I am not generally given to hyperbole, but I do seriously wonder whether our political system is now so dysfunctional that we ought to take a fresh look at the way in which it works (or, rather, doesn't).

A dysfunctional system

There are four main problems, as I see it.

The loss of party political principles

First, there are no discernable party political principles in politics any more. I have never been a great fan of party politics (more of that shortly), but a party system ought to at least enable us to know what a political party stands for. That doesn't seem to me to be the case any more.

Things are confusing enough on a simple left-right axis. Labour has moved so far right (identity cards, banning peaceful protest, anti-terrorism legislation, etc) that it is arguably more right-wing than the Tory party of old; the Tories have moved into the centre ground that used to be occupied by the LibDems; and the LibDems are now a long-way towards Old Labour territory.

Worse, though, the ground occupied by each of the parties appears to be not so much shifting as completely lacking anchor-points. Certainly both Labour and Conservative parties appear to simply be chasing the vagaries of public opinion rather than putting a stake in the ground and declaring 'This is what we believe'. (The LibDems at least seem a little less prone to this, though their stakes in the ground are few & far between.)

What does Tony Blair believe in? Other than clinging to office for as long as humanly possible, I have no idea. David Cameron? Aside from believing that he would like to be Prime Minister, search me. Both seem to draw their opinions more from the results of newspaper polls than from a deep inner conviction, and both seem to live almost entirely in a world of media soundbites rather than clearly articulated strategies.

The loss of honour

Honour may seem a quaintly old-fashioned word to use in a discussion of politics, but if we are to vote for elected representatives and/or political parties, we surely need to know what it is we are authorising them to do on our behalfs?

Instead, politicians seem to view manifesto promises merely as nice-sounding words to get them elected, and which they are free to abandon shortly thereafter.

Politicians routinely lie to save their skins. They cling tenaciously to office in circumstances in which it is clear to all that they should resign. They don't even appear embarrassed to do so.

Uncomfortable issues are met with silence, such as Blair's failure to condemn the manner of Saddam Hussein's execution for several days, and the use of a spokesman when he finally did. Or the decision to abandon the SFO enquiry into BAE (or, more generally, the hypocrisy which surrounds this and many other issues: where governments are perfectly well aware of what goes on but wish to pretend that they aren't).

Point-scoring & squabbling rather than solutions

A Martian listening to Prime Minister's Question Time would surely consider it a form of entertainment for the masses rather than a serious attempt to ensure that the nation is informed on the current issues and basis for the decisions being reached. And so it has become.

Virtually every debate that takes place at Westminster suffers from the same substitution of political jibe for reasoned debate.

Churchill once famously described democracy as the worst political system apart from all the other ones. There is much truth in this, of course. The undignified squabbling that goes on in the House of Commons is infinitely preferable to the peaceful assent of a one-party system. But are those really our only alternatives?

A cynical & disengaged electorate

This is, of course, a chicken-and-egg position. Is the electorate cynical and disengaged because politics is dysfunctional, or vice-versa?

But whichever came first, the result is that three problems outlined above are allowed to persist. Nobody expects politicians to be clear, honourable or adult, and so they are not.

Quo vadis?

What can we do to change things? Let's start with a couple of things that clearly don't work ...

Voting for the correct party

That's what most people try. It patently doesn't work. Even assuming that one of the minority parties on the horizon would be different (and I have seen little sign of this), by the time they became a big party, we would almost certainly see the same issues all over again.

Representational democracy

I began my voting life as a strong believer in representational democracy. That is, I meet the candidates, quiz them on the issues that mean most to me and then vote for the candidate who I believe will best represent my views in Parliament - irrespective of party. Once they are elected, I get involved in lobbying them to act on particular issues I feel strongly about. This is, after all, the fundamental principle behind our Parliamentary system.

Of course, it was always a somewhat idealistic approach, as the party whip system means that MPs of all persuasions will vote with the party on core issues of domestic economic or social policy. But if politics is the art of the possible, then representational democracy is the ethos of figuring out what one individual can achieve. And lobbying campaigns mean that, actually, individuals can achieve quite a lot.

I have voted in six general elections. For the first three, my representational democracy approach worked pretty well. There was always one halfway reasonable candidate who could at least be counted on for at least intelligent debate of the issues of interest to me, with sufficient common ground to form a basis for a working relationship.

