Only a third of the public think Parliament is effective in holding government to account: two thirds want improvement of our democratic institutions. We struggle to get more than two in three adults to cast a vote at a general election. It is widely held that anti-politics is the prevailing mood of our times. With depressing regularity though, discussions involving politicians and the media focus not on how to improve our democracy, but rather on how we can better communicate the brilliance of our achievements to those too cynical or ill-informed to see them.
My eighteen years in the Commons have led me to a different conclusion: I think Parliament is weak, ineffective and in need of radical change. It isn’t the way we elect our MPs – as the 2011 referendum showed, people are quite happy to choose a single local MP using First Past the Post.
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