A useful round-up Malcolm.

I couldn't bring myself to engage with Italy/Israel example quoting retards on Ian Dale's site so went for the more cerebral tone of Sunder's post on Our Kingdom - as he obviously has some influence with Straw on this subject. As I think the constituency link argument is one of the most frequent and fallaciously used ones we face, i've copied my comments here:

"Andrew C - Your comments on the constituency link are a ray of sunshine in this debate.

“Parliamentary Voodoo” is exactly right. MPs of all parties hide behind the “constituency link” fig leaf without ever producing a shred of evidence for its utility besides some soppy anecdote about how their constituents “keep them in touch with reality”.

Two points:

1 - the constituency link that people venerate is a link between 1 individual and 1 MP. There’s is no reason why 1 individual to 3 MPs could not be referred to/act as a constituency link. The Hansard Audit of Engagement 5, launched yesterday, shows that only 15% of people have contacted their MP in the last 3 years. Democracy is not going to crumble overnight if we introduce multi-member constituencies.

2 - size of multi-member constituencies: Britain is a small and relatively densely populated country. If AV is a good system then the few Highlands and Islands constituencies that truly are too sparsely populated to support multi-member constituencies can operate AV (STV in single member constituencies).

For the rest of Britain we can move to a single-transferable vote (STV) system based on 3 member constituencies without this stupid idea that we will all be travelling miles out of our way to speak to our MP. The vast majority of communication with MPs (postal/email) has no relation to geographical distance anyway.

I raised this with Ed Milliband at a Fabian event last summer at which he seemed to imply that his (North Doncaster) constituency couldn’t possibly be incorporated with the South and Central Doncaster constituencies because the people of Doncaster couldn’t possibly cope with or comprehend this vast and impassable swathe of England.

Simply locate the MPs in a single building (or even better the Council building) in the centre of Doncaster and those who truly have a need to visit their MP face to face will do as they have always done in this instance (as well as whenever they need to go the cinema/club/full high street etc) - they get in the car/get on the bus and go to town. They also get the bonus pay-off of having more than one MP to chose from - any maybe even one of their own party/persuasion.

The same applies for anywhere with an urban/rural mix, which in a country of market towns and cities is pretty much everywhere. Those few isolated areas where it doesn’t apply can use AV or 2 member constituencies, which is still an improvement on what we have now.

The point about change and reform is that things will be different. In a land of suposed individuals and eccentrics I find the current addiction to centralisation, tradition and uniformity deeply disturbing.

Rant over."