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Welcome to fourteenth article of Red Rag

As a first term MP I very early on decided to well and truly keep my head down and not cause trouble, this unfortunately meant staying well away from the actual levers of power. However it quickly became apparent to me that the power of Parliament is extremely limited, especially in terms of actual things we’re able to do. The running of an eCountry so simplistic and dull that a very long time ago it was decided by my predecessors in Parliaments past what the ‘optimum settings’ were and there is now very little space for different approaches. This isn’t a fault of any individual or the bogeyman party but rather it is a fundamental flaw of eRepublik itself.

The worrying thing is that the dictators of our eWorld seem to me to be leaning towards more simplicity, not less. The changes to Parliamentary electoral system are thoroughly undemocratic (you pick the party but not your representative) and worse still, boring. With candidates representing particular regions there was the possibility of accountability to constituents. The section titled ‘Constructions’ found on the details page of each region seems to hint at some potential facet of eRepubik that either isn’t finished or isn’t utilised.

I would very much like to see citizens having more of a reason to live in certain regions and I would like to see Parliamentary candidates spend their time and effort trying to improve their region and trying to get things built and money spent in their areas. At the state level we need to be given more variables, taxation could ‘banded’ for higher and lower earners, minimum wages could differentiate between Communes and Private Enterprise by employers declaring which they are, perhaps even let us decide on our own voting systems. There’s a whole host of things I could list and the more buttons and levers we have to play with the more real political genuine debate and argument we would have. The difference between a right wing government and a left wing government would be more than just semantics. Give us the keys to our destiny.

- Comrade Buck