Jon Bright (London, OK): Frank Field is the latest person to have a stab at the problems of disengagement and governance - releasing the above named pamphlet (opens pdf) through Policy Exchange. "Cumulative social and political changes have undermined the concept of active citizenship" is the pull quote from the Executive Summary, which is all I've had time to read so far. He maintains that disengagement is down to increasingly "rational" voters (who won't be very interested in voting in safe seats) and a decline in strongly held "ideological" voting patters.
Some of his proposed remedies will be familiar to many democratic reform campaigners, though they make an interesting selection - a two-stage election process where the winning MP must eventually get 50%+ of the vote, US style primaries for candidate selection in safe seats, House of Lords reform, fixed term limits for parliament and checks on executive power. He also proposes a sort of "one in one out" rule on legislation - each new page for the statute book must be accompanied by a page removed - which might be a bit unwieldy but is an interesting concept.
Policy Exchange aren't exclusively "right wing" of course, but they are more well known for entertaining the likes of Osborne and Cameron than Frank Field. Is this an example of Labour reaching out to Policy Exchange; or democratic reformers reaching out to the Conservative party?
