If you've been following our Twitter feed you've probably noticed a few links about electoral and governmental reform mixed in with the more directly relevant stuff lately. I've been spending some time over the last year looking in more detail at the processes and procedures that take place to bring into law stuff such as the swathe of 'anti-terrorism' legislation that we so often end up reporting abuses of, and the more I find out about how our government currently works, the less surprised I am that I felt the need to start this website. I'm also more and more convinced that some fairly fundamental things need to change about the way our political processes and organisations currently work before we will have fixed the actual causes of some of the problems we're facing, rather than just fiddling with the symptoms.

It came as news to me when, early on in this educational process, I found out that 'the Government' is a different thing from 'Parliament'. Parliament is the collection of local MPs (of all parties, and independents) that we voted in at elections. The Government is the group of ministers selected by the Prime Minister to run the country. Most ministers are MPs, although some are from the Lords (notably, Peter Mandelson).

Interesting aside here - once an MP is chosen to be a minister, they can no longer perform some of the duties and functions of an elected MP. For instance, my local MP told me that she cannot sign any Early Day Motions (a sort of petition for MPs to show they care about an issue) because she is a junior Home Office minister. I feel a bit cheated by that - she's supposed to be representing my views, but now that she's part of the 'inner circle' she can't always do that, no matter what my views or her views might be about an issue - that seems wrong to me.

Anyway... ministers form the Government, which is the group that usually comes up with new pieces of legislation. Parliament's job is supposed to be to then look at these pieces of legislation and debate them before voting on them, making sure that only 'good' bills make it into law.

Here we start to run into some problems. One of these problems is that as the bills are being debated by people many of whom are from the party which came up with the bill, there's a certain amount of bias in the system which will tend to see a bill through regardless of its merits. Most particularly, ministers form a significantly large part of the group of MPs who are supposed to be debating each piece of legislation, and those MPs who form the Government are not often inclined to debate against it.

Another interesting issue is that it is the Government (the bill-creators), not Parliament (the bill-debaters) who sets the schedule for what Parliament debates and for how long they can debate any given item. The potential for abuse there is obvious, and very regularly exercised - a common ploy is for a short debate time to be set, and then for MPs of the dominant party to keep asking questions with easy answers until the debate time is exhausted, meaning that MPs who wanted to ask challenging questions miss their chance, and all MPs have to vote on the bill without having had its problems fully explored and, well, debated.

I was told about this method of stifling debate as part of an official workshop about how Parliament works, run by the Parliamentary Outreach organisation, in an office inside Parliament. This isn't sneaky secret-handshake stuff, this is a publicly-acknowledged and frequently-applied trick that is being used to wreck our democratic process, by turning it into a points-scoring game of some kind - and with stacked odds at that. I was more than a little annoyed when I found this out, and I hope that some of you are too!

The influence of the parties, and most particularly of the party whips, is another problem that seems to be very clearly interfering with whether MPs can do what you or I might consider to be their job - i.e. representing the views and interests of their constituency. All too often an MP is compelled to vote 'the party line' rather than following their conscience - and particularly, this happens most often on exactly those contentious issues where we might most want them to display a conscience and a strong appreciation of their position as representative of the people in their area. Instead, they are faced with a choice of voting as they are told, or potentially losing their position as a member of their party, and therefore likely losing their seat at the next election.

One reform which might help to fix some of these problems would be to say that MPs cannot become ministers - their job should be to hold ministers to account, not to aspire to become ministers themselves. Interestingly this is exactly how our Parliament was supposed to be set-up in the first place, before the power blocks of the time realised that there would be advantages to overlapping the two roles (advantages for those in the roles, not for the rest of the country!) and amended the various reform acts of the 1800s appropriately.

As well as governmental reforms - which seem unlikely to ever see the light of day, the more so the more significantly they change power balances in the current system - there is also the slightly more likely prospect of electoral reforms. An easy one to point out here is that, much like the manipulation of the timetable for debates in Parliament, the Government sets the timetable for the election. We should have elections on the same date (or at least in the same month) every four years, not let the incumbent party pick a date that might suit them best.

There are lots of other possibilities in electoral reform of course - the most discussed being proportional representation, some system whereby parties get a number of seats relevant to how many votes they got across the whole country. This would probably give us a more balanced Parliament, quite possibly a hung Parliament, which would almost inevitably lead to more discussion and debate on controversial bills, instead of them being rushed through practically by decree.

Yet another issue around electoral reform is the way that the party in power can rearrange constituency boundaries to their own advantage. Labour have been criticised for this recently, but they're not the first party to take advantage of the potential for abuse here. Perhaps this task needs to be managed by some sort of independent body?

Many of these issues have gone into a shortlist compiled by Power2010 of reforms and changes which are currently going through a public voting process before being presented to the government as suggestions of change the public would like to see. If you're interested in these issues, it's worth going to take a look at the shortlist (I think there are less than 20 items on it), and voting for anything you consider to be important.

The expenses scandal last year has left a lot of people more aware of politics - and its apparent divorcal from the reality of our day-to-day lives. The challenge for people who are interested in improving matters now is to guide that awareness into action rather than letting it settle back into apathy. I would suggest that the first action you try to encourage is simply getting people to vote at the general election this year. At the last few elections, more people have not voted at all than have voted for the winning party, which seems to me to be a huge problem.

Beyond that there are a myriad issues you can get involved with, and perhaps most people reading this site are already involved with one, or at least considering it. At the extreme end of the possibilities, you could run as an independent candidate at the general election yourself - this year is probably the best chance most independents will ever have to win, as the main parties have all lost a lot of the reputation and trustworthiness that is usually their biggest asset in grabbing drifting votes.