On the panel were: Dominic Fisher, Chair of the Ladywood constituency Conservative Party, Councillor Paul Tilsley, LibDem Deputy Leader of Birmingham City Council, Jonathan Bartley, Co-Director of the liberal Christian thinktank Ekklesia (and also speaking as a member of the Green Party), and Jack Dromey, Labour MP for Erdington.

How to reform the House of Lords without giving too much power to one party and/or preventing gridlock between two houses?

PT: the problem with an elected upper chamber is if you get it wrong in the electoral cycle you’ll end up with stalemate, but he does think we have to move to an elected Lords.

DF: one of the key things needing changing is the element of patronage in the current system. He wouldn’t want people who ‘feel like they’ve been elected’ – the upper chamber’s role is one of scrutiny, not to vote against the lower house. He would favour some form of pr election, plus some form of appointment by a commission for say five years.

JD: would we have a second chamber at all if we were building a system starting from scratch? Since we’re not, he thinks it should be entirely elected and is opposed to patronage and what it has led to. Any system which continues to have nomination by political parties is prone to corruption. The House of Commons should remain supreme and not be challenged.

JB: agrees wth the others; sings the praises of the approx 200 cross-benchers who are independent of any party – an elected second chamber should not lose this. The coallition agreement to make the House of Lords look like the House of Commons in terms of representation is a mistake.

From the floor: as well as bishops, shouldn’t there be other representitives of ‘organisations’ eg trade unions in there?

Who benefits from the Alternative Vote as proposed in May?

DF: voters will benefit the most – you get to vote with your head and your heart, without needing to vote tactically. He also agrees with the idea of the referendum to decide this, because voters should choose the method of voting, not MPs. He does expect to see more extremes at both ends of both main parties under AV.

PT: not a fan of AV, but that was the best that could be done in the negotiations leading to the coallition agreement; at least every vote would count, which is a start.

JB: voters will benefit. He notes that the BNP and other extreme minority parties oppose AV because they wouldn’t stand a chance under it, whereas with FPTP they do stand a vague chance in some constituencies.

JD: agrees with PT about AV being a poor step; he also thinks the current bill to enable the referendum stinks because of the link with the government’s MP reduction plans. He thinks MPs will have to work harder and not able to take anything for granted, and it will add to the legitimacy of MPs since they’ll be able to say they have the support of 50% of their electorate.

From the floor: is marginalising the minorities actually fair?

Is an elected mayor for Birmingham a good or bad thing for democracy?

PT: one of the problems an independent candidate – even a famous one – would have in standing is being able to mobilise people to shove leaflets through doors, so they don’t stand a chance. He thinks a mayor would be a total disaster for democracy to vest all the power in one person. Stoke-on-Trent is a perfect example of the disaster, as are Doncaster & Hartlepool. The London model of a strategic leader of a regional assembly is totally different from Birmingham and other local authorities. The Birmingham Mail’s failed campaign demonstrated that the people of Birmingham really don’t have an appetite for an elected mayor.

DF: agrees the public has no appetite, but he comments that business is apparently in favour. The test is, does it bring power from Whitehall to the region, or does it actually transfer power from neighbourhoods to the Council House? He thinks the latter, and doesn’t agree with his party on the issue.

JD: thinks it’s particularly silly that the Localism Bill proposes appointing the current council leader as the caretaker mayor until a mayor is properly elected. Again, he thinks it worked in London, but wouldn’t work in Birmingham – but does think we need to have the debate on it. He does think if there was a referendum tomorrow Birmingham would probably vote for a mayor on the basis of a perception that Birmingham doesn’t punch its weight, and predicts that the public might think a mayor would solve that.

From the floor: thinks it would lead to corruption in Birmingham – which is why business is in support, because they’d be able to do dodgy deals…

How representative is Parliament, and what could be done to fix it?

JB: most MPs were opposed by two thirds of their constituents; AV would at least address that. It’s not representitive because it doesn’t represent peoples’ concerns – he thinks AV would broaden that. The last election campaign was a sham, because it focussed on one thing which was not actually relevant anyway. A third of parliamentary seats haven’t changed hands since the Second World war – the whole election is won and lost on a few thousand votes in a few marginal seats, so that’s what the campaign is focussed on.

