A mixed bag

I am going to continue not making much comment on the US elections, all the professionals are making a lot of mistakes calling these elections, I can't imagine I am going to do much better. The two things I will say are, 1) personally I think it is good for the process if the primaries remain an open field for as long as possible and 2) in the same way that Gordon's messing up of the stop and go play in October brought forward a campaign for fixed term Parliaments this presidential election is getting lots of talk going about the electoral college system.
A brief warning that with the Six Nations starting, the resumption of of the IRB Sevens and a full menu of cricket kicking off all in February there will probably be a lot more talk of sport in this blog.
I am sure all of us would like to control how we are remembered when we are gone. Major Andrew Olmsted was a blogger, both on his own site and for the Rocky Mountain News decided to leave his own final post as part of the preparation all soldiers make for when their time comes.
Lastly it surprised me that even independent school pupils are as much part of the mélange of mannerless savages and need to be taught how to behave at table.

Campaign for fixed term Parliaments

I wrote what I think about fixed term Parliaments
10 days ago. Since Gordon Brown trifled with the affections of returning officers up and down the country a lot more people, from all tints and shades of the political spectrum, have said similar things. There is now an organised Campaign for Fixed Term Parliaments with an associated Facebook group, if you agree with the aims, go and join up.
There is also a new Bill before Parliament I am not as happy with this as I am with the campaign group being set up as it doesn't seam to have any provisions to deal with lame duck governments or other issues of confidence. It also seems to be technically unconstitutional as it has no provision for the monarch's right to dissolve parliament at their will which the current arrangements (the Septennial Act 1715 as amended by the Parliament Act 1911) support.

That end of term feeling

Give me five reasons why we shouldn't have fixed term parliaments. I can only think of one reason why, no prime minister ever really wants to give away any of their electoral power; it is the same reason why virtually all of the other reforms to our electoral practice have never been given a serious outing on the legislative timetable. The current situation where we don't know if Gordon will or won't call a general election means that great swathes of the most important people in the country are too busy worrying about winning and loosing seats rather than doing their jobs. Every expert commentator seems to agree on one thing, that even Gordon doesn't know 100% for certain what he is going to do, and therefore all the other ministers of the crown are in the dark. While I know that jobs based on patronage aren't renowned for stability or piece of mind, but in this case there is no way that any of 30 people who attend cabinet are at this point concentrating more on their jobs than on the prospect of being out of a job before Christmas. Of course in opposition things are different, the 1992 Labour Party manifesto said:

This general election was called only after months of on-again, off-again dithering which damaged our economy and weakened our democracy. No government with a majority should be allowed to put the interests of party above government, as the Conservatives have done. Although an early election will sometimes be necessary, we will introduce as a general rule a fixed parliamentary term.

A counter example is the circus that is the electoral cycle for the President of the United States. I do feel however that this is more to do with the shear amount of money floating around and term limits than fixed terms themselves. The only way to be sure on this is through experimentation, we leave the current system running as a baseline reference and then set up several parallel supreme heads of the executive branch of the US government. We could then alter all the appropriate variables, one of the systems would have strict funding caps, one would have no fixed terms, one would have no term limits and so on. This would give us the opportunity to appraise my thesis and inform the UK government as to the likely effects.

None of this is new; in 2001 Tony Wright (Lab, Cannock Chase) introduced as a Private Members Bill the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill which in less than 800 words would have solved all these problems. Instead everyone in political life is at the equivalent of the end of term at school, fidgeting, distracted, playing games and wondering what is going to happen in the summer holidays, in fact anything other than working.