How can we end this political madness?

It is possible to date reasonable precisely when UK Politics started to descend into madness, May 7th 2015 when David Cameron won an unexpected (not least by him) majority but found himself caught out by his rash promise of an In/Out Referendum on EU Membership. The rabid Europhobic wing of his Tory Party would not allow him to renege on that promise and there was nothing he could renegotiate with the EU to placate them once they smelt blood.

6 years on, after the divisive Referendum, the May years of political stasis while she attempted to achieve the impossible (a “good” Brexit) and the last 3 years of Johnson’s disastrous Maladministration has left the UK a global laughing stock.

That same rabidly anti-Europe tendency in the Tory Party (and the more extreme versions in UKIP and the Brexit/Reform UK Party) has driven UK Politics further & further to the extremes so for the last 6 years we have lurched from crisis to crisis, making the Conservative Party unmanageable and (with Labour also in disarray for most of that time) impossible to govern the UK sensibly.

All this mayhem has been aided and abetted by much of the media that has done its best to lie and dissemble rather than report objectively, run by powerful owners that do not have the UK’s interests at heart, just wanting to protect their wealth & influence.

So how can we stop this madness carrying on?

Firstly, we need to change our voting system from the the current so-called “First Past the Post” system which gives us Governments with big majorities in Parliament with 1/3 of the electorate voting for them. We must implement a Proportional Representation system so that the representation in Parliament is governed by the number of votes each party gets. If such a system had been used in 2019, the Commons would be divided approximately 283 for the Conservatives, 209 for Labour, 75 for the Lib Dems, 25 for SNP & 17 for the Greens. This would mean that Parties have to cooperate to govern stop extremist views in one p[arty being allowed to gain control of the agenda. There are a number of different schemes for PR (Party List, Alternative Vote, Single Transferable Vote, Additional Member System, and many others), all have their advantages & disadvantages but do give a Parliament that is more representative of the nation’s political make up than our current system. The argument that, because they almost always create Coalitions, they create unstable Governments has been shown to be false by the antics of the Tories in the last 6 years.

Secondly we need to regulate the media better, not to censor what the print or broadcast, but to make sure the ownership is more diverse (not concentrated in the hands of a few rich individuals) and that those owners, be they corporate, individuals or trusts, are resident for tax purposes so they have a real stake in the country they are trying to influence. This will give us a more diverse media and a less politically powerful one.