Recent content by MarkHeenan

You do still want to leave yourself the option of holding an election before the fixed term is up if it's clear that parliament simply can't function (I believe in Germany a few years ago the Government passed a vote of no confidence in themselves), but you don't want to leave it so that your...

There's no reason why it has to be a "do nothing" role, it was for Geoffrey Howe and Harriet Harmann but it certainly wasn't for John Prescott and Michael Hesletine. It's not a clearly-defined constitutional role so it has as much power and scope as the Prime Minister chooses to give it. And of...

Ah, get it now *facepalm

We seem to be getting one...

It would seem so, and if there was a form of PR that: a) kept the direct link between representative and constituency, and b) produced, or tended to produce, strong governments, then I'd be all in favour of it.

1931 actually

How exactly? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_UK_general_election http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_2005 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_2010

Yeah - it's worth noting that the Conservatives got more votes in 2010 (10.71 million, 305 seats) than Labour did in 2005 (9.55 million, 356 seats) and that Labour got less votes in 2010 (8.60 million, 258 seats) than the Conservatives did in 1997 (9.60 million, 165 seats). It's all a bit screwy...

That worked well last time, didn't it?

I would prefer a coalition with the Lib Dems over a minority government. It's more stable, can make better decisions and I've already had enough of election campaigns for the year.

Looks like Labour's given up the ghost

It's been done, actually, even if that was in the 1930s

True.

Yeah but they have two major parties and two minor parties each with natural allies, so it's a bit like a two-party system with each party split into two parts. They did rather impressively hold together a "Grand Coalition" a few years back though. Not sure Labour would be prepared to support a...

That's not what's foremost in their minds when the deals are done. The Government will have something it wants to pass (and that something may be an empirically good thing) but the minor parties will want to extract their thirty pieces of silver first. Some decisions that are in the national...