Sorry but I refer you to my previous post, Proportional representation is highly complicated. The election is 650 different contests and not just one big one which Proportional representation is.
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General Election 2015 - Thoughts/Predictions/Results
- Thread starter MidlandMainlie
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Sorry but I refer you to my previous post, Proportional representation is highly complicated. The election is 650 different contests and not just one big one which Proportional representation is.
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R
RailUK Forums
But there would be such an outcry about the legitimacy of such a government running unopposed.
In the seventeenth century, people might have been content with electing the local squire, but the point of General Elections now is to decide how to Govern the Country according to policy. Having 650 separate contests across the Country does nothing to further that aim. Why on earth do we need 650 different contests to decide one Government ?
It is very very complicated, and again how would you or I be able to stand as an independent? In our current system anyone can put themselves forward and as long as they get more votes than others in their area they are elected, simple!!
You obviously haven't read how it works. It's not rocket science!
DelayRepay
Established Member
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I'll get over it but thousands won't.
Homelessness and rough sleeping up. Suicide rates up. 1 million using foodbanks. NHS waiting lists up with hospitals finances further in the red. The number of people on zero hours contracts up.
I'll get over it but I fear for the future.
Britain what have you done? :cry:
Because you elect your local MP to represent you and your local community at parliament. I voted based on local issues and national ones.
It doesn't work with more than a 2 party system.
I've no doubt that if write to my local MP they will listen to my concerns for an individual problem, whether I support them or not. However that doesn't in anyway make up for the fact that my opinion may have a disproportionately greater or smaller impact on National Policy, purely as a result of how geographically concentrated myself and those with a similar viewpoint happen to be. That is no way to decide policy in a democracy.
Of course it is. You vote on who is your representative at parliament, not who will form the government. Even with Proportional Representation the Tories would have still been the largest party. Labour would have no mandate to govern. This is about local issues just as much as it is about national ones.
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Whether the Tories were the largest party or not doesn't enter into it. If the Country is foolish enough to give them a majority of the votes, then so be it, but there is no justification for one set of political views to be weighted entirely different from another equal set, purely based on their geographical distribution.
I vote on which set of policies I wish the Country to be Governed by, not on whether my bins have been collected.
If I moved up north there is no way my vote would make any difference in the Labour strongholds, but I would still vote.
Your MP lobbies the govt and the various secretaries of state for changes you want in you constituency. My MP has pledged to get more housing built and get the local roads improved so I voted for them.
I find it amazing how Labour voters have been happy with the electoral system for years while Labour were doing well. Now that Labour have lost badly all of a sudden the voting system needs to change so Labour can do better.
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MidnightFlyer
Veteran Member
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Indeed. For the 2010-15 Parliament, I believe Labour's safest seat numerically was East Ham, and the Conservatives's was Richmond (Yorks)...
Trog
Established Member
Why would there be an outcry against the government as it would be the opposition that would be in the wrong. The government would be simply and legitimately carrying out their mandate from the people, doubly so if they stuck to their election manifesto. But the opposition by refusing to take part would have disenfranchised those who voted for them to represent their point of view.
TheKnightWho
Established Member
"Our lot" will already be reporting more deaths from disabled people. "Your lot" will carry on not caring.
I will not get over it so long as heartless rubbish like this keeps being presented as ideology.
Excellent point, you vote for an MP to represent you at parliament.
TheKnightWho
Established Member
At least some people can admit they support cheating. Small mercies.
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And people are arguing this shouldn't be the case. You can't present this as "just the way it has to be" as though we can't change the system yet keep it fair.
I agree local representation is good, but the choices are not just FPTP or PR.
To claim PIP all you need to do is go for an assessment to check you are a legitimate claimant. Nothing wrong with that what so ever. Funny how Labour opposed the £26k cap on benefit claims until they realised it was a popular policy and now support it.
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AV was put to a referendum a couple of years ago and FPTP won.
Oh please, you vote for a set of policies. You might have an MP who decides to take up a particular issue, but your vote is by and large for the set of policies presented by the party.
