It doesn’t matter if you’re a Labor fan, the good times won’t last. If you don’t install proportional representation this will come back to bite you in the ass as it has before.
Could somebody explain this to me (I’m from Belgium, so we have proportional representation)? Is it similar to the USA with each state going to a single party?
Basically, yes. Each of the 650 constituencies votes in a single member of parliament, even if they don’t get 50% of the vote, just more votes than anyone else. So if you have 3 constituencies that all vote 40% Labour, 35% Conservative, and 25% Lib Dem, you will get 3 Labour MPs, even though if it were proportional, you shpuld get at least 1 Conservative MP (sorry Lib Dems, too small a sample to let you have one too)
What kind of dumpster fire voting system is that? They should be forced to fix it if tgey ever want to rejoin the EU.
We had a referendun on it in 2011 68% voted to keep FPTP instead of switching to Alternative Vote.
Thanks, this is very clear and also insane that it’s still that way. I thought the US was the only place where popular vote differed from the actually elected officials!
The only other European country which has FPTP voting is Belarus.
Canada has it too and Trudeau reneged on his promise to ditch it.
The saddest part of this is the tiny representation of the green party in parliament vs the voter sentiment :(
Honestly if they weren’t anti nuclear they might get more votes. It is definitely a wedge issue for a lot of people. They are also anti car which is good! Except I have never met anyone who is also anti car.
They also say weird things sometimes like wanting to reduce c sections and make birth a non medical event.
Honestly I’d take anti-nuclear over pro-fossil but yeah its not perfect.
I think part of the problem is that their entire MO is built around expecting to only get 1 or 2 seats.
I think they’d also get a lot more votes if people didn’t need to vote tactically. A lot of the left wing voters would be freed up to vote with an actual left wing party
I mean, even if you’re a labour fan, I can’t imagine needing to do a coalition with the liberal democrats and greens would hurt. That said, I don’t know much about UK politics.
My complaint is more about how voting has becoming about voting in a party that most aligns with how you want the country run, rather than voting for a wise and trusted member of your community (constituency) to be part of parliament.
But that’s a bigger question of demographics and societal change, not just politics, and perhaps it’s not my place to ill-judge societal change.
It seems to be human nature to group together like that. It makes sense from a game theory perspective, too. Perhaps political parties are inevitable
While I see the good bits of Proportional Representation, it does give extremism a foot in the door. Remember this is the voting pattern in a FPTP system, one of the tabloids even encouraged reform voters to switch to the Tories because of tactical voting. Changing the voting system gives these far right anti human rights parties a much better chance.
