Ideas flooding in from UK blogland

Guy Aitchison: The Power2010 ideas "meme" I created last week, where I asked fellow bloggers their ideas for reform, continues to spread across UK blogland, generating some thought-provoking ideas and discussion.

Tim Trent wants MPs working in Parliament during office hours doing the job they're paid to do: "I want my MP to realise that he is my (collectively our) servant, and is not there to feather his nest. I actually don't mind paying him a bonus to attend and do his job, but I expect him to be there as a public servant, doing a public service."

After he was tagged by Tim, Lib Dem blogger Stephen Glenn posted five ideas for reform on his Linlithgow journal. Stephen thinks we should introduce a Prime Minister's Answers session in Parliament alongside Prime Minister's Questions as a way to crackdown on slippery and evasive answers by the PM. He'd do this by giving the Speaker the power "to sin bin the Prime Minister if he fails to answer a question". He also reckons the bizarre restrictions on parliamentary debates appearing on video sharing sites like YouTube should be dropped and wants to allow the public to vote on which bills are debated in Parliament. Stephen's final idea, which he hopes will re-connect MPs to the real world, is to have them swap jobs for a week a year with a volunteer in their constituency.

Stephen then tagged young Labour blogger Yapping Yousuf. Having worked on Barack Obama's campaign and seen the excitement there was amongst voters in "pubs, cafes and hairdressers" across Ohio thanks to policy propositions being on the ballot paper, Yapping Yousuf thinks we should try a similar system over here: "What if we had a system where if you got enough names on a petition that could then be put to the voters at the next general election?", he asks.

He thinks there would need to be "safeguards" in the process and a "limit on spending implications" but that "it could lead to a more accountable democratic process and crucially a real value on why voting matters."

Reading Green Party member Adrian Windisch wants to see an end to the party whip, a proportional voting system, the naming and shaming of MPs that don't communicate, and, just like Lib Dem blogger Mark Thompson who I first tagged, he wants to see a modern Parliament with MPs acting like grown ups.

Jane Watkinson would like to tackle what she sees as the BBC's bias against the Liberal Democracts and suggests weakening the Whips and holding more free votes to loosen the grip of parties over the political process.

And last but not least Tom Griffin, of OurKingdom, proposes a "compulsory register of lobbyists" to bring their murky activities out into the open. Tom says that "if we are to get a reformist parliament, it is up to us to ensure we elect one. An ideal way to do that is to include a lobbyists register among the five pledges that Power2010 asks all candidates to sign up to."

What do you think of these bloggers' ideas? Would they help fix our broken politics or would they just make things worse? Let us know in the comments and if you haven't submitted your own idea for change yet, do it now.