Order of the Bath

It is May and our thoughts turn to elections. Somewhere in the country always has elections at the start of May and this year it is our turn, so I have a few thoughts around this theme to pass on.

The first relates to the story of the Fire Brigade’s Union which, in common with a number of bodies like this, has a problem with its council. For very good reasons I am sure, sometime in the past they wanted to make sure that their minority members were adequately represented so they arranged for their council to have a member to represent each of the Women’s, Gay and Ethnic Minority interests (women are a minority among fire fighters). Now, rather late, they have discovered that this gives some members double representation and a more or less effective veto on certain issues before council. To resolve this they are trying to abolish them.

As I heard it announced the first time it said “the fire-fighters union is trying to remove the gay, black and women representatives from the council”—a more poorly worded statement I can’t imagine! But even when we and they understand what they really mean, they still have a problem—other representatives on the council also represent minority groups, but of a more industrial nature. So it looks like they need to thoroughly review their constitution and understand what democracy really means.

The same applies to political parties, particularly the Labour Party. The unions have always had a block vote “on behalf of their members,” though this has been diluted in recent years. All the time it exists, some members who also belong to a union effectively have two votes on party affairs.
Another misguided attempt to manipulate the rules to try to equalise the representation is the biased shortlist—e.g. all women thus disenfranchising people before they even vote.

Representational government is only fair and seen to be fair if it is not tinkered with. If you want (as we should) to ensure proportionate representation of all groups entitled to vote they you must have a proportional representation voting system. There is no other choice.

This entry was posted on 2 May 2007 at 09:33 by Rick and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.