I’m watching with interest. I knew Ed as a student. Along with future Green Party stalwarts Tim Andrews, Andy Spring, Maya de Souza and others, we were members of a university group called Green Action.

I was already interested in green politics though my experience of it was limited to growing up with parents and parents’ friends interested self sufficiency and food issues. An Ecology Party manifesto found its way into the house circa 1983. Green Action helped crystallise many of my impulses and give them a more coherent framework.

A lot of the impetus came from Tim who invited speakers like Sir Julian Rose, a leading light of the organic farming movement, and Brig Oubridge who came from Teepee Valley in Wales to speak to us. It was an exciting group to be a part of. There were demos against Chernobyl, green forays into student elections, attempts to educate college kitchens about catering for veggies and vegans. Ed was very much a part of it.

That said while most of us were looking towards the newly renamed Green Party, Ed was a Liberal/SDP alliance type. Ed never made any bones about it. He was a little bit square, very much ‘out’ about his politics and we were broad minded enough not to give him a hard time. But in an important way he was also ‘one of us’.

Then, as you do after university, you lose touch. I ran into Ed briefly at Westminster in the run up to the 2001 election. I’d read that he’d been somewhat surprise to be rushed into parliament in the upheaval of 1997. He still seemed faintly surprised four years on.

Now he’s Energy Secretary and taking over from a man who had a reasonably good rap amongst campaigning groups. I’m interested to know how ingrained an impression those formative years of student environmental activism left. Ed, as I’ve said, was never a political Green but he did clearly understand just how critical environmental issues were.

The big question, for me, is whether he has the clout to take a stand on issues like climate change, renewables and the democratisation of energy when he’s surrounded by a bunch of brutal uber sceptics.

Chris Huhne (who stood as a local parliamentary candidate for the Alliance while Ed and I were at uni) earned a reputation of having given as good as he got from his Tory ‘chums’. But then Huhne always came across as ambitious, self assured and slightly ego-centric even 25 years ago. Ed Davey on the other hand was quiet and thorough and not quite exciting. However he always struck me as a decent guy and a nice guy.

Huhne showed what was possible even in the nest of vipers that is the present cabinet, Ed Davey has known most of his life that the things for which he’s now responsible really matter. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect miracles, we certainly shouldn’t tolerate lame excuses, but let’s see how he does.

As the cuts continue to bite, the wages of workers remain stagnant and the economic outlook for the UK remains gloomy you’d be forgiven for thinking that the official opposition might just step into the breach and make a stand. You’d be wrong. Yesterday Ed Balls capitulated to the most ruthlessly pro-market government we’ve had in many years. The Labour Party, he said, would not reverse any of the Tory cuts or tax raises if they won the next election and they’d keep the freeze on public sector pay.

The reason given for the capitulation – and we heard this time and time again at yesterday’s Fabian Conference – is that the Labour party must be “trusted on the economy”.  In the main plenary Chukka Ummuna MP, the pollster Deborah Mattison and the former economic secretary to the treasury Kitty Ussher clambered over each other to proclaim the need for policies that look sensible to the public. Later in the day Polly Toynbee suggested that the Labour party must look tough on the economy now in order to gain power and do the things they really believe in.

The state of our parliamentary democracy could hardly be more dire. We have three parties who are singing off the same orthodox hymn sheet. The official opposition, lying down to die in the face of focus group studies and opinion polls which suggest the public believe cuts are necessary, have given up making the case for doing things another way. The few dissenters who remain, like the single Green parliamentarian, are accused by the Labour party of ‘playing into the Tories hands’. The cuts, we are told by all three main parties, will continue, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Instead of providing political leadership Ed Balls is using the public’s fear about the economy as a starting point for his party’s policies.

Let’s be clear: The Labour Party have hardly been a shining light of independent thought and radical ideas in their time in opposition. But Ed Balls’ rather sudden lurch to the right is still hugely disappointing. Defending public spending, while the government spew bile about a ‘bloated state’ and ‘extraordinarily levels of debt’, was hard enough already. But now, with the Labour Party abandoning the hope of persuading the reluctant public of any alternatives to austerity, those of us still calling for a change of course are set to become more marginalised than ever.

It’s all about looking like a party of government they say. But what the Labour leadership fail to see is that they are just looking like a less enthusiastic version of the Tories. The choice for the electorate is between a party who sound convincing while they make cuts and one who look guilty about it. The promise is that once they’ve seen the destruction of many of the services upon which people rely, they’ll reshape the economy to a fairer form of capitalism. It looks to me like the Labour party have run out of ideas.

