Lynne Featherstone MP and Sara Scarlett on House of Comments - Episode 19

The latest "House of Comments" podcast with myself and Stuart Sharpe of the Sharpe's Opinion political blog is now live. The website for the podcasts is here and the Nineteenth episode which we recorded on Tuesday 23rd March is available to download via this page here (raw mp3 file here if you prefer). You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here. Or you can listen to it right now here:

The format is to invite political bloggers on each week to discuss a few of the stories that are making waves in the blogosphere.

This week we were joined by Lib Dem MP for Hornsey and Wood Green and blogger Lynne Featherstone and Sara Scarlett of the Liberal Vision blog.

We discussed the Channel 4 Dispatches MPs for hire sting and its aftermath, Obama's healthcare bill and whether is it a democratic triumph or unconstitutional and the Conservative #CashGordon campaign that found itself the victim of online hijacking this week.

If you are a political blogger and would like to participate in the future, please drop me an e-mail here.

Mark Reckons interviews Greg Dyke

One of the fringes I have attended at this year's Lib Dem Conference was the "Moats, Mortgages and Mayhem" event run by Liberal Vision.

One of the panelists was former Director General of the BBC Greg Dyke and he had some very interesting things to say about reform of parliament. He suggested that there should be some sort of citizen's convention or jury which could take the reform decisions out of the hands of the political classes. However he did describe some of the reforms he would like to see. Amongst them he suggested that:

• Parliament could be physically moved to Birmingham, Manchester or another city well away from London.
• Halve the number of MPs.
• Electoral reform to a proportional system for the House of Commons.
• An elected second chamber.
• Abolition of the whips.

At the end of the meeting I managed to grab a couple of minutes with him and asked him a couple of further questions about his time at the BBC and the likelihood of his reforms being implemented: