It’s in two parts (after v brief remarks by MBG editor):
(1) Current proposals for the reform of Parliament
(2) Some shakers and movers on the reform of Parliament

MBG editor RDN remarks:
I have elsewhere argued that the House of Commons in principle is supreme and has total command over everything it does. MPs could grab control of Parliament and the Government any time they had the cohesion and courage to do so. The MPs (and the public) need not wait for Government or party initiative on any of this.

There is a rather circular argument that the current MPs have too little moral authority to initiate reforms. On the other hand, if they don’t it will be all the more arguable that they are showing no leadership.

It is great that almost all current proposals want MPs to have more power – discredited as they are supposed to be by a tinpot scandal over small sums of allowance money rather badly-paid legislators were told to pitch for anyway they liked.

(1) Current proposals for the reform of Parliament

MPs to elect Select Committees and chairmen
This is a high-impact low-risk way to increase MPs’ scrutiny of and power over Ministers and ministries

MPs to initiate legislation
It is hard to predict what this would achieve though it would presumably weaken the Government, which has the power of taking the initiative in legislation.

MPs to control parliament’s time-table
This would very much weaken the government’s power to get its way over legislation – which might be seen as weakening or strengthening democratic control and authority.

Fixed term parliaments
At the moment the Prime Minister has the power in effect to dissolve Parliament, provided he can command a majority in the House of Commons. This change would weaken the Prime Minister’s current power over the Government’s supporters and the opposition. There would need to be new rules to determine how to get rid of a very unpopular government before its due term.

MPs to face re-selection
This would weaken the power of the sitting (incumbent) MP but also of the party machinery which currently acts as gatekeeper. The Tories are already experimenting with “primaries”.

MPs face recall by constituents
This would strengthen the power of constituents over their Member of Parliament – and that would weaken the MPs’ ability to speak freely as a representative (rather than as a mandated delegate).

Smaller Parliament
This would make Parliament more manageable but it would increase the size of constituencies and increase the number of constituents each MP is representing (arguably making it harder for each MP to identify with a neighbourhood or take each constituent complaint as seriously).

PM by direct election
This would tend to the “presidential” aspect of the premiership and raise issues of accountability. At the moment, the PM is in the end a creature of Parliament and this approach would weaken that.

Ministers from outside Parliament
This would increase the “gene pool” for the top jobs but reduce Parliamentary control over the executive. It would also reduce the likelihood of MPs becoming ministers which might reduce their subservience to their party and Government managers. It might also reduce the attraction of becoming an MP.

Proportional Representation
In general this produces “fairer” representation, makes forming a government more a matter of party negotiation in private, increases the turnover of governments, weakens the MPs’ connection with a constituency and increases their dependency on a party (though it increases the number of parties in play).

Citizens to trigger referendums or debates in parliament
This would complicate politics, possibly in a good way, though it would increase the likelihood of populist “flair-up” issues taking a disproportionate amount of Parliamentary time.

A new less confrontational chamber for Parliament
Arguably British politics stuck in an unproductive tribal shouting match and the present chamber encourages that. Perhaps a post-class  and post-ideological needs a less confrontational chamber to express and allow an new consensualism to emerge. It might be even more boring to too may people, though.

Elections to the House of Lords
It is hard to see how to avoid making this into a new vehicle for party power, or for show-off independents. It is easy to imagine more imaginative selection processes, free of party power, to find talented, experienced people for the revising chamber.

(2) Some shakers and movers on the reform of Parliament

The time has come for Spectator readers to save the constitution from politicians
Fraser Nelson
Spectator
3 June 2009
(with PoliticsHome)

Discusses:
Voter recall of MPs
MPs reselection by constituents (every 4 years or whatever)
Office for Budget responsibility (being considered by David Cameron)
Annual departmental justification of spending
Larger MP salaries, maybe with no expenses
Whether the existing parliament ought to frame reform
PM to be directly elected
Some/all ministers appointed from outside parliament
Smaller parliament

The real cure for Britain’s political malaise
Philip Stephens
Financial Times
2 June 2009

