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| MPs' expenses: Alan Meale won battle over £1,300 for 'garden cabin' A Labour MP who was paid more than £13,000 in gardening expenses over four years won a dispute over £1,300 he claimed for the cost of replacing his "garden cabin". telegraph.co.uk |
Senate Democrats Unite to Advance Key Health Care Reform Bill The Senate has voted by 60 to 40 to close debate on landmark health care reform legislation backed by U.S. President Barack Obama and fiercely opposed by Republican lawmakers. Now, the divided chamber appears to be heading towards a vote to pass the bill on Thursday, Christmas Eve. www1.voanews.com |
Petraeus: Airline Bomb Plot Had Roots in Yemen General David Petraeus says US, Yemen shared information about al-Qaida activity that 'resulted in failed attack on airliner www1.voanews.com |
Iraqi Forces Seize Explosives in Baghdad Raid Government spokesman says raid followed tip from citizen about possible car bombings in city www1.voanews.com |
If Britain wants change that counts, there's an election it can vote in today | Timothy Garton Ash Ideological differences between the parties are hugely exaggerated. What matters most is to transform the systemCall it the Politician's ВParadox. Democratic Вpoliticians must insist that their party deserves to win every election. But if one party won every election, there would never be a change of government – something that is essential to democracy. So at some point, if you're in a democracy, it must be time for a change. We've reached that point in Britain.New Labour has not given us the worst government in our modern history, not by a long chalk. But it has grown weary and sleazy, as all parties do after more than 10 years in power. For Labour to stagger on for another term would be good neither for the country nor for the party. Look what happened to the Conservatives after they staggered on till 1997. Some Labour politicians privately acknowledge this, as much by what they don't say as by what they do. But publicly, they continue to insist that a victory for anyone else will be the end of civilisation as we know it.So beside the Politician's Paradox we have the Politician's Pretence, which is that we face a dramatic choice between fundamentally different visions of the way forward for society, the economy, the family, the nation etc. They all say that, don't they? They think they have to. And journalists cheer them on, with added hype, to inject some badly needed excitement into a limping story. For is it not the journalist's supreme moral duty to sell more papers and attract more viewers? In the Westminster loop, the Politician's Pretence and the Journalist's Pretence reinforce each other.But the boring truth is that, on policy and ideology, the differences between the major parties are smaller than at any election I can remember. As the veteran political analyst David Marquand observes in his history of modern British democracy, the Conservatives, following David Cameron's rebranding of them as "compassionate" and even "progressive", are now "swimming in the same crowded post-Thatcherite and post-socialist pool as Labour and the Liberal Democrats".If you did a blindfold wine-tasting of the parties' specific policies on many economic, social and security issues, without seeing the party label on the bottle, then you could often end up ascribing them to the wrong party. ВPerhaps 70 to 80% of policy content is now, so to speak, interoperable. Hence those silly little rows you hear on the Today programme about who stole whose policy clothes.I don't mean to suggest that some of these individual policies are not better than others, and that it does not matter which management team implements them for UK plc. And there are still some important differences: over Europe, for example, or the treatment of the very rich. But there are not solid, ideologically defined, discrete and coherent sets of policies that consistently distinguish one party from another. The argument about "investment versus cuts", for example, has run through the middle of the Labour leadership. What we are talking about here is variants of liberal democratic capitalism. Compared with the stark ideological contrasts of 30 years ago, which pitted deep red against deepest blue, this is shades of pink, terracotta and magenta.Voters sense this. They are fed up with politicians anyway, particularly after the expenses scandal. And they know that, whichever party wins, a soaring budget deficit will compel the new government to prescribe some very nasty medicine. Nothing to look forward to. So probably most people will only start getting interested when – in April, if the election is on 6 May – it comes to the televised debates between the three main party leaders. These will be the political equivalent of The X ВFactor or Britain's Got Talent, with Gordon Brown taking the part of Susan Boyle. But will Nick or Dave prove to be politics' Joe McElderry?While we await that apotheosis of contemporary British democracy, there is one genuinely fundamental issue which this election could affect. This issue is not who governs us but how we are governed. For we British now live in a state which is at once the most ramshackle and the most intrusive among the advanced democracies of the world. Marquand reminds us that it is more than 35 years since the then judge Leslie (later Lord) Scarman described the need for a "new constitutional settlement" in Britain, a country whose system of government the Conservative Lord ВHailsham soon thereafter characterised as "elective dictatorship".In the meantime, through a process of incoherent, piecemeal reform that owes more to Heath Robinson than to Edmund Burke, our constitutional arrangements have become even more bizarre. Yet our overcentralised, overmighty executive is mightier than ever, while at the same time it intrudes ever more insistently into the nooks and crannies of our once private lives. So the last thing we need now is to swap one elective dictator for another.My approach to this election is Вtherefore to ask: what can it contribute to fundamental reform of the state we're in? How can I best use my vote and my voice to advance this change we really need? The answer is complicated, and the change will not come in a single step. Much will depend, for example, on whether the election produces a hung parliament, and if so, what variant of a hung parliament.I'll come back to the voting options in another column, but meanwhile, if you share this goal, here are two things to watch and one to do. A parliamentary committee chaired by Tony Wright has proposed some good reforms to strengthen the independence of parliament, its ability to scrutinise the government, and its responsiveness to public concerns. The Wright committee produced a draft resolution to be passed by the House of Commons, summarising its proposals, but forces in the two largest parties (not the Lib Dems) have been stalling it for two months. As the Guardian urged at the time, Вparliament should just get on and do the Wright thing.Second, Brown yesterday repeated his commitment to a referendum, to be held only after this election, on introducing the Alternative Vote system for general elections. This is little and very late, but it could be attached as an amendment to a constitutional reform bill currently going through parliament, and might then still be passed in the legislative "wash up" before the election. It should be. It would stake a claim for electoral reform from which a Conservative government would find it harder to resile.The thing you can do at once is go to www.power2010.org.uk/votes and vote for what you think are the top five political reforms that Britain needs. The Power 2010 movement will then confront parliamentary candidates with these demands, and try to persuade them to endorse them.The more of us join in, the more oomph this campaign will have. As I write, the top five are 1) a proportional voting system, 2) scrapping ID cards and rolling back the database state, 3) fixed-term parliaments, 4) a written constitution, and 5) English votes for English laws – but that list can change when you all vote. No need to wait till May. This is an election you can hold today.General election 2010David CameronLiberal DemocratsConservativesLabourElectoral reformTimothy Garton Ashguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |