Vote Lear
Best of a bad bunch
Proportional representation
I have to say that I do support proportional representation, and my reasoning is this. I can count on one hand the number of times the government (of any shade) has done anything right. The minimum wage and handing over interest rate decisions to the Bank of England are the only two I can think of. Other than that they just bring out more and more ill-considered laws, chiselling away bit by bit at our freedoms. The main argument against proportional representation is that it would more than likely produce nothing but hung parliaments, which would be unable to actually do anything. My response to that is ‘Good!’
The House of Lords.
This might sound a bit odd but I fully support an unelected second chamber. If I wanted to become Prime Minister I would first have to be selected for one of the major parties. This would involve support from other party members (favours that will need to be paid back one day) Once I was an MP, if I ever wished to raise to the Cabinet I would need to agree with every policy my party adopted, however perverse it might be, and that would be the end of my personal integrity. If I got that far, I would have to start plotting and scheming to stab the current incumbent in the back whilst outwardly supporting him and by the time I arrived at any degree of power I would not be worthy of a scrap of it. Hereditary peerages might seem like an archaic bunch of old duffers that have done nothing whatsoever to have such a say in the running of the country but in my view the fact that they cannot be fired means that they are less likely to be bought, sold, bullied or manipulated by vested interests. I think they were a valid ‘sanity check’ on the House of Commons and a system that worked well has now been replaced with a half way house that is the worst of all worlds.
Europe
I cannot think of a more unhealthy situation than a single superpower (America) throwing its weight around with impunity. Due to its power, America has the United Nations in its pocket and can effectively make international law to suit its own ends. A federal Europe might have mitigated that. It could have been such a good idea. The 12 or so countries that made up Western Europe working together. We could have had the French doing the cooking and making the wine, the Italians could have made the clothes, the Brits could have handled the fighting, the Germans run the public transport, the Scandinavians making flat pack furniture and running about naked.... What have we got now? The Belgians doing the organising, the English doing the cooking, the Germans in charge of the European sense of humour and the Americans laughing all the way to their next outrage. I am starting to think that not a lot can be done about it now. There are too many members with too many conflicting interests. Whilst I, along with many others, resent some of the lunatic edicts coming from Brussels, the flip side of the coin is that every time our own government has been taken to the European court they have deserved to be and had their wings clipped a bit. I would not support pulling out of Europe. In fact, if the Euro survives the recession I would even favour joining it, but Europe as a whole has become too unwieldy to ever produce a functional federal government and I can’t see that changing in the next twenty years.