Discusses:
Gordon Brown considering voting reform
David Cameron wants “Massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power change”
DC “thinks about” fixed term Parliaments
DC considers constituency recall of MPs
Stephens on decentralising: “They would prefer to strangle local democracy than risk their own popularity.”
Local business taxes to increase local democracy

David Cameron leads Alan Johnson in the new battle to be the boldest reformer
James Forsyth
Spectator
30 May 2009

Discusses:
How DC has a very radical reform rhetoric and less solid actual plans
Brown’s John Smith Memorial lecture, 1996: “New Labour wants to give power to the people”
Brown began premiership “proposing changes that will transfer power from the Prime Minister and the executive”
DC to Power Inquiry, May 2006: Power has gone to bureaucrats in Brussuels, judges and
Quangocracts
Cameron’s “speech on Tuesday” proposed “Citizen’s Intitative” and a 5 percent trigger for referendum
Proposed transfer of power “from Brussels to Britain; from judges to the people; from bureaucracy to democracy.”

This is a constitutional crisis. Dave dare not blow it
Fraser Nelson
Spectator
16 May 2009

Discusses:
Hansard Society say: Only 19 percent say Parliament is working for me
20,000 voters or 0.05 percent of voters hold power, an insider remarks: “It’s the swing voters in swing seats who decide the balance of power. We have computers to work out where they live. We can love bomb them.”

Why we need separation of powers
Andrew Turnbull
(Former cabinet secretary and head of the Home Civil Service)
Financial Times
2 June 2009

Discusses:
“Vernon Bogdanor’s important new book, The New British Constitution”
“More radically, we could follow French practice, which requires any deputy appointed to the government to stand down from the National Assembly. Or we could adopt the German/Swedish model of politically appointed, but non-elected, ministers.

“The Commons does not control which committees are established, who chairs them, who can table legislation and how time is allocated. All this is controlled by the government through the Whips office.”

The Plan by Daniel Hannan and Carswell:

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-plan-twelve-months-to-renew-britain/3704883

The Power Inquiry
chaired by Helena Kennedy

(Conservative) Democracy Taskforce, chaired by Ken Clarke
(A summary)
by Hélène Mulholland
The Guardian
14 January 2008

At this writing, 6000 people have looked at the piece on Number 10′s channel. It isn’t by any means the most popular of GB’s outing on YT. Several others have put him up there with Tony Blair’s ratings. He is said to look awful – hopelessly winsome and fulsome. It’s true, he does. But if you look at some other postings, he’s a revelation. Try this one on globalisation. (Here’s the text of it.) He’s funny and sharp and quite clever, just like his fans say he often is in private.

I say “quite clever”: I have looked briefly elsewhere at the evidence as to GB’s intellectuality.

In general, it’s important that politicians should post informal, short material on line. It’s one of the few arenas in which they stand a chance of reaching the young, and do it on their own terms – without the dreaded intermediation of the professional media cynics.

The YT announcement of the MPs’ expenses idea was horribly wrong of course. Let’s list the reasons.

(1) The young audience couldn’t be expected to know how this sort of initiative should not properly come from the PM at No 10. (It isn’t a government matter after all, and this audience were being misled that it might be.)

(2) Hot-foot announcements are the best way to convey the idea that an initiative has not been thought-through, debated, and made consensual. That’s to say: social media are precisely useless for the work GB chose to use them for that day.

(3) The social media are an elephant trap for leaders, from whom – in perception terms – we need dignity above all. YT is never obviously a good vehicle for dignity and is at least a testing one. That’s its downside.

(4) In a classic PR blunder, GB sets off talking uncontroversially and virtuously about how he’d like people to aspire to be MPs the way they aspire to be firemen. And then, having grabbed our attention as a mentor or a senior statesman, he uses the opportunity to play a political game. It’s a cheat.

Still, GB and the rest of us have much more to gain than lose by keeping the PM on YT.

The signs are not good at this moment. The Tories are leaving it perilously late to make well-grounded policy statements. They are having at best a mediocre credit crunch. David Cameron seems a litle too keen to hog the limelight.

