I should have expected a fellow Architect to highlight issues that weren’t articulated in the article! Yes, you’re entirely right to question the role of the MP. The answer is actually the solution to another problem, so I’ll start the explanation there.

“How,” asked an astute reader, “are you going to afford everything? People are just going to vote ‘Yes’ for things with no appreciation of the need for a balanced budget.”

In the same vein, another observered: “That’s never going to work. The first thing that would happen is that people would vote to bring back hanging or national service.”

The solution to these issues – and most of the ones in your post – is to realise that MPs are there to deliver a legislative agenda. You’d vote for an MP with whose manifesto you agreed the most. A group of MPs who shared broadly common goals and manifesto pledges would form a government. The government would be responsible for putting forward a sensible legislative programme that was fiscally sound.

So, an MP wouldn’t be a glorified hand-raiser; she would have to consider the work of pariliament carefully and, I’ll warrant, take more responsibility for good quality legislation than a well-whipped MP nowadays. Oh look, we’ve just answered your last point and abolished the whip! Job’s a good ‘un!

(More of this please, everyone. The idea was unlikely to work straight out of the box but constructive criticism surfaces issues to be addressed and thus improvements to the scheme. Perhaps it’s my Physics degree and belief in the scientific method at work: a hypothesis becomes a theory only when it can survive every test thrown at it. Fail just once and the hypothesis has to be abandoned and a new hypothesis formed. Challenge the concept, please: I look forward to seeing whether the idea survives or whether it has a fatal flaw.)

Surely they become the only point of failure in your super computer data system. If they by mistake say “nay” rather than “yay” come voting time. Therefore the logic says have everyone voting straight from their meter to a government super computer.

No more MP’s! No more expenses scandal! Everyone’s happy, except that kind of ignores a large reason for politicians existing. we elect an MP as our representative because we accept that whilst going about our everyday life we don’t have the time to give the level of attention to every decision that needs to be made by government.

Do we really all want the responsibility of making decisions every morning over our Coco Pops that can decide the future of nations, how soon before the majority stop bothering or just skim through without detailed thought? MPs should in theory be doing this for us.

Now if you can come up with a data solution that will reduce the power of the whips so that an MP always votes for the good of his constituency rather than tow the party line, then that is something I will vote for through my teletext!