Austerity isn’t working. The Labour Party have been saying it for months. But somehow, after an all-to-close analysis of the polls, Britain’s second biggest political party have done a monstrous u-turn. They’ve let down their members, many of whom must be questioning why they’re still in the party. They’ve let down the left, whose battle has just become ever more difficult. But mostly The Labour Party have let down the British public who will now be blindly led down the path of ignorance to austerity, with no-one in parliament fighting their corner.

This post first appeared on Matthew’s blog – Segment Politics

When David Cameron says that he wants to reduce the “red tape” burden on businesses, what he means is that he doesn’t want your employer to have to meet the costs of looking after your safety at work. Rather than being a manifestation of the nanny state that tells ordinary working people they don’t have the sense to look after themselves, health and safety is their protection from bosses who would pressure them into unsafe working practices, or neglect maintenance, just to save a bit of money. Cameron’s comments on “ending health and safety culture” are a clear demonstration of where his loyalties lie, and that he doesn’t understand what it’s like to work anywhere more dangerous than an office.

Unlike Cameron, I’ve had some insight into what it’s like to work in places where health and safety really matter. The year after I graduated from university, I worked in an outdoor education centre that schools and youth groups used for residential trips where they could try activities like canoeing and abseiling.  We had health and safety regulations coming out of our ears, but for a very good reason: twenty years ago, when centres like the one I worked in were less regulated, children died. Decent equipment and properly trained staff might be expensive, but they save lives and prevent serious injuries.

Critics of health and safety say that it is an insult to our collective intelligence, but there were two things that I saw during my year in outdoor education which made me question the nature of common sense. First of all, I discovered that a few of the men I worked with used to set fire to their own arses for fun. It wasn’t even for a bet; one day somebody thought it would be a laugh, and it kind of caught on and became this weird game called “flaming arseholes”. It’s probably just luck that nobody ended up in hospital or burned down the staff accommodation block, but when people realise that they can get away with doing something stupid and dangerous, they’ll keep on doing it until their luck changes.

Secondly, I realised that some of the things we think of as common sense are learned responses, and this can be shown up when people are in an unfamiliar environment, where their previous knowledge just doesn’t apply. A lot of the kids I met during my year in outdoor education came from Birmingham or Inner London, and for some it was the first time they’d ever been outside the city. They had no idea what risks to look out for in the countryside, so had to be taught that wild animals are best left alone, even when they’re small and harmless-looking, or that there are some places where swimming in the sea is really dangerous. Going into a new workplace can be a bit like that; it might be really obvious to someone who has worked there for years that you don’t touch that or stand there, and you can’t rely on the confused newbie to work it out for themselves.

If, as Cameron says, health and safety regulations cost jobs, I’d hate to see what those extra jobs in his deregulated utopia would be like. However, if working conditions become more dangerous, then at least it’ll open up opportunities for people on the dole to get into work by traditional route of the dead man’s shoes.

The coalition government’s response to this has been to announce that they are setting up “Work Academies” to provide training and work experience placements for young people. How this is supposed to help, I’m not entirely sure. As Employment Minister Chris Grayling enthused on the press release:

“With training, work experience and a guaranteed interview, they will put people at the front of the queue for vacancies that employers are looking to fill.”

Training might help individual people move up the queue, but what use is that when the queue keeps getting longer and longer? It’s hardly as if there are jobs sitting empty, waiting for the day that the nation’s workshy scroungers deign to lever themselves off the sofa and hand in an application form. There aren’t enough jobs to go around, and sending people on training courses isn’t going to create more. This is just re-arranging the queue, increasing the competition for the few jobs that are available, and making the unemployed fight even harder against one another to get into paid work.

It brings us back to the old idea of the deserving or undeserving poor. In order to get any financial help, the government is forcing benefit claimants to go further and further to prove that they “deserve” to be housed and fed, and being seen to take part in mandatory jobseeking activities to prove that they are among the deserving. Regardless of how useful these activities are, we’re supposed to want to see the unemployed being busy, just for the sake of it. It’s like a secular form of penance: they have to demonstrate that they are suitably sorry for not having a job before they can collect their dole money.

The new work academies sound no different to the existing programmes for getting people into jobs; in particular, they sound like a vehicle for work-for-your-benefits schemes, where the unemployed are forced to do unpaid work for profit-making companies. The academies are endorsed by Tesco, who are one of the well-known retailers already taking on “volunteers” for placements which can last for months, and the press release invites more businesses to do their bit by employing unpaid staff. Some of the academies will be based in sectors like retail and hospitality, where much of the work is low-skilled and low-paid, and a steady supply of work placement volunteers could provide competition for staff earning minimum wage or above.

