Quote:
Originally Posted by Thande View Post
I think I may have worked out a way to do devolution without federalism while riding on a bus.

Given that all world-shattering political ideas seem to be conceived on a bus or a train or something, this may be a good sign.
OK, here is what I came up with. The trouble is that this idea would have been great in 1990 but would now be hard to reconcile with the existing devolved institutions. Still, I'll put it on the table.

So currently the UK has 650 single-member FPTP Westminster constituencies. Historically the majority of these have not been single-member but two member, using bloc vote. Now we can use this constitutional precedent. Let's keep the 650 constituencies but have each of them elect 2 MPs rather than 1. But not by bloc vote as in the past, instead there are two separate seats for each constituency, which we shall call Seat A and Seat B. The ballot paper has two separate sets of boxes and candidates, one for each seat, and each voter casts one vote for each. From the POV of the voter it's like the German or OTL Scottish devolved system where you have two votes.

Constitutionally speaking, what happens is that these 1300 MPs go to Westminster, cram them all into Westminster Hall, and then the Speaker declares that all the MPs elected to the 'B' seats have been offered a position on The Regional Committees, which are paid Crown offices. By convention all the 'B' MPs accept the offer and are therefore disqualified from sitting in Parliament. They then go and sit in these Committees which are, in fact, devolved assemblies situated in the capital cities of the regions. The beauty of this approach is that you can redefine the regions however you want--it can be all the 'B' MPs in Yorkshire and the Humber forming a committee, or all the 'B' MPs in South Yorkshire forming a committee, or all the 'B' MPs in the North of England forming a committee. You can change it quite easily if opinions shift.

Now these committees have the same kind of power as the Scottish Parliament currently has, maybe even more, devo-max style. But the point is that because the committee members were democratically elected to Westminster as MPs and are then appointed by the will of Parliament, parliamentary sovereignty is not violated. It's no different from Parliament appointing a powerful commission to conduct an inquiry.

These committees are therefore always elected at the same time as the 'A' MPs of Westminster, on the same ballot paper, and as a result the turnout will always be the same and there are no separate devolved elections that can be treated as frivolous midterm protest votes. But those voters who genuinely do currently elect a Labour MP and an SNP MSP (or whatever) can still do just that by ticket splitting.

You could potentially do the same for the European Parliament as a third seat, although the numbers can't be equal in that case.

Thoughts? Like I say, nowadays it's kind of shutting the door after the horse has bolted, but...