Klintron posted about the Open Source Party a couple months ago. It was created in response to the current dissatisfaction with our current political party system. Well, there are people in other countries just as disgusted with theirs as well. UK writer/blogger Anthony North suggests getting rid of political parties all together:
“British politics has been in a mess for some time. Prior to Thatcherism, the two main parties came into power and went again as if on a political see-saw. No time was allowed for proper policies to formulate, and as soon as sanity seemed to prevail, the new party took over and threw away all the previous party had done.
With Thatcherism, all that changed. A long period of stability in Parliament followed, which was itself followed by a long period of New Labour. This was the opposite of see-saw politics, but the result was equally as bad. Both parties soon settled down into a form of elective dictatorship.
One answer to the problem of British politics is proportional representation. This is a very bad idea. Central to accountability is the idea that a constituency picks the MP it wants. PR would have MPs imposed on a constituency. They would be pure party animals, and the voter immaterial.
We need a new look at British politics. We need to begin a …
CAMPAIGN FOR THE ABOLITION OF POLITICAL PARTIES
Political parties are at the core of the problem. There is nothing in the British constitution to say we need them. So maybe the answer is to discard them. We need to do this for many reasons other than an attempt to bring stability to the British Parliament.”
(via Anthony North-Beyond The Blog)
(More interesting political ideas from William Irwin Thompson’s “Catastrophist Governance and the Need for a Tricameral Legislature”)
2 responses so far ↓
1 Bipin Adhikari // Jan 13, 2008 at 3:37 am
Well, lets assume that you have a theory to be dicussed, but here the key question is who will replace the space once the political parties that you are so tired of have occupied since long.
2 TiamatsVision // Jan 13, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Anthony states in the article:
“COMMONSENSE
Of course, the political parties will not, and should not, disappear. Without political parties it would be difficult to actually run a government, so a political party would need to be voted into power. But if a sizeable proportion of MPs were independent, no political party would be able to have a monopoly on power.”
I asked him to further expand on this and got this reply:
“That said, even if independents totally swamped the political parties and they disappeared, as long as representative democracy was preserved, we should trust the political system to come to the proper answer. With democracy, if it wasn’t the proper one, I think we’d let them know. But it is almost certain that political parties, of some form, would continue. It is in the nature of politics to find allies, similar voices, etc. So the process of political parties would most likely begin again, and in fifty years or so we may need another campaign when they take over. That’s the nature of life - it moves in cycles. It’s just time we knocked this end of this cycle on the head - stunned it a little and made it retreat for a time.”
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