Queen's speech was a missed opportunity
After a summer of duck houses, moat cleaning and second home flipping, Parliament should be devoted to addressing our failed political system in the short time it has left to run. Instead, Gordon Brown obliged the Monarch to mouth empty promises of Bills that will never make it to the statute book. It was a fantasy programme from a government that has run out of road in a Parliament that has lost people's trust.
The Liberal Democrats would have implemented an emergency programme of political reform which would change our politics for good by reforming of the House of Lords and party funding, and introducing fixed-term parliaments and, above all, fair votes.
Our current voting system has given overwhelming power to minority and secretive Tory and Labour governments over many years and the House of Commons is incapable of holding the executive to account.
Fair votes, however, would make every constituency a marginal one: there would be no more safe seats, where MPs take the voters for granted. Indeed, every vote would have equal value across the country, so the result of the General Election next year would be determined by not just a few thousand voters in 100 or so marginal seats, but by the whole electorate. The decline in turnout would be reversed.
More than anything, fair votes would put power in Britain back in the hands of the people, rather than the government and whips in Westminster.
Brown's government just isn't prepared to clean up our politics. It is clearer than ever that only the Lib Dems are prepared to do that, and to bring real change to Britain.
HENRY JEBB
Liberal Democrat PPC, Staffordshire Moorlands
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