The speech they won't make

Whoever is Prime Minister on Friday almost certainly won't make this speech. But they ought to.

There are some real arguments in favour of the British Parliamentary system of representatives chosen by first-past-the-post elections in single member constituencies. But its obvious that most of the British people either disagree with them or don't understand them. So its got to go.

Even if the only reason that people don't like the current system is that they just don't understand it, that's still a good reason for scrapping it. Democracy is important. And representative democracy only works if the people trust their representatives and the system that elected them. The losers need to know they were fairly beaten and that they can have another go next time. Democracy, like justice, needs to be seen to be done.

So we need to reform the electoral system, and we need to do it now. Because if we don't do it now things will just be nastier next time round. And if we don't choose a workable new system we risk getting landed with real PR, the Party List system, which is just about the only one unarguably worse than FPTP.

So I am going to do two things.

First, I am going to introduce three separate Reform Bills in the first week of the new Parliament. Three separate Bills because each of them is worth doing even if Parliament rejects the other two:

• There will be a General Election on the first Thursday in May 2014 and on the first Thursday each May each four years after that. We need to make an end to Prime Ministers fooling around with the dates of elections to try to gain some political advantage. It just pisses people off and it almost never works anyway.
• Immediate adoption of Alternative Vote in Parliamentary elections under the existing constituency system. This is only meant to be a stop-gap until we can choose a proper new system, but at least any early bye-elections in the new Parliament will have some form of preference voting.
• Remove the vote from hereditary peers in the House of Lords. Should have been done decades ago.

Second, We are going to call a Select Committee of the House of Commons on Constitutional Reform. It will have 50 members, and its membership will be proportional to the share of the popular vote each party actually got at the election. (My advisors have advised me not to tell you that the reason it has 50 members is that that is just enough that the SNP, the Greens, and the DUP get one member each; but not so many that Sinn Fein are entitled to one, or that the BNP would be if they had any MPs, which they don't. But, seeing as I am being honest, I am telling you that. Sorry about Plaid Cymru, can't be helped.)

To start with the Committee will have two remits.

• One is to propose a new constituency structure. Are we going to carry on with single-member seats, or use multi-member seats, or have a mixed system? If multi-member will they all be the same size, or will we try to follow natural social boundaries?
• The other is to recommend a new voting system to the British people.

To be honest we hardly need the Committee for this, we all know that it will be some form of preference voting, probably STV if we have multi-member constituencies, maybe AV, just possibly a two-round system. But its important to implicate all the main parties in the new system, and to have any little intra-party spats out before the report comes out.

The Committee will reports within the first year of the new Parliament. And whatever it recommends will be put to a referendum within a few months after that. If more than half of those who vote agree with the new system, we'll have two years or more to get boundaries drawn up

And as soon as that is settled the Committee can decide how best to set up a fully elected Second Chamber to take over the legislative powers of House of Lords; and propose a different electoral system for it from the one we use for the House of Commons.

Meanwhile, we're going to get on with the business of cutting your public services so that we have enough money to pay back the dosh we bought off the bankers with.

No, that last bit was just unbelievably honest...