Worse, in terms of their presenting themselves as solid, their shadow chancellor seems to have no idea how to draw the line between being a man of the world and being a plaything to the super-rich. 

George Osborne has a private office part-funded by a Rothschild and schmoozes an oligarch client of the Russian mafia state on his yacht while it is moored off the villa of another Rothschild.

This fuels gleeful speculation that David Cameron’s loyalty to an inner coterie of toffs may be unhelpful.

Tending the other way is plain fact that people like Michael Gove are plainly important to the Conservative’s bid for power.  What’s more, the shadow cabinet seems to have its fair share of talent, Eton or not. It could afford to let the maverick David Davis do his diva thing. 

We need every sign that David Cameron is proud of his savvy, grounded heavy-hitters and wants them to develop and promote consistent policy. And care about the proprieties.

Gordon Brown is almost certainly not a great intellect (though he has his fans on that score). He reads serious books, but that proves rather little. According to John Lloyd, Gordon Brown’s thinking is more interestingly of the right than of the left. For a man who wants to get things done, he certainly doesn’t seem very diplomatic. But he may have grasped the right of end of some important sticks. He may be an important figure in the history of 21st Century globalisation.

Gordon Brown is a serious man and seems seriously interested in the world economy. He has spoken rather well about globalisation and the need for open markets, light-touch regulation and the needs of the world’s poor. Several years ago, he developed ideas for how the G8 and others could reduce the debt of the poorest coutries. He has consistently argued for increased state aid flows to the Third World. He has argued for some months that the IMF ought to become an early warning system for the world’s economy. He has suggested that the World Bank become the bank of environmental security as well as economic development. He wants the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank) to bcome the location of international regulatory oversight. 

Actually, there is a good deal of serious doubt that reducing Third World debt has been quite as helpful as supposed, or that increasing aid flows (insofar as it has happened) is all that valuable. In particular, it isn’t obvious that specific Brown proposals from the 1990s on the means of debt reduction have been adopted.

Even now, it isn’t clear quite how original Gordon Brown’s ideas for global financial reform really are. And of course we have no idea how sucessful they will be.

It would be fair to say that Gordon Brown does not seem to have done himself any favours in persuading the rest of the world’s leaders to follow his lead. He seems deliberately at various points to have snubbed his fellow EU leaders and George Bush. 

Still, we may yet come to accept that the “Brown Plan”for dealing with the credit crunch really sprang from his brain and was a success. It may yet emerge that his wider ideas are also really his, and that he steered them into happy reality.

In short, it just possible that this brooding, perhaps paranoid, certainly difficult man had talents which turned out to be hugely valuable.

David Cameron was making one of his toga-moment speeches, and no harm in that. He is keen – as all politicians are – to say that government is over-centralised and should be devolved, decentralised and generally returned to civil society, local authorities and The People.

The problem that local authorities attract few voters and spend mostly national money rather scuppers some of that. But the concern here is that the anti-Whitehall bias. DC was talking as though we could have some internet-driven “Wisdom of the Crowd” and that it would be fairer and more efficient than anything civil servants could give us. Here’s a flavour of what he said:

The bureaucratic age

I have described the 20th century as the ‘bureaucratic age’. With huge advances in communications and travel, it became possible to concentrate power in the central state. Wise men in Whitehall had a monopoly of both information and capability…….

At the same time, our national culture emphasised conformity and knowing your place. There was a sense that top-down control was not only practical and efficient, but that it was also fair and moral.

So even after the denationalisation of the economy, the apparatus of civic and social organisation remains firmly under central control. Schools, hospitals, police forces, town councils… all are remotely controlled by central government.

The post-bureaucratic age

I believe that it’s time to abandon that model once and for all. It is not fair and moral, just as it is not practical and efficient, for the state to control society….. Society no longer emphasises conformity and knowing your place…

Democratic control

Why? Two reasons. First, because local democratic control works, well – locally: it allows communities to tailor customised solutions to local problems, rather than having to fit into a national template.

And second – perhaps paradoxically – local control works nationally too. Diversity strengthens the country as a whole. From diversity and competition and picking up tips from each other and making mistakes and learning from them….