Decentralisation
What does this mean?
Our current system has a focal point, a central hub that controls every branch of government.
This core of ideological self-righteousness is the cause of the inflexibility and we believe it needs to be removed. Removing the centre, Decentralisation.
So what then?
What will government look like?
Here’s our suggestion…
Flexible, Proportionately Representative, Transparent
Flexible
Remember our architect analogy. Well now we’re the architects!
No more political parties, no ideological scripture holding us back. No more incompetent zealots insisting that they know better.
We propose electing cabinet ministers directly.
Without affiliation to an ideological party we can democratically elect a minister for each department based on meritocracy and policy.
(Our choice of kitchen doesn’t determine what our living room looks like)
If we have a separate vote for each department then we may well end up with a Transport minister who’s ideologically left leaning but simultaneously an Education minister who’s leans to the right, if that’s what we vote for.
This makes more sense to us because each department provides a different function so may require different logic, different ideology, in order to achieve the optimal results.
This also gives us the flexibility to change course in each department without undoing progress made in other areas.
(We can have the kitchen we wanted and the garden we wanted but if we change our minds we don’t have to replace the whole house)
Overall this gives us a flexible government, greater public control and, because the public are now in control, ministers are more directly accountable to us.
So what about local MP’s and the Prime Minister, how do we elect them and what do they do now?
Here too, we would like to see an end to party politics.
A ‘local representative’ can not in good faith represent your local area while they represent an ideology and are subject to party whips.
So MP’s free from party affiliation or ideological influence can now do what they were meant to do.
Represent you and your local area.
There’s a few ways you could deal with the Prime Minister position but to maintain the theme of meritocracy we suggest using a combination of public approval surveys and minister approval surveys to shortlist the most effective and capable MP’s.
That shortlist can then be put to public vote.
The aim here is to simply get MP’s and the PM to do their damn job… governing!
Proportional
Now that we’ve got rid of the party system we can make full use of a proportionally representative voting system.
Again, The Electoral Reform Society has far more information on this and which voting method in particular can be a separate discussion, frankly anything is better than FPTP.
But for the purposes of our changes we believe this new voting method can be implemented for every Local MP, the PM and Ministerial vote.
Transparent
Corruption sadly seems to be part of human nature but that doesn’t mean we can’t do something about it.
The changes to the system should already mitigate some of the problem by making the entire system more accountable directly to the public so removing any bad eggs is easier for the public to do but why stop there.
We also recommend an entirely new department of oversight.
This new department will also have a minister elected directly by the public.
They will be responsible for:
Conducting background checks on MPs and Ministers.
Highlighting conflicts of interest or associations with questionable characters.
Monitoring and archiving all communications of elected officials.
Recording movements and meetings of elected officials.
Providing access to all archived meetings and communications for public review.
With today’s technology it is well within our ability to monitor our government as closely as they wish to monitor us. In this instance we’d argue ‘turnabout is fair play’.
In effect MP’s, the PM and Ministers will all have a shadow.
‘We already have a shadow cabinet in the current system, we’re simply suggesting the shadow should actually shadow them, literally be in the room when there’s a meeting, be in the official group chat and be copied in on official e-mails. Then archive it all.’
The shadows from the oversight department should also be vetted and be selected to be as impartial as possible, reporting raw facts.
Not only would this be an effective deterrent to corruption but it also provides the ability to respond to corruption faster, possibly catch it in the act.
In addition to this new department, candidates that were unsuccessful should be given the option to be an additional shadow.
This would provide a pair of eyes to prevent collusion between officials and their shadows and provide these candidates with experience.