David Green (of Civitas), Douglas Carswell and Danny Finkelstein have taken up our suggestion of recall ballots for MPs.  

And I think Nick Clegg floated the idea last week too. Obviously there need to be safeguards – you couldn’t have a mad vendetta of ten people who try to recall an MP twenty times in a Parliament.

I think there probably needs to be a percentage of the local electorate who support the measure; a time limit on collecting signatures of support; and some way to stop repeated attempts at something which there is nomore than very limited support for.

But overall, bringing in a way to directly and more quickly hold an MP to account is exactly the kind of reform that should be enacted.  Imagine if all these expenses stories had come out in June 2005 – we’d have another 5 years until we could get rid of any of them… 

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Tags: Accountability, Constitution

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 1:46 pm , written by Fiona Melville and is filed under Change, Democracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.