No more. The 1997 election was the one that made it all too clear that all three mainstream parties were now depending totally on the fact that the vast majority of the electorate would vote for a wax dummy provided that it was wearing the correct coloured rosette.

The Tory candidate didn't seem to be able to move out of soundbite mode, spouting short summaries of his party's policies on whatever issues had been Daily Mail headlines recently and seemingly incapable of answering any of my questions.

The LibDem candidate was terribly nice but couldn't be pinned down on anything. He turned seeing both sides of any argument into an artform.

The Labour candidate was- well, there is no polite way of putting this: the Labour candidate was a moron. No exaggeration, the guy's IQ couldn't have reached triple figures. He made the Tory candidate look bright.

It was a frightening experience. Especially when the Labour candidate won. This guy - who probably couldn't even spell Parliament - was my elected representative, called upon to pass judgements on matters of State at a time when governments face tougher questions than ever before.

Things did not improve in two subsequent elections. In the most recent one, two out of the three main candidates couldn't even be bothered to meet with me. ("The candidate is very busy at the moment." Er, yes - that would be trying to get elected, in which endeavour one might have thought that talking to voters might figure somewhere in the equation.)

So I have to acknowledge that my own approach to voting is today no better than voting for a rosette.

True democracy

So if party politics and representational democracy don't work, what about true democracy? Everyone votes on every issue. Referenda rule.

True democracy is technically possible today. Indeed, scale issues aside (which is about money rather than complexity), creating a web-based system to allow every voter to vote on every issue would be quite trivial.

Socially, we're not quite there yet, of course. Not every member of the electorate has daily access to the web. But with long-range wifi and the type of low-cost basic PCs being created for use in the developing world, we're probably not too many years away from true ubiquitous access.

The far greater problem is that we'd then have a country run by Sun readers. I think we'll move swiftly on ...

Meritocracy

A meritocratic society, where decisions are made by those best qualified to make them, is an idea most of us could support - albeit quietly (or silently). This is, of course, because we are each sure of our own qualifying status.

We must dismiss this one equally swiftly given the utter impossibility of agreeing objective standards for qualification. Or, at any rate, of persuading Sun readers to vote for their disenfranchisement.

So what do we have left?

A brief episode of fantasy politics

Ok, I'll return to reality in a moment, but humour me for a few minutes ...

The Greeks are widely credited with inventing the concept of democracy. What is perhaps less well-known (certainly in my own case it took a Radio 4 programme to educate me on the subject) is that voting was a later variation on the original system.

The original system of Greek democracy was in fact a lottery. You still had to signal your consent to be elected, but the election itself was decided not by the popular vote, but rather by the vagaries of fate.

I will readily confess that electing politicians on the winds of chance does not, on the face of it, seem the brightest of ideas. And of course a change of this magnitude moves us well into the realms of fantasy. But since we're here, let's at least play with the idea a little before moving back to reality ...

I would refine the idea by introducing a few very simple qualifications. Nothing as onerous or controversial as those that might be suggested for a meritocracy, but rather a very low bar designed to eliminate only those who would clearly have no right to throw their hat into the ring.

Voting record

First of these would, I suggest, be an unbroken record of having voted in both local and general elections. Granted that this may often seem a rather futile exercise given the issues raised above, it nonetheless remains one of the few ways we have of having our say in the governing of our society.

I would, incidentally, happily accept someone who turned up at the ballot box each time and scribbled 'None of the above' on their paper. I merely want to exclude those who simply couldn't be bothered.

Evidence of engagement in the system

Second, I would personally want to see some evidence of further engagement in the political system. A letter to an MP. A phone call to a councillor. Even signing a petition. Anything at all to show some interest in changing the world for the better.

Contribution to charity

Third, and for the same reason, evidence of having contributed to charity. Ok, we can't track every occasion on which someone has stuffed a fiver in a collecting tin, but as we're playing fantasy politics in this system, we'll pretend that we can.

Ability to manage our lives

Finally, anyone who wants to play a formal role in managing the country needs to be able to demonstrate an ability to manage their own life. By this, I mean no serious criminal convictions; no debts without payment arrangements in place; no kids we can't support; no ASBOs ...

A return to reality (of a sort)

Ok, any plan to seriously reform our political system might well also be considered fantasy politics, but let's at least have a bash at devising a brief set of proposals that ought to be non-controversial.

