Did you get your “many” and your “few” muddled ?

The reasons that “european” issues are not getting much coverage fall under the following headings:

(1) Displaced by a domestic scandal
(2) Issues of little interest to public anyway
(3) The parliament has few powers to change anything
(4) The PR electoral system means that it makes little difference anyway

So, in summary, we will have an election based on domestic issues with voters taking the opportunity to protest with little fear of the consequences if some odd people get to join this (extremely expensive) super-Quango.

In terms of Europe, what the public really want is a referndum on the Lisbon treaty, but of course Brown has denied us that. No doubt he came under some fierce pressure from Brussels, Paris and Berlin who have no illusions as to what the outcome would be, but in any case Brown does not have the courage to agrue the point – hence he has been absolutely invisible in terms of the euro-elections.

A very good question.

The Euro “election” is , of course, for the benefit of the politicians who participate in it, rather than the voters.

Perhaps that is why the former ( of whom there are many) make little effort to inform the latter ( of whom there are few).

It is as though this sham election , whose purpose is to return Party hacks to their Ivory Tower Talking Shops in Brussels & Strasbourg, has been accepted by our Press & Public as just another spendaholic Quango, with no relevance to anyone outside in the real world…….just another part of “the b****y system”

Does anyone know who their MEP is ?
Does anyone understand the voting system?
Does anyone care?

In Government the SNP have entered a voluntary concordat with local government which has a set of jointly agreed outcomes.

This allows each council to decide how it will pursue each objective and at what pace, with each free to priorities them as it see fit.

So on that count we are already implementing what Cameron is only now suggesting.

As to Independence, as far as I know we haven’t had an Independence question in a Scottish poll since before the expenses story broke and I’d be interested in seeing one.

The last SNP poll conducted by Yougov showed that a change to a Tory Government had an effect of peoples likelihood to support Independence.

It may well be that Cameron out performing Brown during this affair might have changed that , as could talk of voting and constitutional change on a UK scale.

However, we could equally see dissatisfaction with Westminster boosting support for Independence. We’ll just have to wait and see if we get that Scottish weekend Euro Poll.

Peter.

If pushed on PR I would opt for single member STV constituencies and cull to 500 as well. I was thinking more along the lines of Deltic Dave’s conversion to local government; something which his party eviscerated during the Thatcher years. If we are to have a mature look at local politics then we must accept that service delivery cannot be universally “standardised” and must trust the local electorate to place the pressure when required.

Cameron is winning the electoral cycle in terms of heaslines at the mo and it will be interesting to see how this plays out in the polling data for the next few weeks; especially with the Euro’s coming up.

As for your own party, anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that quite a few will plump for the SNP at a national level but would vote against independance in a referendum – again something which the polls bear out?

Remove “interesting” for plagarised……..

Given that PR and electoral reform has been debated in it’s numerous variants for decades you could level that criticism at anyone.

I am a big fan of PR and I can see how it’s advocates are seeing this as an opportunity to advance it, but it’s not something to be rushed at in a crisis becuase you could get it terribly wrong.

I am a strong supporter of open list PR as it takes power away from the parties if we have seats that have more than five or six members because then large parties have to put up more candidate in each seat who under open list compete as much with each other as their opponents.

Thats a good way to get rid of the deadwood,

As a compromise I suspect we might get STV in single member seats where the first to get 50% wins. That would give every member a mandate without the big parties suffering the way they would potentially in multi member seats.

It’s not a particularly good type of PR and is very much a littled reform, but I suspect that you could get a majority of Labour and Tory MP’s to back it on the Turkey principle that it would mean most of them would have a good chance of avoiding the potential general election cull.

I shorted, I’d favour open list STV and seven member seats, but if we get anything we are more likely to get 500 single member STV constituencies.

Peter.

However he is hitting the right notes at the moment. And this shows in the steady 10+ leads.