One detail left out of the DWP’s press release is any information on who will be running the work academies. Now that there are private sector providers like A4e running services that try to get people into work (with success rates far below what was promised on the contracts), it’s entirely possible that these could be run by private sector contractors. That would mean that there are companies making a profit from their unemployed clients – either by sending them on work placements or by using their free labour – without providing them with any meaningful help.

The unemployment figures aren’t going to fall any time soon, and the government aren’t going to improve matters by continuing to blame it on individuals who don’t have jobs. Jobs don’t magically appear or disappear according to the level of work ethic we show, and “try harder” is not a substitute for economic policies that would provide long-term work. The people who are to blame for rising unemployment are in the Commons, not the dole queue.

The Health and Social Care Bill will pass into law and the process of dismantling our public health system will advance again. It would be easy at this point to retreat into despair and defeatism. To think of all the effort we have put into our campaigns over the last few weeks and months and to conclude that we tried our best but we lost. To decide to give up or move onto the next fight. We won on forests, failed on higher education and the NHS, what’s next?

It would be easy to damn the Liberal Democrats but gloat over how they will at least get kicked out in three years. But to be replaced with whom? With Labour? Who support cuts, just a little slower. Who gave us foundation hospitals, supported the internal market in the NHS (not to mention academies and fees, if we want to broaden our scope a little) and believe in the mantra of ‘choice’ and ‘modernisation’ just as much as the Tories and Lib Dems.

With the Greens? or the Socialist Party? (or whichever other far-left electoralist outfit you prefer.) Well that might be nice to imagine. And if it happened they might restore the NHS, they might bring our public services back under public ownership and under some sort of public control. But does anyone really think that’s going to happen? Two or three MPs? maybe. Throw in the LRC and we might get a dozen MPs we could consider to be socialists (if we’re lucky). That’s hardly the mass representation that could legislate to nationalise the towering heights of the economy, though. And even then, we still have to sit through three more years of Tory-Lib Dem government before we even get that far. Who knows what of our public economy will even be left at that point for our parliamentary leaders to speechify upon?

It would be easy to be despondent. But we should not be. We don’t have to wait three years to fight back, we don’t have to accept that we lost and we don’t have to delegate our struggle to someone else to take action on our behalf. But we have to learn the lessons of how we reached this point. We have to build and rebuild our community and grassroots organisation. We need action which is more than symbolic and which cannot be easily co-opted or dismissed.

People are upset, and they are angry, and they are actively looking for new ways to engage with politics to build a genuinely democratic economy, where we don’t only get to vote once every few years, and where we don’t have to pin our hopes on a room full of unelected aristocrats, bishops, business people an ex-politicians to deign to save the institutions we all want to protect.

I may have some reservations about the Occupy X actions happening across the US (and now coming here), but the fact that they are enduring, and spreading does tell us that people are willing to do something more than traditional party politics, that people are fed up of waiting for others to take action and that there is a desire to change the whole system, not just the people at the top. But as Sophie pointed out on this blog, and several people explained on libcom, it needs to go much further than occupying parks.

Mubarak didn’t lose power in Egypt because people sat around in Tahrir Square, much as that seems to have become the dominant narrative amongst some, he fell because of a sustained and coordinated campaign of direct action. Yes, of occupations and public protest, but also of thousands of workers striking and shutting down transport and production across the country.

The general assemblies in Greece prior to the vote on the last bailout package may have garnered all the media attention, but Greek workers didn’t give up once that vote passed. Two weeks ago workers occupied seven government ministries as representative of the troika (the ECB, the EC and the IMF) were due to conduct an inspection of how the austerity measures were being implemented. Today, workers occupied the finance ministry as the start of a nine day strike and “hung a banner reading ‘Occupation’ from the roof of the eight-story building and hoisted black flags around the roof”.

On the 9th of November we will see a national demonstration against fees and privatisation in higher education. On November 30th we will see the largest coordinated strike action in this country in decades. These events give us scope to build a real resistance. They will not be enough on their own, but they are a start.

We must avoid any retreat into defeatism, or a return to tactics that have failed, and instead escalate our response if we are to have any hope of protecting our public services and building the sustainable, democratic society we desire. The power to do so lies in our hands, if we can learn the lessons of today’s set back.

He didn’t get it.

