I’d like to write a series of posts here in defence of the political Party system. I’m conscious that this is not an elegant or fashionable position to take, and it’s certainly not one of those lines that you can defend in the 140 character Twitter template.

I’d go further: It takes a series of blog-posts – a set of milestones. It’s like fighting the great Earnie Shavers – there are about a dozen knockout punches that can be aimed at you early on – but if you can take the fight the distance, you often have a good chance of winning it.

Before I really get into the meat of it though, could I ask you to indulge me in something?

Just go here – I’ve pointed to this site before (it’s a few years old, but it still illustrates something very valuable – it was created by the late Chris Lightfoot) – fill it out willya?

If you want to, and you’re not too worried about showing your political colours, you can grab the URL of the results page and save it – or paste it into the comments box here?

I’ll explain why later.

BBC Radio 4′s Analysis programme – and the podcast – are essential listening for anyone with even the slightest wonkish tendencies.

Just after posting on ‘cognitive polyphasia‘ a few days ago, I listened to this programme from their archive about the problems that devolution is creating for parties that were established as ‘national’ parties. One of the talking heads on the programme – Linda Colley -  suggested that few people in Westminster really thought through the consequences of creating a Scottish Parliament.

Well, it’s there now. And it’s forcing politicians to modify their reliance upon monolithic one-size-fits-all policies.

Perhaps more powers should be devolved in different ways without much thought?

I find it almost impossible to take a blog seriously when its central claim is that any British government in the recent past of forseeable future is really lurching towards totalitarianism. It is with this proviso that I offer a semi-approving link to this post.

The elected police chief – like the elected Mayor – cannot seriously be seen as a democratic step forward, can it? If one were to apply the logic that places ‘distributed moral wisdom‘ at the heart of a functioning democracy, then it is very hard to make the case for elections that foreground single individuals.

Surely, it is very hard to make the case that one vote every four years can endorse one individual’s approach to almost everything in a particular sphere? Surely this is little better than holding a plebiscite on a policy issue that most people don’t understand?

The recent London mayoral elections provides a very good case-in-point. Whatever you think of Ken Livingstone’s personal politics, he was an adornment to the Labour Party and he was a net contributor to the quality of parliamentary life while he was there. The same can be said for Boris Johnson in the context of his own party.

I’d go even further than that. Though they were /are all quite controversial figures, George Galloway, Ian Paisley, or Enoch Powell – in the context of 600+ other MPs – improve(d) the quality of the House of Commons. Variety is not only the spice of life, it’s also one of the magic ingredients of parliamentary democracy.

My argument is that this kind of distributed wisdom is the least unlikely way of getting competent and humane policymaking.

But distributed wisdom – whether it’s the type that was promoted by advocates of some versions of public choice theory, by Hayek, or the more swishy up-to-date ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ – only works if groupthink isn’t in evidence. And party groupthink is one thing you can’t – by definition – accuse these mavericks of.

So, should we be comfortable in voting for a political party that we generally favoured if it had one or two candidates that we really deplored? I would suggest that it is almost impossible to find a functioning party that doesn’t have a few problematic characters – after all, organisations tend to thrive as long as they have a diverse base.  In fact, the presence of most mavericks – whether one personally finds them acceptable or not should makes a party more attractive to one, rather than less – if our starting point is that a good democracy is the product of a distributed moral wisdom.

Now, what if the unpalatable candidate is standing for one’s favourite party in the local constituency? How do we address that one? That’s a tougher one – but I’d still vote for them secure in the knowledge that they will be emerged into a more acceptable whole. This would be very different in a contest that would hand them fairly untrammelled power as an individual.

Now, if the party I voted for started doing what The Conservative Party did in Ealing Southall (David Cameron’s Conservative Party went on the ballot paper) , I’d struggle to vote for that party – not because of their overall policies, but because it would interfere with the notion of distributed moral wisdom.

This seems to me to be the paradox of political parties. On the one hand, if they are highly centralised, they are a damaging competitor to any decent model of democracy. But if they aren’t, they could make the whole shooting match work the way that it should.

For this reason, this proposal from the New Local Government Network (NLGN) makes sense. In summary, they want to replace the Greater London Assembly with a council made up of the leaders of London’s boroughs.

Again, on the principle of distributed moral wisdom, I’d go one step further and get rid of the elected mayor as well – and just have a regional assembly made up of nominated councillors, who in turn nominate a mayor.

Perhaps this would not only be a very good idea in principle for London. It would also provide a template for regional government throughout the rest of the UK. You could sack all of those MLAs in Northern Ireland, the MSPs and the WAMs. And you could set up regional assemblies where they don’t really sit properly everywhere else.

It would mean that councillors would have more power, and people would have a reason to care about which councillors they elect. And it would allow you to establish real regional government throughout the UK – without having to have a referendum!