Passport High, Emotional Low

How about this? You go in on Monday. You provide your paperwork and a special delivery envelope. You hand over £15. And on Saturday morning at 9.30 am the postman wakes you up with a letter to sign for which contains your brand new passport.

A utopian view of how government should operate? A reality we can only aspire to? No. The service the Spanish consulate in Manchester provides for Spanish subjects.

My wife now has a brand new passport and that's all she had to do to get it.

Compare the above with the British government's fees and service level agreements here. The service she just received would've cost her £97 if it'd been a British passport she'd been renewing rather than a Spanish one. Nationality is a privilege and an honour, it is true; but when it becomes a burden for the majority of a country's citizens is when something is poorly conceptualised at the heart of the relationship between an establishment and its voters.

Thus I am brought back to the subject of the FPTP voting system. Some interesting points made at Liberal Conspiracy this weekend on this very same issue. Meanwhile, Paul has argued that the voting system is an irrelevance. If socialism was engaging with its clientèle as it verily ought to have been doing already, it wouldn't matter what system was used.

There is some degree of truth to this argument - but it still doesn't address the following: if we are truly interested in fairness, we should create a system which fairly represents all shades of opinion at any one time. Elections are a snapshot and we really shouldn't wish to tamper with the frame. Power is a necessary objective in all politicking - whether this be national and parliamentary or local and at grassroots level. But it shouldn't be coveted or achieved at the expense of conceptual probity or statistical accuracy. Every vote must count. Just as much as every month and year.

Perhaps it is wrong of me to focus the argument only around PR. But PR as a baseline could be used to lever engagement with the electorate with a more frequent and staggered timetable of elections; elections and votes of different sorts - local, municipal referendums, mayorals, European - say every six months. A rolling programme of elections in fact, so that elections became part and parcel of the political landscape - a regular litmus test for all politicians, a true point of reference; even a substitute for the hideously tolling bells of specious opinion polls.

In the meantime, and I'm sure you'd agree with me, Spain's relationship with its subjects and the pecuniary burdens of citizenship that it chooses to impose seem a damn sight more joyful, realistic and just than the UK's.

A metaphor, perhaps, for the wider malaise that is striking us all down in such sad times. Never was it so true as now: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In New Labour's attempt to square circles, it actually ended up brutally pigeon-holing us in a set of political and economic structures where a lack of intellectual and social ambition guided us towards the contradictions that now tear us apart.

The Tories do not deserve to win, not yet. But neither do we deserve not to lose.

So it is that I continue to vote Labour out of a desire to recover and re-establish a forum of healthy and creative political debate - but not because I feel, at least for the moment, that there is any chance of me forming part of an organisation that is up to the job of running a country.

Gordon Brown may show resilience in these difficult times and merit our admiration for such resilience but there is a fine dividing line between a socially responsible desire to stay at the helm on the one hand and a selfish stubborness that speaks only of pig-headedness on the other.

I cannot say if that line has been crossed.

I can only say that a country which believes that its passports are worth six times those of its neighbours must have given its soul up to the marketplace far far too long ago.

And - to be honest - that's really quite a shame.