Rather, he got a chorus of abuse from both the Tories and Labour. Sadiq Khan, the shadow Justice Secretary, called it “a dog’s dinner, with nobody happy” – and that’s a nice summing up of the attitude in the Commons.

But although I support Lords Reform, I’ll take the Deputy PM’s invitation and give some constructive criticism.

Let’s go through the proposals again:

• 300 members
• 80% elected, 20% appointed
• Members elected for single 15-year terms
• Elections by STV
• Elections in thirds (80 members at each election)
• Reduction in Bishop numbers from 26 to 12.

I’ll just outline my problems/agreements.

No issue regarding 300 members; average attendance is only ever about 400 at the moment, any more would be unnecessary and expensive. The United States makes do with 100 Senators, while France – with a similar population to Britain – has 343.

No significant issue with the 80% elected, 20% appointed mix. Like Clegg, I’d prefer a fully elected House; but the case for preserving some independence and expertise is strong, and the vast majority of peers/Senators would have a mandate from the people, so appointed members will have little effect on votes. I also think this option is most likely to gather agreement in a Parliament seemingly obsessed by the issue.

I have a significant problem, however, with a single 15-year term.

Firstly, the fact that it is single makes a mockery of the idea that having an elected upper house would allow voters to throw people they don’t like out of office. If the Lord/Senator doesn’t need to seek re-election, they can pretty much do as they like secure in the knowledge that the voters can’t express their dissatisfaction with them.

Introducing right of recall might rectify this a bit, but it depends upon the size of constituencies. Too large, and a by-election on a single-winner basis is ridiculous. As the Deputy PM’s White Paper points out, “it would be necessary to replace members elected through [PR] with a candidate elected on a majoritarian basis..holding by-elections across larger Electoral Districts has the potential to result in significant costs.”

The government has suggested instead that “elected member would be temporarily replaced by a substitute member until the next election. Under STV, if the departing member stood for election from a particular party, the substitute would be the candidate from the same party in that Electoral District, who, at the point the final seat in that district was awarded, had achieved the highest number of votes… without gaining a seat.” But this denies the electorate a direct say in the matter.

These problems can be contained by the use of smaller seats e.g. 3-4 members, as in Scottish local councils. But too small, and the constituencies have little claim to be proportional – a 3-member seat, whilst ensuring few wasted votes, doesn’t fit the government’s wish for “proportional representation”.

So introducing recall wouldn’t cut it. Instead, at each election, you have to be able to throw out of office/keep in office the person who has served you in the upper house.

Then there’s the use of a 15-year term. This makes my issues with the single term even worse. This is tied to the elections being in thirds, I understand: but how on earth can it be ‘democratic’ to restrict people’s right to choose one of their senators/Lords by making them wait fifteen years?

That length of time between elections makes the issue of ‘accountability’ hellishly difficult to solve. Given that a large STV seat makes by-elections hard (see above) voters will have to wait 15 years to hold their representative to account for their actions. Add to that the fact that they actually can’t, because the term is non-renewable, and you’ve got not just a “dog’s dinner” but a total sham of democracy, to be frank.

There’s no complaint from my quarter about elections being conducted by the single transferable vote. It’s a very good voting system, and in fact in our proposals for constitutional reform the Green Party recommends electing a reformed Lords using the system. However, I would put one point.

If non-renewable 15-year terms aren’t stripped out of this Bill, and recalling Lords or holding by-elections is difficult because of the size of STV seats, then we can’t use STV. We’d have to use either an ‘open list’ system or a version of the Additional Members’ System (AMS) using open lists. AMS would allow for a constituency by-election/recall to occur, or for a pretty ‘democratic’ transfer of power to that person who is second on the party list.

But if we were to change the Bill in the way I think is right, then the single transferable vote is appropriate.

As regards elections in thirds, I’ve partly dealt with this above as it’s tied into the 15-year term proposal, but I’ll just add that I dislike this as well. Tied in with the 15-year term, it could promote voting by party rather than by person – simply put, the voters could hate a certain Senator/Lord but be unable to remove him or her, and so they’d refuse to elect a party colleague instead.

That would make a mockery of STV, which is supposed to disregard parties. So I’d say strip out this proposal too and replace it with full elections. It’s also worth noting that this mechanism was the same one that the founding fathers in the US used to prevent the upper house becoming overwhelmed by the will of the people, as they could only ever change 1/3 of its composition at each election.

Finally, the reduction in Bishop numbers. It’s already been pointed out that this actually results in a proportionate increase in Bishops because although their numbers have been cut, the number of Lords in general has also been cut by proportionately more.

