The First Parliamentary Reform is an English Parliament

Parliamentary reform requires a parliament for England. The effrontery of the England of the Regions propaganda compounds the failure of the Union of the United Kingdom within the collapse of democratic representation and its expression in the Westminster Parliament.

Scotland, Wales, and northern Ireland answer to their local electorates on all and any matters of immediate significance to those voters - health, education, housing, infrastructures and, in Scotland's case, some weighting of tax burdens and the facility to initiate legislation.

England is to be governed by an Executive whose leader is unelected in England (and unelected in his own Party), and whose Party has been defeated in Scotland yet uses Westminster MPs from Scotland to maintain control in England.

This Westminster Executive disposes of all the powers of the Crown, which are used without reference to the Westminster Parliament in the case of England, but are ceded to the Scottish Parliament in the case of Scotland and, to a lesser extent, some of which are ceded to the Welsh and northern Irish Assemblies in matters concerning those countries.

The powers of the whips at Westminster are a function of this Executive power (the whips do not derive their control from charm or even force of character), and from the powers of prime ministerial patronage. Any Westminster MP sitting for a Scottish, Welsh or Irish seat can hope for advancement only from the Westminster Executive, so they do precisely what they are told, although what they're ordered to do will apply only to England for anything affecting normal everyday life. They do not represent English voters, nor do they care what they want.

Until this Parliamentary reform is carried out, all other discussion is a waste of time.

Labour rules

The Labour party Rule Book (what is usually called a constitution) is an ill-drafted and often silent document, whose difficulty of interpretation is, I suspect, a political tool.

It states:
Leader and deputy leader
(a) There shall be a leader and deputy leader of the party who shall, ex-officio, be leader and deputy leader of the PLP.
(b) The leader and deputy leader of the party shall be elected or re-elected from among Commons members of the PLP in accordance with procedural rule 4B.2, at a party conference convened in accordance with clause VI of these rules.
In respect to the election of the leader and deputy leader, the standing orders of the PLP shall always automatically be brought into line with these rules.
...
i) When the party is in government and the party leader is prime minister and the party leader, for whatever reason, becomes permanently unavailable,

the Cabinet shall, in consultation with the NEC, appoint one of its members to serve as party leader until a ballot under these rules can be carried out.

ii) When the party is in government and the deputy leader becomes party leader under (i) of this rule, the Cabinet may, in consultation with the NEC, appoint one of its members to serve as deputy leader until the next party conference. The Cabinet may alternatively, in consultation with the NEC, leave the post vacant until the next party conference.

If Blair resigns as Party leader this week, but does not go to the head of state to resign the office of prime minister then the question ‘why not?’ receives no satisfactory reply from the claim that time is needed to organize the election to the Labour party leadership of his successor before the head of state can call on the new Labour leader to form an administration.

The Rule Book ‘s provision for an immediate substitution of a ‘permanently unavailable’ Party leader ‘When the party is in government and the party leader is prime minister ‘ is clearly designed to deal with precisely the contingency of a resigning (or arrested, or dead) Party leader. (It is noteworthy that the Rule book seems to envisage a situation where the Party leader might not be prime minister, although the Party is in government).

Why does Blair not resign from leadership and prime ministerial office, the cabinet appoint Brown leader until there is a confirmatory ballot, and Brown go to the palace to accept the invitation to form an administration? What is the purpose of the hiatus; or have the media misunderstood the process that will occur?

A prime minister has two great powers, to recommend his successor, and to recommend a dissolution. His advice on either of these has not been disregarded for over a century. What is Blair trading for those weeks in which the Labour party acts out an unnecessary electoral process that all know to have an inevitable outcome?

Horses for Courses

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We all take our unique place on the spectrum from neuro typical to raving mad. At times we shift our position when our lives lead us or we lead our lives into places and actions that trigger exaggerated response. We all know a great deal about this although we may think and speak of it in different ways. Touchy-feelyness speaks of reaching out, feeling the pain, knowing where you’re coming from, stressed out; more formally we may speak of empathy, kindness, sympathy, understanding, anger, or exhaustion; and as we respond to others we automatically assess and adjust to their condition and the effect it might have on their normal position. This response is part of an innate capacity - a theory of mind, what is called social cognition. It permits interaction with the rest of the world in real time so fast that responses can begin even before the concious mind notes them.

There are people so far along the spectrum from the majority cluster of neuro typical, positioned there at all times and moving rapidly towards the other extreme when circumstances other than tranquility confront them, that neuro typical people recognise their difficulties instantly and respond - sometimes kindly and making allowances but, depending on circumstances, sometimes with contempt, or even worse cruelty; always with circumscription at lesser or greater levels.

We pick up deviance and measure it consistently and irresistibly ; it is our nature. Sometimes it does not matter; sometimes, it has been argued, specifically for this kind of difference there are benefits where narrowness of focus, high detail attention and the imposition of logically constructed models onto very diverse data is required and contributory.

What spectrum position does political leadership call for? The fastest, universal understanding of complex, and differently ordered and weighted, inputs; intuitive grasp of the slightest of given signals in face to face contacts; the ability to construct diverse scenarios and imagine outcomes; infer hinterlands of reasons and aims; the capacity to understand - not to construct a model of others’ behaviour derived from a list of recognised inputs for a set of situations and generate a model specific response - to understand and respond to another’s viewpoint.

When we see for ourselves, on the national and international stage, a candidate for our highest political office ungroomed, unkempt, ill-dressed, unable to control the most florid symptoms of obsessive behaviour, and we are told by ranking officials, by civil servants who of their professional nature are the most discreet of people, by political colleagues who have every interest in promoting their party, that what we see displayed publicly is privately more and worse displayed in every aspect of official and private interaction, then we must speak out.

Horses for courses.

Gordon Brown cannot be a politician at the level of a country’s leader in a pluralist democracy.

What he would be is what he is; and he is the stuff of a dictator.