Safe Speed Forums

These a novel and potentially interesting petition on the Downing Street web site:

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Permanent-Votes/



It's a new one on me, but I think I like the sound of it. I'm very unsure about the practicalities of 'candidates in waiting'. If the local MP boobed big time a sudden flurry of vote changes could see you 'called' on very short notice.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Each seat would require a considerable staff to ensure the, potentially numerous, transitions went as smoothly as possible, which would still likely be not that smoothly! These permanent staff would be unelected, and would likely wield a bit too much power for such a position!

It's a nice idea, but it would require a sizeable government IT system in order to make it workable, hence it's never going to happen.

I think it would be fairer to make it weekly or monthly though. Nobody likes being put in a position where they don't know if they'll have a job tomorrow, and I couldn't imagine being in that position for the entirety of my working life.

I can't see that changing MPs every couple of weeks in a marginal seat would provide any benefit to anyone.

Perhaps yearly top up elections would be a good idea. If there was still a majority for whoever was in power then the status quo would be maintained. If not, a proper election is then done and they are ousted. Thus there is feedback to what they're doing and they will only do what the majority want as they will have to get more than 50% of the vote to stay in power. Voting would have to be easy and preferably from home for the top up votes. Then you can ensure 'proper voting' for the main event to reduce fraud.

This and making sure party funding is only from subscription charges from individual members would stop the band of goons from being too distant from the electors.

Sounds very silly to me.

Policies changing by the day, no long term plans (as if they have anyway!!!) and even more waste by government.

Just think - yesterday they put out a "get tough" message on benefits, so what would happen? An immediate vote change from millions who don't want their dole money to go down.

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Wake me up when the revolution starts
STOP the Toll Tax http://www.traveltax.org.uk

You could stop constant changes with a bit of hysteresis built into the system design. You could do this by time as well as vote thresholds. So the rule might be: 'if a 500 vote lead has been maintained by the second candidate for one calandar month then a change of representation takes place'. The figures are examples and might require tuning.

But all sorts of engineering takes full account of working close to a threshold and avoids setting systems into uncertainly or oscillation by appropriate design.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Bring in Transferable votes and long term planning goes out of the window, sensible policies will also die, as all it takes is for an unpopular but required change to be made and it won't happen, will the public get full briefings? will Intelligence agencies etc provide all the info? if you want better government then Proportional Representation would make more sense

I would rather see the ability to put order of preference on the ballot, that no party could be elected without a clear majority, and if they did not then people's second choices would be taken into consideration.

How about a system that takes into account the actually number of votes each MP received in his constituency ? So, instead of each MP have equal voting "weight" : one MP = one vote, as now, each MP would have the number of votes to cast as he received at his election and the result of parliamentary voting would be decided by counting all the "aye" votes vs counting all the "nay" votes. Would give MP's from numerically larger constituencies more sway than those from numerically smaller ones. It could be that 140 MP's vote "aye" and 139 vote "nay" but those 138 control, say, 80,000 more votes than the "ayes". We could call it Democracy.

I'm sure there are downsides to this and I'm equally sure you guys will flag them.

Shall I get my coat now, or wait a while ?

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"Experience isn't everything - but it's most of it".

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Wasn't that how the TUC used to vote . Can't remember why /if they stopped using it - think there was a good reason ( perhaps related to new labia ??)

er.......mmmmm! Sorry guys, but just think if Hitler had have had such a system!............eh?


...and HE got 44% anyway!......................

Pulled some stats off t'interwb that show that at the last General Election the Parties % shares of the vote were :

LAB = 35.2, CON = 32.3, LIB DEM = 22, Others = 10.5. But - turnout was only 61.4%. You can figure out your own other stats.

These votes gave the following % of Parliament seats to the Parties :

LAB = 55, CON = 30.5, Lib Dem = 9.6, Others = 4.2.

So, for polling just over a third of the votes, Labour occupy over half of the seats. Despite all other Parties collecting a combined 64.8% of the vote , Labour with their meagre 35.2% outnumber everyone else by 355 seats to 290.

What kind of democracy is that ? Why do we let them get away with this ? Surely there has to be a better way ?

Site shown below was source for these stats and it contains stats for all General Elections back to 1945. Makes b****y depressing reading.

www.psr.keele.ac.uk/area/uk/uktable.htm

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"Experience isn't everything - but it's most of it".

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

The whole raison d'etre of the Boundaries Commission is to balance constituencies so as to minimise such differences