Legally-binding manifestos

A political manifesto represents hopes & plans as well as promises, of course, and I would not deny any party the opportunity to express both.

What I would do is require them to clearly separate one from the other. Under each heading (eg. Economy, Education, etc), we'd have several subheadings. For example ...

Promises: things we have costed, know we can do, and will do within the coming term.

Plans: things we believe we can achieve within the coming term, and will do our best to implement.

Intentions: things we would like to do, but don't realistically expect to achieve within the coming term.

Enforcement of the promises would need to be tough, of course. I would suggest that if a government fails to deliver on any of its manifesto promises within that term, that none of the members of that government are allowed to stand in the election that follows. Not the prime minister, not the cabinet, not any of the backbench MPs. If those people can't keep their promises, the party has to replace them with people who can.

That ought to mean we get some realistic promises, methinks.

Properly-costed budgets

No government can be expected to predict its exact income and expenditure, I appreciate. Recessions can hit. Disasters can occur, natural and otherwise.

But what they can do is show us their costings, including a list of the main assumptions made (rate of economic growth, etc), so that we can decide for ourselves how realistic those budgets are.

Properly-costed budgets would be mandatory for manifesto promises.

An end to stealth taxation

Ok, ok, I'm back in fantasy land again, I admit, and I will at some point write another opinion piece outlining my fantasy taxation system.

But I'm going to hold out here for the principle at least. Renting a government ought to be no different to renting anything else: we ought to be able to see how much it will cost us, and what we're going to get for our money.

At present, we have no idea what our governments cost us, because so much taxation is disguised - and because we have so many taxes on taxes.

Let's take the simple example of buying a gallon of petrol. Alright, then, a litre of petrol ...

At the pump, we pay (as of the time of writing) an average of 88.2p for a litre of unleaded petrol. Care to guess how much of that is tax? Well, let's see ...

To keep the maths simple, I'm going to round to the nearest penny at each stage (just to avoid the numbers like 74.893617p that we'd get otherwise).

First of all, we paid VAT on both the cost of the fuel and on the fuel tax. Yes, that's right, we paid tax on a tax. So of that 88p, 13p was VAT.

Next, we paid fuel duty. That was 47.1p which we're rounding down to 47p. Yes, that's also right, the fuel duty alone comes to more than the cost of the petrol: 47p duty on 28p of petrol.

So already, the total tax on that 28p of petrol comes to 60p - a tax rate of 214%.

But don't forget, you already paid income tax on that 88p. You also paid national insurance on it, which, incidentally, was charged on your gross income - another example of a tax on a tax. But let's keep things simple: at some point during the year, a higher-rate tax-payer is paying 40% income tax. So to get that 88p to pay for your 28p's worth of petrol, you had to earn £1.46.

Running a country is an expensive business. There are many worthy things to pay for. None of this amounts to an objection to paying high rates of tax - that's the price of living in a civilised society, and it sure as hell beats the alternatives.

All I am asking is that we be told how much we are paying. Do that by ending stealth taxation and sticking it all on income tax and VAT, or do it by stickers on petrol pumps, I don't much care. But let's have governments with honest price-tags.

Accountable personal finances too

On the topic of accountable finances, this also ought to apply to the salaries and perks of MPs.

Let's end the absurd situation of MPs voting on their own salaries and simply make their existing salaries index-linked.

Let's also ensure that all perks are transparent and above-board. No more hiring wives as secretaries, for example. And when a regional MP needs a London home, the government buys it so that the nation, not the MP, gets the benefit of the equity growth. (In case you are unaware of this practice, MPs from outside London can claim an allowance for a London home. Many of them buy a flat and use the allowance to pay the mortgage, selling the property at a profit if they lose their seat, or ending up with a free flat if they remain in their seat for the duration of the (usually) 15-year mortgage.)

Lie to the electorate, lose your seat

Finally, if John Prescott wants to shag his secretary, then so long as he does so in his own time and on his own property, I consider that his business. But when an MP lies to the electorate, they ought to lose their seat with immediate effect.

That lie might be Tony Blair expressing his belief in Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction when he had already been clearly told that this was exceedingly unlikely, or it might be an individual MP lying about some personal wrong-doing. Either way: lie to us, and you are gone.

Vote for me - you know it makes sense ...