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Starmer’s Labour must promise proportional representation [1]
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Date: 2023-03
The Labour leader’s warning was stark, his modernising message clear. He spoke of “a worrying loss of confidence in Parliament” and “mounting sense of disenchantment and cynicism about our political system”.
The leader of the British opposition said it was “no answer to say: ‘Leave it to Whitehall’” and called for a new deal between the people and the state that would put “the citizen centre stage”. He proposed a package of reforms to revitalise our “anachronistic and inadequate” democratic process.
Some were waiting for a commitment to electoral reform, to proposals for proportional representation to slacken the grip on power of the big Westminster political machines. But in this they were disappointed.
Although uncannily similar to Keir Starmer’s New Year speech about “Westminster’s sticking plaster politics”, this lecture was in fact made by another Labour leader, John Smith, 30 years ago. Speaking on 1 March 1993, Smith set out the most comprehensive agenda of constitutional and democratic reform ever made by any Labour leader.
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Why, then, did he not promise a new system for electing national governments? Why did Tony Blair later abandon a manifesto promise for a referendum on voting reform? And what lessons should Starmer take from that decision, and the Tory disaster that has followed it?
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/proportional-representation-electoral-reform-labour-tony-blair-john-smith-charter-88/
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