Constitutional fandango

Here in the UK we are endlessly deferring the question of constitutional reform, whether it's of the House of Lords or of the electoral system for the Commons. Clearly it is more important to deal with the mess of the lower house first, though of course MPs, when they bother, are more interested in tinkering with the upper house.

It's enough to make one despair.

In Zimbabwe we have just witnessed a remarkable election, the aftermath of which has seen the courts brought in simply to get the results published! The final paragraph of the Beeb's latest report makes depressing reading - the situation is darkly farcical at best.

Meanwhile in Turkey, the separation of powers has recently contributed to a constitutional crisis, with members of the judiciary voting to begin legal action against the executive (specifically, against the ruling party, recently returned at the polls with a significant majority) for violating certain constitutional principles. Zaman, a paper symathetic to the governing AK Party and its exceedingly moderate Islamism (which is really only an attempt to restrain the extremist secularism that has barricaded itself in certain corners of Turkish public life), is full of stories, which are well worth pursuing. They put the UK's constitutional and political weaknesses into perspective, they highlight the important principle that law is not ideoogically neutral (which Islam, at least, recognises, in contrast to the duplicitious thought-systems of Western liberal humanism and pluralism) and they teach the reader about a fascinating country.

no time for complacency

Democracy is not a panacea, in case you were wondering. For all the freedoms we enjoy in this country, there's a lot that's rubbish. The nature of the voting system we have could be called into question, for instance, along with successive governments' attitude towards its reform.

makevotescount.org.uk has sent a trenchant e-mail round in the wake of the release of the Government's review of electoral systems. (What's with that big right-left stripe on the cover? Are we meant to be thinking about rushing back into an ever-vanishing past under the auspices of a poorly integrated Union...?!)

MVC say:

We had not expected the review itself to be much different from what was published on Thursday. What has taken us by surprise, disappointed, even angered, us - and will hopefully galvanise all of us in our campaigning efforts over the coming weeks and months - is the Government's determination to downplay what is actually in the report and close down opportunities for the public to have their say. Voting matters and so do the systems used. Yet the Government no longer seems to care about voters' real world experiences and opinions of elections. That was certainly the impression given by Michael Wills when he claimed (in his Department's press release) that the "current voting system for UK general elections works well". The voting system may be working well for him and other MPs, but not necessarily for voters. He would struggle to substantiate that claim - either from polling data or from the review itself - if he was looking at the issue more objectively from the voters' perspective. The Government is in danger of treating voters with contempt, by not going beyond the academic exercise of the review and now shutting out parlimentary and public debate. For us "democracy isn't deskbound". Together we need to push the Ministry of Justice to take the debate beyond Westminster and the confines of parties and politicians who have a vested interest in the status quo. And we need to encourage Gordon Brown to show the leadership needed to take this issue forward and help realise the new politics that he has said he is keen to usher in.

Sad, but vested interests (in this case the MPs themselves, though the Lib Dems are to be commended for their stand on PR) do have a tendency to arrange things to suit themselves. Conspiracy theories not necessary: greed and inertia survive Ockham's razor and explain rather a lot...