Hain joins 'sweeping reforms' call

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Peter Hain urged the Government to introduce a "Great Reform Bill".

He said its aim should be to create "a politics which was genuinely pluralist and empowering".

Writing in the Guardian, he called for changes including an overhaul of the electoral system, a shake-up of the House of Lords, consideration of a fixed-term Parliament, an end to "shabby" party financing and better scrutiny of Bills.

Mr Hain said: "There is now a window of opportunity for a Great Reform Bill which may not come around again for a generation, if ever.

"It should be introduced this autumn and taken through in the coming parliamentary session so that it is in place before the next election."

He said the current first-past-the-post voting system meant that power was being "sucked upwards to regional or national levels of party structures", with the single member constituency "abolished".

Mr Hain favoured the Alternative Vote system, by which bottom candidates drop out and their subsequent preference votes are allocated to those above until someone wins with an overall majority.

This means that the winner would have to have more than 50% of voter support, he said.

Former Home Secretary David Blunkett, also writing in the Guardian, echoed his former colleague's call for electoral reform. He said he could "wear the alternative vote system if I had to", but described proportional representation as a recipe for "disempowering voters" and "dodgy stitch-ups" between political parties.