Disclaimer: this post does not represent the views of the Conservative Party, CUCA or the poster.

This morning, the British people failed to return the Pro-court/Tory/Conservative Party to their proper place running the (de facto) Queen’s parliament. Many different kinds of electoral reform have been mooted as a solution to supposed problems with the current system. I suggest that most of these are inadequate because they have misidentified the problems, citing spurious priorities for our democracy such as ‘representing the will of the people’ or ‘preventing minority parties from being properly represented’. Really the only problem is that of Labour’s inbuilt advantage – that is, that the Conservative Party did not get an absolute majority. Below I have suggested some solutions to prevent this ridiculous state of affairs from occuring ever again.

1) Ban Trade Union funding.

Ashcroft’s millions are a trifle compared to Unite’s (and, I am told, compared to his donations to other charities). Without funding from trade unions, the Labour Party would be hamstrung in its ability to campaign in marginals. As soon as possible, we need to cook up some plausible reasons why union funding should be illegal (as of writing I have not heard of any convincing ones) and whip a ban through the Commons with the help of other non-union-funded parties. This solution is, of course, imperfect: at some future stage ways to bankrupt other parties may need to be found if constituency boundaries give them an advantage that is too tricky for the Conservative Party’s campaign funds to surmount.

2) Create a ‘black-op’ Corruption Squad.

Independents, Liberal Democrats and minority parties (UKIP boo!) find it too easy to capitalise on voter dissatisfaction with ‘sleaze’ because they have never been in Parliament and are not implicated in past corruption (or, in most cases if we are honest, mere unpleasant veniality: the expenses ‘scandal’ hardly had any incidences of actual foul play). One long term solution to this is to have a special team of extra-Party hacks (think tanks, journalists, choice lobby groups) to target ‘anti-politician’ politicians both before and immediately after their election and invite them to lots of juicy parties, dinners and conferences to rust their shining suits of armour until their protests of integrity and financial perspicuity become empty words. Ideally, pampering such candidates and MPs would actually change their characters so that they would become genuinely corrupt, make genuine mistakes and lose their moral high ground. Meanwhile, the Conservative Party must of course become and remain squeaky clean: the flip-side of this policy will have to be some sort of purge of nasty Thatcherite New Statesman types from the ranks of CF and CA leaderships and their replacement with fresh-faced Disraelians who go to church/synagogue and have smiling nuclear families or steady girl/boyfriends.

3) Re-draw boundaries on a by-square-kilometre basis.

Instead of constituencies being based on population and attempting to keep track of population changes (which seems to have manifestly failed as people continually de-urbanise into Tory areas, increasing how many votes we need to win) establish a constituency boundary system based on physical size. Suddenly those inner-city ‘rotten boroughs’ would be swamped by leafy suburbs – or else lots of country Tory domains would be multiplied in their seat-value.

4) Limit the Franchise.

Naturally, suggesting property as a qualification would be too difficult as there will be complaints of ‘regression’. I’m also pretty sceptical of having an educational qualification to vote, since I’m pretty sure the right answers on the exam paper would end up as ‘vote for whichever Party wrote the test’, to more or less subtle degrees. This is a tricky one: possibly it should be based on credit rating, which seems a sensible way of ensuring some degree of economic responsibility without requiring a special course of political and economic indoctrination education. The problem with credit rating is that the only way for young people to have one is to own a credit card, which is in itself evidence of poor financial management skills as far as I’m concerned – but perhaps raising the age of the franchise would be a beneficial outcome. An alternative limitation would be that in order to vote you have to have one or more children and a successful marriage (you lose the vote if you get divorced) to demonstrate your stake in the country’s long term future and your ability to put relationships with others first. I think we would need a few more decades of aggressive faith school expansion before that is a possibility, however.

5) Secede from the Union. 

To start with, we could try persuading party donors to fund the SNP on the sly through the establishment of Scottish subsidiaries of their businesses linked as tenuously to their holding companies as possible. Ultimately, we should be looking for independence from Wales as well: with enough time a similar strategy could be implemented with Plaid Cymru when they have taken inspiration from Scottish independence. The ideal solution, of course, would be a complete secession of Greater London and the Home Counties from the United Kingdom (we could call it Anglia or Albony or something). Imagine what a delightful place that would be. The makeup of Parliament would revert to mercantilist Whigs and landowner Tories, but I don’t expect there would be much controversy since the city boys would want to make sure their weekend get-aways were preserved and the Tories would have lots of investment in financial services and would want to make sure they were getting a decent return. There would be absolutely buckets of money to spend on tax cuts, public services and high wages for the poorest (i.e. cleaners, baristas, and farm labourers). You would of course have to pay to get a work permit or citizenship, so that Anglia didn’t end up with tens of millions of people crammed into the East End.

I am welcome to more suggestions – I expect you’ll all have excellent ideas. Nothing too sensible please.