The long Labour era will be bookended by a lot of nonsense about constitutional reform. In 1997, Tony Blair promised what some of his acolytes called “a Reformation”: an ideological march through the institutions, a purge of all that was fusty and traditional, and the birth of “Cool Britannia”. Twelve years on, Gordon Brown’s Cabinet is reported to be pressing for a constitutional convention, electoral reform, a modernised Parliament and – yes, you’ve guessed it – a “new politics”.
In Monday’s Independent, Alan Johnson, the man mysteriously poised to replace the Prime Minister if catastrophe strikes Labour in the June 4 elections, declared that “we need to overhaul the political system and… we should complete unfinished business by discussing again the Jenkins review [of the Westminster voting system] and consulting the British people on proportional representation, which gives greater power to the electorate.”
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