Ian Ball said:
Please could someone point me to an explanation of why the BCA was setup with a two house membership setup?
The agenda/minutes mention the significant negatives of the setup, but no positives. I wonder why it was initiated?
In the very early days of NCA there was NO club vote at all, voting was limited to the "constituent bodies" (who were each allowed 4 reps.) and all regional councils had to have at least 2 reps. out of their 4 present, otherwise the meeting was inquorate. A regular threat from some was that their reps. would walk out and leave the meeting inquorate. Also, if any two of the 4 regional council reps. voted against a proposal, this was an automatic veto. (This led to one occasion when no-one dared vote against a particular proposal and risk vetoing it, so the motion was passed with 3 votes for, none against and
19 abstentions!)
Some of us fought long and hard for clubs to be allowed to vote and eventually managed it by posting round our own unofficial ballot paper to a sample of 3000 individual cavers from what we hoped was a representative sample of clubs around GB. Despite heavy pressure from some regions, we got back 1000 responses (a 30% return!) and there was a massive individual vote of around 80% in favour of clubs being allowed to have a vote. There wasn't the mechanism at the time to enable us to have individual members - that didn't happen until the insurance was sorted by BCA in 2004 - but it was the first crack in the armour of those who felt they had a divine right to tell their members how they should think. It is all written up in an issue of DESCENT in 1992 - all about the "Gang of Thirteen" who organised the poll.
The Two-house setup was a hangover from the time when only clubs and constituent bodies were allowed to vote, prior to 2004. It was felt that we couldn't disenfranchise the clubs and constituent bodies straight away so the Two-house system was devised. IMHO it's now been demonstrated that we are able to conduct a ballot of all our individual members so we can move on and the Two-house system is no longer needed.
If you want democracy, you have to be prepared to fight for it and it sometimes takes a bit longer than you'd like.