USS Monitor wrote:Infected Mushroom wrote:IMO, the USA would be vastly more decisive, unified, efficient and logically governed. Much of the systematic gridlock would be gone and I could see policies like universal healthcare and effective environmental legislation being enacted.
Dunno man.... The UK still manages to be very inefficient and bad at making up its mind.
EDIT: Also, the UK is not a unitary state.
The UK is, in fact, a unitary state. At the very least, it's not a federation. Devolved bodies derive their authority from the central state, unlike members of a federal structure, whose authority is their own and cannot be revoked by the central government even in theory. The UK operates under the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, meaning that Parliament- technically speaking, the Crown-in-Parliament- can unilaterally revoke the autonomy of the developed governments at any time by means of legislation.
I think a parliamentary system would serve the US better than the current presidential system, and would probably be more in line with the Founding Fathers' (or at the very least George Washington's) conception of the president as a non-partisan figure in the model of the British monarch. Attempting to impose a unitary system on a traditionally federally organised state with significant cultural and political diversity between constituent members seems foolish to me, however. Canada or Australia would probably be a better model than the UK for the US to follow if it wished to reform its governmental structure along the lines of the Westminster parliamentary system. Might as well go all the way, though, and abolish the presidency in favour of restoring Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to the throne of the Thirteen Colonies and their post-1783 acquisitions.
