I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the example you give.

I would think it was wrong if you were to write a book aimed for the Hungarian market slagging off the UK.

Interesting to hear a tory supporter criticise Hannan anyway.

Hannan is entitled to his views but if he feels so strongly he should explain about his proposals for british health reform in the UK media.

I am married to an American and we alternate our Christmases between the UK and the US.

This year we were in Chicago, where I happened to visit an excellent Barnes & Noble bookstore. Prominently in the Top 10 book shelf was “The New Road to Serfdom” by Daniel Hannan MEP. There was a large publicity garb advertising the book, saying something like “In this book, British MEP Daniel Hannan warns Americans not to Europeanise and turn into a socialist basket case like the UK”. maybe I’m paraphrasing, but that was the jist.

Am I alone in feeling furious that a member of parliament whose wages are paid for by myself and other British taxpayers is so prominently slagging off his own country in the US?

One of the best characteristics of Americans in my view is that they do not slag off their own country or people overseas. Those that do, eg Micheal Moore, are detested by left and right alike. I wish we were more like that.

If I were to be living in the South East region I would definitely never vote for Hannan.

What would the ballot paper look like for a 58 member constituency? And on a list system all sorts of weird parties would get MEPs (the BNP would sail in ) with one or two percent of the pole. If you tried to overcome this problem with a minimum threshold (e.g. 5%) you would lock out independents even more conclusively than now.

Of course, many people would like single member European constituencies back, but the European ant-national sovereignty people would never allow it.

More generally, England is already outrageously centralised, denying adequate democratic input, compared to just about any other country in the world with anything like a democratic system. And Joseph’s point does nothing at all about the inequitably political treatment that results from the grossly disparate sizes, in therms of population, of the currently recognised countries in the UK.

It is glaringly obvious that the currently gerrymandered boundaries lead to the election of more minor party candidates in the South of England than the North.

A belated reply to H. Hemmelig. It is true that with open list STV the parties still get to choose who goes on their list. They can also cut down electoral choie, and I believe that overseas they often do, by putting up less that a full list. For instance, if they are likely only to get one seat, they may put up two canidates instead of a full list – which has the advatage of making the ballot paper more manageable! But they will still put up more candidates than places, which gives electors the oprion as to which one to put first. Very importantly, there is also the option to vote across lists. For instance, I don’t vote Tory, but if I had ten votes here I would certainly consider voting for Dan Hannan and Nirj Deva, because I think that individually they do a good job.

For the next election, would it be possible at least to tweak the system so that whilst voting for a list electors could number the candidates within that list in order of preference?