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Many.Just as an example, one of Mueller’s indictments discusses an actual Congressman who conspired with the GRU spies, and it is obvious that Congressman will eventually be indicted, and charged with “Conspiracy Against the U.S.” That Congressman will eventually be going to prison, for a very long time.But, Mueller cannot indict that person yet, because he believes there is even more evidence, of more crimes. Now, would you be in favor of “tipping off” this criminal in advance? His name has not been announced publicly. Yet.But, that person exists.You know what criminals do when they find out that the law has “the goods” on them, don’t you?As of right now, a lot of information regarding this investigation (and any investigation) is officially classified. Much of it is classified at very high levels (because much of it also concerns 13 Russian agents, and 12 Russian spies). Most of the material is classified, because we must not allow a hostile foreign government to learn how we acquired that knowledge. We have very real agents working in Russia. We also have Russian citizens and even people in the Russian Government who are willing to feed our agents information. We cannot put those people’s lives at risk. And, Putin would disappear any of them, or poison them, or they would fall off a very high building in Russia (another of Putin’s favorite methods of dealing with anyone who betrays him).Classified — is a broad term. It has levels, and those levels break into sub-levels. Nobody in Congress has (or should have) access to classified material beyond what it necessary in order to do their job. That is also how it works within the FBI, and the CIA, and the NSA, and all of the various departments that make up the DOJ. And, in the State Department. And, in the IRS. In Congress, most members are only allowed to see a tiny bit of low-level classified material. Those who are on certain committees, are “vetted” and then approved for slightly higher levels. That does not mean they get to request any other classified material, and even then they must request it, and it normally gets approved if — IF — it is determined that it is required in order to do the job.When material does leak (and it has, on some occasions, even by a member of Congress), people’s lives are put in jeopardy. Often, with no warning, or time to flee.And, even if they survive, people’s careers often end. A CIA agent in St. Petersburg is useless once a Congressman (Devin Nunes, cough, cough) leaks it, and then the Kremlin reads in the U.S. papers that he or she is a CIA agent. So, our own intelligence also suffers, from that day forward — especially if the agent was obtaining valuable intelligence.A real life example — someone from the Bush administration leaked classified material which made it obvious to foreign governments that it could only have come from one person — A CIA agent named Valerie Plame. She managed to get out and get home okay (but the story is terrifying). Then, of course, her career was over. Now, she is a novelist.More recently — someone from Congressman Paul Ryan’s campaign “somehow” gained access to classified information that was on a CIA agent’s application form for employment. It got leaked (via Paul Ryan’s SuperPac, and then by Corry Bliss, the executive director of the Congressional Leadership Fund). There were lots of denials, but the fact was that once leaked, the material was of course out there. (This CIA agent was now running for Congress, had retired from the CIA, but there was information that was divulged which was classified, and could also hurt our own current efforts, according to the CIA Chief).But, lots of reasons why everyone in government is on a “need to know” basis. With varying levels of what they can and cannot have access to.Often, people’s lives are at stake.

