The client state, in a first past the post, one member voting system democracy, faces the problem that clients are created in too few constituencies. Both industrial and manufacturing decline constituencies, and longstanding affluence and stability sequestered from technologically-engendered decline constituencies, create pile-ups of unused votes.
Except that people freed from the need to work will tend to migrate to areas with the highest social wage: decent neighbours - resulting in decent schools, lower levels of disturbed social behaviour, better communications systems, better social-networking opportunities, etc. The chances of affluent people migrating from the Home Counties to areas of the country with collapsed socioeconomic systems are, of course, much lower than benefit-dependent migration from despoiled areas to pastures new; as many coastal and rural constituencies once bastions of Conservative support show.
Which obvious observation is very much to the advantage of the Labour client-base creation policy. The self-exportation of your excess votes into the heartlands of 'privilege' damages the enemy voter base while lowering your client-state building costs. Unfortunately it also alters people's local environments at times quite dramatically.
Back in the USSR there were internal passports to control such internal migration, democratic expression having other means of control; unauthorised external migration was controlled by execution, as so many from eastern Europe discovered.
While, in our country we can still (though there is a query for how much longer) live where we like, it may be time to reconsider a voting system designed to reflect commonality of interest within a small geographic area and replace it with a system that reflects majority voting across much larger areas for national elections. The disparity of interests becoming quite such a sore point in many areas can be addressed locally by returning its lost powers to local government.
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4 comments:
Bring back the old property qualification for voting, is that what you suggest?
Certainly works for me.
Nothing at risk in the country = no say in how it's managed. Seems fair.
er, what do you mean? "you're not from round these parts so keep away"!
are there lots of coal mine communities trying to elbow their way into vicar of dibley territory?!
What coal mining communities? There aren't any coal miners in the UK. Are you saying that there's a load of people who still think they are? And that they live in work-related communities? No wonder it feels as if Labour creates La la Land.
"benefit-dependent migration from despoiled areas to pastures new......
....The self-exportation of your excess votes into the heartlands of 'privilege' damages the enemy voter base "
i'm merely asking what you mean.
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