented and the opportunity to pick offered.
i can picture them now. sitting down, discussing the various methods of voting weighing up the pros and cons and then making a decision as to which is the right one.
hold on but how do they come to that decision?
do they just say, “this is the right one”? not very democratic.
they must vote. surely?
do they have a vote on the voting system used to vote on the best voting system? after all they can’t just use ‘first past the post’ as they have told us it is not good enough for parliamentary democracy, so it can’t be good enough to vote on the method to vote for the method that we are going to use to vote for parliament. even before they vote on the vote for the voting system, there has to be a vote to make sure that the vote for the vote for the voting system is the best one to use. though that also implies that there should be a vote on the vote on the vote for the vote for the voting system.
and i haven’t even complicated this by asking if there is a voting system to make sure that all the potential voting choices have been correctly voted onto the voting choice ballot. of course once you have asked that you need to check has the right voting choice been made for the voting system to make sure all the potential voting choices have been made. which leads to the question: was there a vote on the vote… oh hell you know where i am going with this.

as much as it may annoy the self-appointed guardians of the pure flame of purity (or something equally wonderful) there is a reason we have an elected parliament – we put them there to make choices for us, but at the same time we have them there because they are accountable.
we can vote them out.
whatever voting system there is.

(you can file this under – was it worth the wait? you decide.)