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Thanks for that - are you suggesting that MPs work through such a "preferendum", or the population?
Once the questions are worked out, possibly via focus groups or a working group of MPs, it could be done well, couldn't it?

{Ed. Absolutely. Basically, consensus voting could - and should - be used, wherever and whenever the subject under debate is contentious. For if it is contentious, and if we do enjoy a plural democracy, then doubtless there will be more than two options 'on the table'.

So consensus voting could be used either when the House is meeting in plenary, or when a committee of the House is in debate, or whatever. The options could be determined in plenary, in which case you would have a rule to suggest that any one party could only put forward one option; or the list could be drafted in committee or even, as you suggest, via focus groups... as long as the list of options were, as I say, a draft: the final decision-makers must have the final say as to the options.

You could even have a consensus vote in the country as a whole. Take, for example, the Jenkins Commission on the UK's Westminster electoral system. If he had been instructed to draw up a short list of electoral systems (as happened with the Royal Commission in New Zealand), the entire electorate could have been presented with, let us say, a five option ballot (which again is what happened down under) and then we could all have cast our preferences (whereas, in New Zealand, the voters only had one preference - they used a funny version of the two-round system).

There are exceptions to consensus voting, of course. Not least when ratifying treaties, as with the EU Constitution. Though even here, to take the French example, they should have voted "EU comme ci (d'Estaing) or EU comme ca (Maastricht)"; by asking "d'Estaing, oui-ou-non?" the vote was an absolute nonsense, with people voting 'non!' if they didn't like the EU comme ci, or if they didn't like it at all, or if they didn't like Chirac, Macdonalds, Turkish accession, or je ne sais quoi!

The whole thing was handled very badly, for it was all very top-down. Whereas, if Giscard d'Estaing had been asked, via public hearings and so on, to draw up a list of options... OK, it gets a bit complicated, but where there's a will, and at least we (Europeans) could have had a short list of five, say, constitutions, as opposed to being told, comme ci, take it or leave it.

OK, I think that will do for one comment! Peter Emerson.}