As Edmund Burke remarked, if a constitutional system doesn’t bend under popular pressure, eventually it may snap. That may have been the lesson of the French Revolution, but it could also be the warning to be heeded from the British general election of 2010. The ill repute in which politicians of all persuasions are generally held, manifested on the nation’s doorsteps in recent weeks, pre-dates the scandal of MPs’ expenses. At its root lies an awareness that Britain’s “elective dictatorship”, as the late Lord Hailsham dubbed the system whereby the party in power can use its control of Parliament to do almost anything it likes, has produced a series of governments backed by less than half the electorate. It is bound to alienate the people from their rulers.

Labour’s belated support for what is called the Alternative Vote (AV) system – where candidates are marked with a 1, 2, 3 and so on to indicate the voter’s preference – may not be entirely disconnected from the fact that such a system, used in the 1997 election, would have given Tony Blair a majority of 231, against the 179 the first past the post (FPP) system actually gave him. Calculations like this, made by the Jenkins Commission in 2002 when constitutional reform was last being taken seriously, also reveal that an entirely proportional system (PR), where parliamentary seats are allocated according to overall votes cast, would have left him 67 short of an overall majority in the Commons. To form a Government, he would have needed the support of the more than 100 Lib Dem MPs that PR would have produced. So no British invasion of Iraq, rather less of an assault on individual liberty, and with Vince Cable’s influence in Government, rather less of a catastrophic surrender to market forces in the financial system.

A constituency-based system would not survive under total PR, which is why various combinations with AV have been canvassed. The price ...

When Lord Palmerston commissioned Giles Gilbert Scott to design a new Foreign Office off Whitehall in 1861, he insisted on a classical style to convey the grandeur of its endeavours. Today, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office may not run from its portals an empire stretching around the world, but anyone arriving at the building would still believe that the British FCO is an elite operation, run by the brightest and ...

When Catholics got to heaven, it used to be said, they were astonished to find others were there before them. At least since the Second Vatican Council, which in a sense revived a much older tradition of openness to others, this has been far from the truth. The bishops of England and Wales, eager to spread a more nuanced and more respectful view of other faiths, have published, in “Meeting God in Friend and Stranger”, ...

They are all "progressive" now, save those who are "radical". Labour's election manifesto, published on Monday, declares: "Our aim is a modern, progressive Britain ..." The Tory manifesto the following day claimed: "This is an unashamedly progressive Conservative manifesto." The Liberal Democrats went one better, setting forth "radical changes proposed in this manifesto". The three together, about 80,000 words, are ...

The Parliament about to be dissolved to make way for a general election has been disastrous for the good name of British politics. It is crucial, therefore, that the election campaign itself should be conducted in such a way as to rebuild confidence in the democratic process, and not further damage it. Public cynicism, already at a high level as shown by diminishing turnout figures in previous elections, went off the ...