I’m of the view that Bishops have no place in our second chamber – or if they absolutely must be there, they should be joined by Imams, Rabbis and the like to provide a total of 26 or so ‘religious’ representatives. But if it was up to me, we would not have religion in our second chamber.

So. Those are my constructive views on the deputy PM’s Lords Reform proposals. Let’s hope that Labour decides to follow that example – because if it does, then these reforms can be made so much better and their impact can be more lasting.

20 women blockaded the main exits from Downing Street this morning, in an attempt to stop George Osborne delivering a Budget that would hammer women. The protestors were in place from 11.15 until 11.52, when the Chancellor’s car broke through the blockade.

Protestor Sara Ayech said:

“We are stopping George Osborne from delivering his bankers’ budget because this budget has been written for the benefit of big business and the banking sector, not for ordinary people. The banks destroyed the economy and in return received the bail out and bonuses. But the government is choosing to make everyone else pay the price through unemployment, the decimation of the Welfare State and the NHS.

“The Welfare State was fought for and won by ordinary people only 64 years ago. It’s now under attack by the coalition government and we are here to defend it and show that people will resist the injustice of these cuts.”

There will be 21 in total. Ten locations have been chosen by Osborne, so we will see EZs in Birmingham and Solihull; Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Greater Manchester, the West of England, the Tees Valley, “North Eastern” (whatever that means), the Black Country, and Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire.

One will be in London, with a location to be chosen by the Mayor, whose judgment in development matters is of course legendary, and a further ten will be available for Local Enterprise Partnerships to bid competitively for.

The Enterprise Zones will offer low taxes and government handouts in exchange for locating businesses within them. Specifically, the Budget says that once established, an Enterprise Zone will enjoy access to:

• A 100 per cent business rate discount worth up to £275,000 over a five year period for businesses that move into an Enterprise Zone during the course of this Parliament;
• All business rates growth within the zone for a period of at least 25 years will be retained and shared by the local authorities in the LEP area to support their economic priorities;
• Government and local authority help to develop radically simplified planning approaches in the zone; and
• Government support to ensure superfast broadband is rolled out in the zone. This will be achieved through guaranteeing the most supportive planning environment and, if necessary, public funding.

The clear intention here, in classic Shock Doctrine style, is to exploit a clear need for economic investment to force the country to lavish gifts on the corporate interests in whose interests the Conservatives govern.

Over a quarter of a million pounds in cold, hard cash for each company. Permission to build inappropriate developments that reduce quality of life, deplete environmental resources, undermine local economies, or all three. We, the taxpayers, will even pay your multinational company’s phone bill.

The experience of these zones in the past is that they did much more to move jobs around than create them. Between 1981 and 1986, 63,300 jobs were created in Thatcher’s Enterprise Zones, but only 13,000 of these were new jobs. 80% of the jobs in the EZs had been displaced from elsewhere.

This one figure reveals a multitude of sins. Firstly, at a total programme cost of almost £300million, this means EZs delivered each new job at a cost of £23,000 (pdf), more than twice the average wage over the period 1981-86. Hiring workers directly into socially useful public works would have been cheaper and more effective, if ideologically abhorrent to the government of the day (or ours).

Second, each job moved to an enterprise zone means a job (and accompanying economic vitality) destroyed elsewhere. Since many of these Zones were out-of-town, this meant businesses abandoning the High Street in favour of tax-free, big-box locations on the urban fringe. One the few Enterprise Zones still considered ‘successful’ is that which created Gateshead’s MetroCentre shopping mall; but its record of success looks very different from the vantage point of Gateshead Town Centre.

Thirdly, the theory of the Enterprise Zone’s tax breaks is that they are at least additive. It may be low-taxed business, but that is better for the Exchequer than no business at all. But since we know most of the business had already existed outside the EZs, this theory breaks down. What we have instead is business currently contributing to local tax, being taken out of local tax, eroding the tax base with an accompanying hit to local services and public sector employment – costing even more jobs.

Because the breaks in an EZ can only ever be temporary, corporates treat them much as the savvy consumer does a 0% credit card offer. Many of the companies that took advantage of Scotland’s Enterprise Zones in the 1980s fled just as soon as the subsidies dried up. This can be minimised partly by basing business strategy on long-term conditions not short-term bungs, but is always going to be a feature of a plan dependent on inward investment rather than home-grown businesses.