Several of the the other answers on here clearly demonstate one major issue that needs to be overcome, which is the thumping ignorance of the British public towards other types of voting system.So let’s discuss the two main problems first:Public ignorancePolitical hostilityand then a ‘feasible route’.Public IgnoranceThe referendum in 2011 was between two options: ‘keep things as they are’ (the current ‘first past the post’ system), or ‘change to AV’.AV is not PR. AV is a system in which voters are expected to rank candidates in order of preference. It’s far more complicated than either a FPTP or a pure PR system (where a single vote per voter would be cast), and as such, I would argue that it’s probably the absolute worst system you could offer in a referendum - ‘Keep this system which you’re familiar with from experience even if you don’t fully understand all the ins and outs, or change to one where you’re expected to do maths’. Yeah, how exactly did you think that was going to pan out……If you don’t think that offering that in the referendum was a ‘what the fuck were you thinking, you morons?’ type of disaster, well, I’ll just point out again that half the answers on here appear to think that we were already offered a vote on PR. With that in mind, it should be crystal clear that the Great British Public did not cope particularly well with what was offered, and would almost certainly not cope well with a system where they are asked to do anything more than put an ‘X’ in a box.On top of that, the campaign was a disaster. The Lib-Dems thought they’d forced this referendum out of the Tories as a great concession. They then spent half the time dithering about what should be on the posters and campaign material, and allowed themselves to be effortlessly out-maneouvred by the Tories who easily achieved a vote for the status-quo by simple and negative campaigning.Good one, the Lib-Dems.Political HostilityThe second major hurdle that you would need to overcome is the in-built and considerable resistance on the part of politicians to any change to the voting system, which considerably advantages the two parties most likely to gain power, and in particular the tories.We’ve just had an election, and the tories have gained ‘a thumping majority’. The have done so on a vote-share increase of 1%. 1%.The Conservaties got a 43.6% share of the vote, against Labour’s 32.2%.What possible motivation would they have for changing the system, since it’s just delivered them a 365-seat majority?The flip side of this coin is Labour’s ‘thumping majority’ in 1997, delivered via a vote percentage split of 43.2%/30.7% (ratio 1.4/1), leading to a highly-skewed seat ratio of 418 to 165 (ratio 2.53/1).What possible motivation would they have for changing the system, since it delivered them a 418-seat majority?Feasible RouteTechnically, the way to actually get a form of PR in place is for it to become an act of Parliament, and then rolled out as part of or a replacement for the current voting system.Which means that a party or parties have to put it forward as a motion, it has to be voted on, and passed.Which means in practical terms that they almost certainly have to have it as a manifesto commitment.Which, in practical terms means there has to be a groundswell of public and and member support for it to make it worth their while.Which, at the moment, is pushing shit uphill. The public are apathetic and ignorant as to the benefits of voting at all at the moment (30% ‘did not bother’ at this election). The chances of them making sustained noises and pressure for an alternative is highly unlikely, especially when it suits politicians to keep them that way and ignore the issue.Short of another once-in-a-generation occurance such as a minor party with an explicit commitment holding the balance of power in a hunf Parliament, I can’t see it happening.Which doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be a good thing.

It’s not very widely appreciated that the Thirteen Colonies, which would become the United States of America, probably had the highest per capita income in the world from about 1650 to 1774, even if all of the slaves living in them are included in the accounting; see P. H. Lindert and J. G. Williamson, “American colonial incomes, 1650–1774”, Economic History Review 69(1), 54–77 (2016). The independent US lagged behind Great Britain in per capita income until the beginning of the 20th century due to the combination of the US being somewhat impoverished by its war of independence and Great Britain being greatly enriched by the Industrial Revolution and the growth of its colonial empire.In recent years it’s become fashionable to claim that the economic success of the US was founded on the terrible crime of slavery. It’s indeed true that during the colonial period the southern states, where slave labor was common, were the wealthiest. But, in the years following the independence of the US from Britain, the northern states in which slave labor had never been dominant and where slavery was abolished in the late 18th century industrialized rapidly and became significantly richer than the agrarian and relatively backward south.The 19th-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the great pioneers of modern sociology, comments on the exceptional qualities of the northern colonies at some length at the beginning of his Democracy in America (1835–40). Tocqueville writes that almost all colonies in history (including those in what’s now the US South) were established by young, single men without prospects in their country of birth, who therefore emigrated to seek their fortune. New England, on the other hand, had been founded by English settlers who’d sailed across the Atlantic with their own families and who were highly literate and, in some cases, had even owned land in England. They emigrated not because of material need, but because their religious principles were at odds with those of the established Church of England. They belonged to sects such as the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the Baptists, and the Quakers. (I note, incidentally, that the Quakers were the first Europeans ever to campaign collectively for the complete abolition of slavery.)Tocqueville remarks on the very high quality of the traditional legal institutions of Massachusetts and other parts of the US, and on