I don't know how rigid party lines are in Britain, but they are very strict on party discipline in Australia. Crossing the floor is grounds for immediate expulsion from the Labor Party, and while there are occasionally some conservatives who cross the floor, when they do so it is a big thing in the media and shows how the conservatives don't really know what they stand for, etc.
Realistically your local member is going to vote and publicly advocate for whatever his party's ministry or shadow ministry decides on. I don't think that this is as bad a thing as it might look. (Here I'm talking from the Australian experience.) Every now and then you get a hard-working local member promoted to the ministry who turns out to be completely incompetent at actually running anything important. The party machines make democracy worse in several ways, but they do a pretty good job at filtering out the dud MP's and promoting the ones with a talent for policy making.
Following this line of reasoning, the logical thing to do would be to have both a leaders' debate and a debate between ministers and shadow ministers. We had some of them before the last election in Australia. I don't know how much impact they had, but then the "debates" here are really tightly controlled, or at least they were under Howard, who was a poor debater and wanted as little actual debate as possible.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-04-29 09:57 am (UTC)Realistically your local member is going to vote and publicly advocate for whatever his party's ministry or shadow ministry decides on. I don't think that this is as bad a thing as it might look. (Here I'm talking from the Australian experience.) Every now and then you get a hard-working local member promoted to the ministry who turns out to be completely incompetent at actually running anything important. The party machines make democracy worse in several ways, but they do a pretty good job at filtering out the dud MP's and promoting the ones with a talent for policy making.
Following this line of reasoning, the logical thing to do would be to have both a leaders' debate and a debate between ministers and shadow ministers. We had some of them before the last election in Australia. I don't know how much impact they had, but then the "debates" here are really tightly controlled, or at least they were under Howard, who was a poor debater and wanted as little actual debate as possible.