The planning provisions for Enterprise Zones are terrifying – towns across the UK have had the life sucked out of them by parasitic out-of-town shopping centres and business parks, many of which were the legacy of the first generation of EZs. Our failure to envisage how we want our communities and landscape to look and behave is the source of so many of our problems, from air pollution to crime to underdevelopment.

Not only does Osborne see EZs as a new Wild West of developer-driven building with a minimum of planning, he announced plans to bring that laissez-faire ethos to the wider country, announcing that “there will be a presumption in favour of sustainable development where the default answer is ‘yes’”. Expect more demolition of valued town centres, more out-of-town boxes, more car dependency. Expect, basically, Northern Ireland, a corner of the Emerald Isle largely buried under low-density urban sprawl.

We do need more development, particularly in manufacturing, but that is not what Enterprise Zones are about. They are a microcosm of the anarchocapitalist conditions Tories ultimately want to see applied to the whole country; they are laboratories, showrooms, and a grateful present to corporate masters.

A real enterprise plan would involve fixed-capital grants managed by a real Green Investment Bank, with the proviso that any such capital return to public ownership if the beneficiary abandons it for overseas outsourcing. It would involve real, planned, walkable mixed-use communities where manufacturing space sits alongside residences and community services. It would aim to offer the world the best educated, most innovative and healthiest workers on the planet, and make it clear that the price companies pay for that quality is fair wages and world-class workers rights, including industrial democracy.

That’s what you’d do if you wanted an economy that delivers for the people of Britain. But if you only care about multinational bosses, why go to the bother?

We’ll have analysis for you once we have our hands on the Budget documents, and we’ll be tweeting throughout the speech @brightgrn.

In the meantime, this open thread is for you to give your verdict on the Budget during and after the speech, or to ask any questions you think BG’s illustrious readership might be able to answer.

So what is she actually suggesting? Well, a whole range of changes to make parliament more efficient, less archaic and generally function more sensibly. Let’s start with how MPs themselves vote.

The US Congress, the European Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament all already use electronic voting an it’s time Westminster caught up. They may like their tradition but, frankly, it’s a waste of time. And quite a lot of time it turns out. An MP with an 85% voting record would spend 250 hours a year queuing up to vote. Switching to electronic voting could save £30,000 worth of time per week. The cost of the new system, estimated at around £400,000, would be paid back in just a few months.

And while we’re switching to a new way of voting, let’s let MPs choose to abstain. At present MPs can only vote in favour or against. So those who turn up to a debate but on’t feel they can vote either way are recorded no differently from those who sit it out in the bar. The only option to show they were present is to vote both for and against, opening them up to the accusation that they just couldn’t work out how to vote. Again, here in Scotland we already allow MSPs to abstain, as many did during the latest budget debate, for example.

Remarkably, when MPs do vote, it’s often not clear what the votes are for. Take this amendment to the Postal Services Bill recently submitted by Caroline:

Clause 1, page 1, line 5, leave out subsection (1).

No explanation. No context. Unless you read through the bill in question and work it out for yourself there’s no way to know what this amendment would do. Wouldn’t it be better if each amendment came with a short explanation as to it’s effect and intention? Say:

“The effect of this amendment is to remove the provisions of the Bill that allow for the privatisation of Royal Mail.”

Giving this sort of information for amendments, as already happens for the main text of a bill, would empower backbenchers an leave them less reliant on the whips to tell them what each vote means, as well as making the process clearer for the public reading through the records.

These are just a few of the very sensible suggestions from Caroline’s report. I hear that many of the old guard in parliament think she doesn’t ‘get’ Westminster. I think she understands how a modern parliament should function efficiently pretty well. Let’s hope her colleagues agree.

That list of recommendations in full:

• Introduction of electronic voting in the Chamber (and in the voting lobbies) using hand held electronic devices.
• The ‘holding over’ of votes so that there is a specified time for voting at the end of each Parliamentary day.
• An option to record an abstention on a vote and replication of the European Parliament’s ‘Explanations of votes’ website.
• An obligatory short explanatory paragraph of the effect of any amendment to legislation to be printed underneath each amendment for stages of a Bill taken in the Commons Chamber.
• For debates in the Commons Chamber, the list of those selected to speak should be made available to MPs in advance and the Commons should consider new rules on who is selected to speak and speaking time limits.
• A systematic modernisation of the language of Parliament.
• Measures to prevent the ‘talking out’ of Private Members’ legislation.
• Power for the Speaker to call Ministers to give an oral statement to the Commons on matters of urgent or national importance.
• An end to late night sittings to make MPs hours and those of parliamentary staff fit better with family life.