the consequent strength of the civil society (see Democracy in America, part I, ch. 5). The contrast with the institutions of Spanish America (which tended to be benign in theory but corrupt and exploitative in practice) is, I think, very clear. You can compare what Tocqueville says about the US with what the two leading Spanish scientists of the 18th century, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, wrote in 1749 in a confidential report to the Spanish Crown, after having spent nearly ten years in the Viceroyalty of Perú. That document is available in Spanish as Noticias secretas de América.The countries of the Indies are abundant, rich and flourishing, and therefore also exposed to indolence and luxury, distant from their Prince and his higher Ministers, ruled by people who often attend to no other interests than their own, and are, at present, driven into such a state by the duration and the great entrenchment of this ill that neither can justice be obtained with sufficient authority nor reason act with enough power to counteract disorder and vice in the least. It is not, therefore, at all surprising that they should suffer from abuses introduced into the whole state of the Republic, damages due to the inobservance of the laws or to the novelty of unjust practices, to excesses in the conduct of Ministers and the powerful with grave detriment to the weak and unprotected, scandals in the licentious view of everybody, and an almost continuous and general deviation from the just and from what in well-ordered states is expected and demanded. Neither is it surprising that, lacking good examples among some, and the damage being insensibly spread among others, either all should be infected by this, or too few should remain exempt to reestablish affairs to the state in which they should be.— Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, prologue to Discursos y reflexiones políticas sobre el estado presente de los reinos del Perú… ("Noticias secretas de América"), 1749 [the translation is mine]Portrait of Antonio de Ulloa y de la Torre-Giralt (1716 – 1795). Oil on canvas by Andrés Cortés y Aguilar, ca. 1856. Casa consistorial de Sevilla.Mexico inherited those weak institutions after its independence from Spain in 1821. Moreover, Mexican intellectual and Nobel laureate in literature Octavio Paz argued that, in their pursuit of independence,The Hispanic Americans (like the Spanish liberals), instead of rethinking and reworking their own tradition [for justifying the fight for autonomy], instead of updating it and applying it to new circumstances, preferred to appropriate the political philosophy of the French, the English, and the North Americans. It was natural that the Hispanics should try to make those ideas their own and that they should wish to implant them in our countries: they were the ideas of the budding modernity.But it was not enough to adopt them to become modern: They had to be adapted. The republican and liberal democratic ideology was a historical superposition. It did not change our society but it did deform our conscience: it introduced bad faith and mendacity into political life.— Octavio Paz, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe, (México, 1982), part I, ch. 1, pp. 29-30 [the translation is mine]Mexico’s independence was followed by fifty years of almost continuous internal conflict, which also left the country open to three major foreign military interventions (the Pastry War of 1838–9, the Mexican–American War of 1846–8, and the French intervention of 1861–7). In his famous letter of 1864 to the City Council of Atlanta, US General William Tecumseh Sherman argued against allowing the secession of the Confederate states in the following terms:You cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war.In fact, Mexico would only be internally pacified in the 1870s under the highly authoritarian rule of General Porfirio Díaz, a period of considerable economic growth that nonetheless bred a deep popular discontent that finally exploded with the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20.In his response to this same question, Pedro Trujamán has noted that at the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1846, Mexico had 7 million people and the US had 23 million people. But to offer this as an explanation of why the US had become so much more powerful than Mexico is to beg the question. The population of the US had been only 5.3 million in 1800. Mexico’s population at that time is harder to determine precisely, but it was probably slightly higher (see “The Population of Mexico from origins to revolution”). Why did the population of the US grow so much more rapidly in the first half of the 19th century than Mexico’s? This had everything to do with the US’s prosperity, which sustained a robust internal growth of its population and attracted extensive immigration.It also has everything to do with the outcome of the Mexican-American War. Although, like US President Ulysses S. Grant, I regard that war as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation” (see ”Grant in Mexico”), it seems to me nearly inevitable given the combination of the great pressure on the land exerted by the booming US population and economy, together with the inability of the Mexican government of the day to exercise effective control over its remote, desertic, and sparsely populated northern frontier.Post-script: Let me add here that I am Hispanic myself. I was born, raised, and currently live in Costa Rica, in Central America. Moreover, I have close Mexican relatives and friends. I’ve visited Mexico several times and hope to continue to do so in the future. There are many things about Mexico and Mexican culture that I love and admire. But I’ve also grown impatient with the way in which left-leaning academics and commentators in the US have started to swallow the leyenda rosa discourse (which originates in the reactionary and ultra-Catholic Spanish right), which would have us discard the great sociological insights of Smith, Tocqueville, Weber and others about why British colonists succeeded in establishing good institutions in America, while the Spanish for the most part didn’t. Neither do I find the discourse of eternal Latin American victimhood vis-à-vis the United States to be at all constructive or likely to help us in improving our own lot.