A Tribal system.

I had an idea last night, only this morning I spotted a slight incidence of mathematical incompetence.
The idea was this:

Hairyloon wrote:There are roughly 650 Members of Parliament and roughly 65 million people in the country.

This means each MP represents on average roughly 100,000 people.

With that many people, the only way you can deal with the bulk of them is as statistics.

100 people is reasonable amount of people to expect someone to maintain a direct, meaningful contact with.

If each of the 650 MPs answered directly to 100 different people, and each of those answered directly to another 100 people, then that would be 650 x 100 x 100 = 65,000,000 people who have somebody they actually know who they can go to go to for representation.

And you have all of course spotted that I missed a zero, so I'm out by a factor of 10.

But I still think the basic idea is good. We can eliminate the factor of ten by either intoducing another layer, in which case the designated people have only about 50 others to deal with.

I must have missed something.

Why is it necessary to "maintain direct, meaningful contact" contact with someone in order to represent their interests in Parliament?

Wilhelm Von Rhomboid wrote:Why is it necessary to "maintain direct, meaningful contact" contact with someone in order to represent their interests in Parliament?

In order to know what those interests are.

Otherwise you just end up with parliament filled with MPs trying to represent their own self interest... entirely unlike the current one.

On a national politics level? My MP needs to remain in direct and meaningful contact with me and 100 neighbours (roughly the residents of my street) to vote on foreign policy for example?
You believe that would improve matters?

Wilhelm Von Rhomboid wrote:On a national politics level? My MP needs to remain in direct and meaningful contact with me and 100 neighbours (roughly the residents of my street) to vote on foreign policy for example?

Check the revised maths: it is only 50.
And how many people do you think (s)he actually has a direct and meaningful contact with?
How many people do you know?
People typically know about 150, so unless your MP is a hermit, then I am not actually asking anything of them that they don't already do.

You believe that would improve matters?

Yes.
The relevant point is that it would mean that everybody has a friend of a fried of a friend in parliament.

In France the Mayor of the village is expected to know everyone and have direct contact, including knowing who has what resources. He's the one you go to if someones dog is barking too much or a bunch of youths are being annoying. He also should represent the people to the next layer up. Does it work? Only if you and the mayor make it so!

Zoe wrote:In France the Mayor of the village is expected to know everyone and have direct contact, including knowing who has what resources.

That sounds like a good plan, depending on the size of your village.
What size is typical?

Does it work? Only if you and the mayor make it so!

How well and how often does it work?
Does everyone in France have a mayor?

My experience of directly elected mayors is from Germany. The first one in my village was a rude self interested builder who lined his own pocket. The second was from outside the village but worked very hard to help the people, especially the youth, he was great. A lot depends on the person and their motivation.
Same goes for local councillors in the UK. During my time as one I saw examples of the above and several shades in between.
I don't think the idea of designating people to act as go betweens would work that well as the people who tend to end up in those roles are either buisy bodies or full of themselves.

Aren't busy bodies exactly the right sort of person for the job?

The other thing is that you are talking about the total population including children. I think people that work within a community can work knowing families and would perhaps be able to know more. If I think back to my school days you could easily "know" several hundreds of people.

The important principal is to know everyone not just those that whinge or have problems like the present MPs do...and constituents that wish to promote themselves.

I don't know how the mayor of Paris (for example) works as I'm sure he can't be responsible for ensuring everyone with a fire arm has the right licence but in the villages you are talking a few hundred and the towns are obviously thousands but there are other councillors with them. In fact we have about 8 councillors for a population of 110 inhabitants!

When I lived in a small town in France the Mayor was utterly corrupt. His extended family got permission to develop property wherever they wanted, their business rivals were constantly denied permission. Bakshish flowed like Pernod.

This seems an argument in favour of favouritism and cronyism to me.

Are we talking about a return to a kind of feudalism?

Badger wrote:Are we talking about a return to a kind of feudalism?

There are certainly elements of similarity, but also, there were things about feudalism that worked.

Wilhelm Von Rhomboid wrote:When I lived in a small town in France the Mayor was utterly corrupt.
This seems an argument in favour of favouritism and cronyism to me.

But remember the majority of people voted for him!

Zoe wrote:But remember the majority of people voted for him!

Did they? Or did they simply fail to vote against him?