Thanks but I will be using my brain.

Brown with his systematic redistribution of wealth, profligate spending and waste, with communist type policies, is slowly destroying this Country.

No I do not expect Cameron with his policies to be the great god of change, and Clegg with his unrealistic policies seems the worst of both worlds.

Agree that all leaders want power, that is why they stand for election, but some know when the game is up, others are just bloody minded and refuse to let go, and I put Brown in that catagory.

I would have thought my many previous posts and comments on policies would suggest I will vote on that issue, and not on personality, but I was agreeing with a simple statement made by Sally about Brown which I thought was true.

I beleive the man is absolutely desperate to hold onto power, and not only is it undignified, it brings our whole political system into question when an unopposed and unelected leader, can operate in this way.

Disagree.

All leaders will do anything to get/stay in power. Cameron will be the same and it is naive to think otherwise. Use your brain and vote on policies not individuals.

Agreed

If people cannot be bothered to make a little effort to vote once evey 4-5 years then do not complain about the result.

There are exceptions of course where the disabled, those in nursing homes and hospital, in some cases cannot make it.

From personal experience my Mothers nursing home go to some effort to get all of their residents to vote.

Our Armed forces should also get the postal vote (as they do at present).

I would like to keep peers in an upper house. I see ways of improving the rules as to those who are entitled to sit during any one parliament, but this is not really the place to lay out such a lengthy analysis.

A further advantage of the AV system is that people do not have to tailor their votes to fit in with their guess as to the likely result, as when they vote not for the candidate that they want to win, but for the one most likely to defeat the one they most want to lose.

I find it strange to suggest that something is unfair because it does not resemble a horse race. Do we want to convey the thought that the two are on a par as far as their seriousness is concerned. One, after all, is supposed to reflect a choice by the British people on who should govern them for the next 5 years, which seems rather more important than – and importantly different to – the winner of the 4:15 at Wincanton. Ideas of fairness need to reflect the decision being taken. It is impractical to run a horse race twice after elimination of the slowest horse. It is far from impractical in the case of a general election and it is also fairer.

I do agree however that Gordon Brown has only introduced this because he thinks that he and the Labour party are likely to be its beneficiaries in the near future. Otherwise, why has he just decided this is the right thing to do? But unfortunately this is the mindset of all but a very small minority of our politicians.

That would kill two persistently troublesome birds with one stone: the Commons would continue to be made up of the candidates who got the greatest number of votes in their constituencies, usually ensuring that one party got a working majority and could form a strong government, while the candidates who came second would form the Second Chamber, usually ensuring that the strong government would be faced with a strong opposition in that chamber.

In fact it's simple arithmetic that the more dominant a single governing party was in the Commons, the weaker it would be in the Second Chamber, and in my view that would be a very good thing.

The central problem with FPTP is that the winner takes all, even if he takes it by just one vote out of tens of thousands, and nobody else gets anything.

For example, in 2005 16,374 people in Crawley voted for the constituency to be represented in Parliament by the Tory candidate, but they were denied that wish because 16,411 people voted for the Labour candidate.

Under FPTP-SPTP the Tory candidate would have taken a seat in the Second Chamber, and although he would have had less power (as defined by the Parliament Acts) that would have meant that 78% of those who bothered to cast their votes would have seen their preferred candidate elevated to Parliament.

However it's clear that the Tory party leadership are not interested in any reform which would mean that they could no longer expect to take their Buggin's turn to form an elected dictatorship.