Vocal Voices

How will Cameron and the Tories perform now that they have a clear majority? It will be interesting to see and will present an entirely different picture in 5 years time.

To be topical to recent events, Cameron has had the Cleggstone removed from round his neck. At least he was wise enough not to have an EDstone planted to weigh him down.....

It is going to be a nerve jangling five years for the Tories. Scraping in with a 12 seat majority is hardly a ringing endorsement from the electorate.

When those back-benchers start flexing their muscles, and they will, quite a few promises, pledges, policies or whatever they now call them, could fail.

One thing Cameron is certainly going to do is to redraw the electoral boundaries. At the moment they heavily favour Labour; expect that to change before 2020.

Yep, a 12 seat majority is 11 seats more than he needs to do that Cromwell. It was the most insidious and damaging thing that Clegg did to the Tories in the whole 5 years and also the least talked about in the press.

At least when the Tories go to the next election the playing field will either be level or tilted slightly towards the Tories. If they do what they have promised, get rid of the deficit, start working on the debt and also create more jobs and more curbs on immigration, then it's quite likely they will get a third term.

The back benchers will be an issue, especially the EUSkeptics, but the Tories can usually control that. So long as they get a referendum, the back benchers should be fairly quiet on the EU, unless the EU tries to push through a raft of additional legislation before 2017. I would expect the back benchers to completely block that until after the referendum on the grounds that there is no reason to implement it until we actually know that we're staying.

The only sad thing about the whole set up is the certainty that the reward for the Tories will be the electorate throwing them out and voting Labour in again to wreck the whole thing.... I read somewhere that there are about 6 ways to say "Thank You " in Japanese and each one stacks up to be an insult to the thanked in one way or another. Maybe that's the problem. The government speaks English and the electorate speaks Japanese...

What I would like to see in the electoral reform is something like the French presidential election. Two rounds, say Thursday and Sunday. First round you take the two top candidates, second round you have a run off with only the top two. No question of splitting the vote then, all you need to do is be in the top two then you need to appeal to the majority of the voters on the second round. I'm guessing that would change a significant amount of the votes in the country and it would also remove the issue of multiple parties in the election.

Then the final thing I'd like to see is electronic voting with biometric Iris recognition. Why Iris? Because it doesn't leave any imprint behind in your daily life (fingerprints) and unlike facial recognition it can't be used to track you going about your daily routine. Perfect in my mind and makes it almost impossible to carry out electoral fraud. This would also reduce postal voting to those who absolutely need it as you would have to give a reason not to have your iris scanned.....

With electronic voting you would have the results 1h after the election (time to count the few postal votes). Making a two round election quite feasible... A two round election also gives people a chance to draw breath and decide if they really did want the result they caused or not. It takes the sudden death and locked for 5 years out of the equation. Which I would have thought was a good thing. The French call it voting with your heart and then voting with your head. Sounds sensible to me.

An interesting point about electronic voting is that if the postal votes were less than the difference between the candidates, they would not even have to be counted..... Making things faster still....

Electronic voting would also make Referenda a snap too. Want a referendum? Great, next Thursday, stick your eye in the machine at the front desk, walk to the booth, press the button, done. Electoral fraud? What's that?

As I understand things Cameron wants to reduce the Commons to 600 MPs and change the boundaries. The next review of the 2013 Act does not have to report till Oct 2018, whether he can speed it up or get any amendments through is up for grabs. He will certainly be hoping that by-elections are few and far between during this parliament. It would only take a handful of changes for his grand scheme to be up in smoke.

I was wondering who the 50 would be..... From Cameron's perspective 50 Labour would do but I'm guessing he wouldn't get away with that....