'Labour's Constitutional Reforms Have Failed' - Discuss

‘Labour’s Constitutional Reforms have failed’ – Discuss

In 1997, Tony Blair began to lead New Labour into power. Labour had previously been a socialist party up until 1994, but in order to modernise themselves and to win more favour after Thatcher’s leadership in the 1980’s, they became more liberal and omitted their policy on government-owned public services. Their new manifesto contained proposals that encouraged electoral reform, citizen participation, devolution and less induction of more traditional political positions such as hereditary peerage.

      Changes in electoral reform appear to have made little progress on a larger scale. In 1998, Tony Blair asked Lord Jenkins to make an Independent Commission on the Voting System. This was in order to find an alternative to FPTP, which was believed to be falling out of favour due to its disproportionate nature. After reviewing the situation, he recommended AV Plus, a voting system which has not yet been used anywhere in the world. In the manifesto, a referendum on electoral reform was also promised, and should have taken place after research was done, but it never happened. Therefore, the issue of general election reform has been ignored for now.

      However, Labour has changed the voting methods for other elections, such as the devolved bodies. The AMS system was adopted for Scottish Parliament and Welsh National Assembly elections. Because of political and religious conflict in Northern Ireland, STV was introduced. For the London Assembly, AV is now used. The most proportional form of representation, Regional List, is used for European Parliament elections. Therefore, some effort has been made in order to make representation more proportional, but not in British Parliamentary elections, where much of the controversy about proportionality still lies.

    A proposal on Labour’s 1997 manifesto was to decentralise the political power from Westminster and Whitehall, and create devolved bodies in other...