DF: MPs aren’t representitive on anything – how many creative industries people are in there? The fault of this is not the voting system, but the way parties choose their candidates. He likes Caroline Lucas’ proposals to modernise the way Parliament works, eg electronic voting, to make Parliament more ‘family friendly’.

JD: thinks things have moved in the right direction in terms of the powers of backbenchers, but Select Committees are still nowhere near as powerful as eg Congressional Committees in the USA. He thinks it’s wrong that parliament has become dominated by the professional middle classes and the professional political classes, and wants to see more car workers and care workers in Parliament.

Should we make more use of referendums for important issues?

DF: we’ve never had that tradition. He thinks it’s wrong, and capital punishment is the classic example – predictions are a majority of the public would vote for it, and that would lead to so many disastrous miscarriages of justice.

PT: thinks capital punishment is a red-herring – ‘personally i’m a fan of democracy’. Switzerland demonstrates the increased political engagement of the people there, where they have a referendum culture.

JD: thinks democracy needs reinvigorating by making representatives more accountable to people, rather than moving to a referendum culture. He notes some of the ugly xenophobic outcomes of the Swiss referendum culture.

JB: agrees with a greater use of referendums. He notes that a referendum on Iraq would have said no. (Does he like referendums so long as they come out with the right result?!). He thinks there’s a big problem with the way that elections are run on manifestos that most people probably don’t agree with most of the contents of, and thinks increased referendums would introduce more honesty to political campaigning.

From the floor: Swiss referendums are polarised yes / no questions – what about multichoice? Who and how would it be decided what becomes a referendum issue? How many people voting in a referendum have properly studied the issues anyway?

Amazingly it seemed that all four members of the panel agreed with each on about 80% of the issues during the evening!

“Britain’s First Past The Post voting system could be scrapped if Labour wins the general election, under plans which have been outlined by Gordon Brown. The prime minister wants a referendum on changing to an Alternative Vote system, where candidates are ranked in order of voters’ preference”.

Whereas superficially this proposed referendum to move to what appears to be a fairer voting system appears to be a step in the right direction, I believe the Alternative Vote system – in the context of English politics – to be fundamentally undemocratic.

Why? How AV works is the voter gets the list of candidates & ranks them in order of how much they want each candidate to win. The candidate who received the fewest ’1′ preference votes then gets all their ’2′ preference votes transferred to the other candidates accordingly, until one of the candidates has received over 50% of the votes available.

In a system where there are a multiplicity of parties – ie, where views within parties are sufficiently diverse that splits have occurred – that’s fine. But in English politics, and to a certain extent the other nations of the UK, we are, to all intents and purposes, a three party system. Sure, we’ve got the Green Party, the British National Party, the Unofficial Monster Raving Loony (Rainbow Alliance) Party, & Dr Richard Rogers’ Common Good Party, etc, but we only have three serious parties. And by and large, if supporters of Conservative or Labour are likely to put a second preference on their ballot forms, more often than not they are most likely to allocate that second preference to the Liberal Democrat candidate rather than to the other serious party or one of the amateur candidates.

Which means that in all but the safest seats, the LibDems will be favoured disproportionately to their actual support. All credit to the LibDems, they are saying the plan doesn’t go far enough.

It’s possible that if AV is introduced more serious parties might emerge – most likely as a result of the broad coalitions of the three main parties fragmenting, leading to such as the Judean Peoples’ Front and the Peoples’ Front of Judea, alongside the Popular Front of Judea. But would that really be such a good thing? Party politics is divisive enough, without it being made even more divisive; all that would happen would be the introduction of coalition governments comprising the same actual people, but just paying their subscription fees to more parties.

If Gordon Brown is serious about improving democratic accountability, then not only does he need to think about something better than replacing one flawed vote counting system with another flawed vote counting system, but also think more radically about the whole relationship between the People and our elected representives, and the system of cabinet government with winner-takes-all.