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Sam B's avatar

Seems referenda are the only way to make UK constitutional change happen these days. And I suspect the politicians aren't mad keen on them right now.

But *longer* term limits? Given our democratic participation already comprises little more than picking one among a selection of inadequate options every 5 years, that doesn't seem very palatable. Might as well just go full monarchy.

Plus, 5 years was long enough to do some big reform like creating the welfare state, or launching Thatcherism.

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In The Sight of the Unwise's avatar

I think this is a fair objection but not an insuperable one. The problem at the moment is not actually a lack of voting. Between council elections, mayoral elections (in an increasing number of places), other-parliament elections (in Scotland and Wales) and constitutional/electoral changes put to a referendum, we're all doing quite a lot of voting. And of course GEs frequently happen more frequently than every five years. But as everyone knows, local/regional government is so pathetically weak that most of this voting means almost nothing, and so turnout is usually low and it doesn't feel like meaningful democratic participation. I do think this is really bad and will sketch out why local government needs to have some real fundraising power of its own in future posts. But if you fix that, I could see longer term limits being more acceptable.

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Sam B's avatar

Maybe longer terms for central government could be acceptable if there's more devolved power (though still feels to me like a solution in search of a problem). But in any case we seem to be stuck: it's difficult to devolve real power without reforming how sub-national government is financed, but trying to do that appears to be political kryptonite. The last attempt was the poll tax, before that there's nothing in living memory. Council Tax, which is hardly popular and obviously bonkers, nevertheless appears to be unreformable. Hard to see Sir Keir taking placing his chips on reform of local taxation. An interesting thought experiment is: what it would actually take for any government to take this on?

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