Would you vote for a candidate from a party opposing the set of policies you prefer, just because he happens to be better at lobbying Ministers ?
TheKnightWho
Established Member
Addressing the first point: firstly, claiming is not made easy - a huge pain for those with issues such as depression and anxiety. But of course mental health is made-up to many Tories. The cap is too low for those with severe disabilities. The assessments have been famously scandalous. Etc etc etc. There have been deaths that could easily be avoided - accept it. Labour are not perfect either, but popularity can kill people as with this.
Secondly, AV is not the only other option either and had many issues. You're massively oversimplifying.
And here's the patronising from exponents of the broken FPTP. "PR is really really complicated, so it's easier to stick with the much simpler FPTP that everyone understands".
PR is not complicated. The methods used in the counting process are probably more complicated, but this is needed to ensure proportionality. The results give us proportionate and democratic representation to parliament, which clearly does not happen under the current system. To the voter, little will change. You'll still mark your ballot with an X, or rank your preferences with numbers. Neither is beyond the realms of comprehension.
PR works well in many areas already, including the Scottish Parliament (although I don't think the Additional Member's System is necessarily the best answer for Westminster). If you look at the results to the 2011 Holyrood election (or indeed any Holyrood election), you'll see that the proportion of candidates returned broadly relates to the proportion of votes cast - not exactly, but a much better answer than what we get under FPTP.
You can stand as an independent under PR, and it's been done before by Margo MacDonald here in Scotland! You'd have have appeal to a larger voter base in order to get elected, but as the swings towards the two big parties make it more difficult for independent candidates to get support under FPTP, it's probably easier to get in under a proportional system, not least because the electorate can support independent candidates without fear that their vote will be wasted.
As for your assertion that an electoral system would "let in" a party... it's the electorate that votes for candidates, and not the electoral system. If a candidate wins, it's because the electorate voted for them. Besides, the majority of people in England who did not vote Conservative are probably feeling bitter that the FPTP system "let in" the Tories to a majority government whilst polling just 36.9% of the national vote! As for you assertion that PR in this election would "allow in a Labour government propped up by the SNP"... well, it could if both parties combined polled >50% of the votes. But they didn't. In fact, combined, Labour & SNP would still have got less votes than the Conservatives in this election. Although I despise UKIP, I have to reluctantly accept that 12.6% of the electorate voted for them and, as such, they should be represented much more widely in parliament than they are.
I'm a proponent of the Single Transferrable Vote, and here's a video which demonstrates it very nicely.
[youtube]l8XOZJkozfI[/youtube]
It's difficult to say how PR would have worked in this election, but to give you an idea we can look at some seats. Let's look at the seven Glasgow constituencies (that is, the constituencies with the word "Glasgow" in their name), each of which returned an SNP MP, and merge them into one large constituency to return seven MPs. I can't simulate an accurate election here because we don't know what second and third preferences are, but here's how things could have looked in the first round of a Greater Glasgow PR style Vote:
Electorate = 252,210
Quotient (number of votes needed for election) = (252210/7+1)+1 = approx 31,527
SNP: 163,937
Lab: 91,280
Con: 20,323
(And a plethora of smaller parties that I can't be bothered adding up)
In this model, SNP and Labour are automatically elected in the first round. We'd then go through a large number of run-offs to transfer/redistribute votes to 2nd and 3rd preferences, which I can't simulate here without knowing data that we'll never be able to know, but it'd be likely that we'd see something like 4-5 SNP and 2-3 Labour MPs, which is closer to what the people of Glasgow as a whole voted for. The vast majority of the electorate are represented by at least one local candidate from a party that they voted for.
This model assumes that:
1) Everyone who voted would vote again under the new system, and no additional votes would be gathered
2) Everyone voted for their first choice candidate in yesterday's election, and would rank that candidate as their first or only choice in this election.
The UK Parliament is currently elected to legislate for the UK. Not that I am any supporter of the Conservatives, and I wouldn't support most of the above examples of legislation. However, as the elected Government of a single state (i.e. the UK) they are entitled to pass laws however much the SNP, a party getting less than 5% of the total votes cast, doesn't like it. Given that the FPtP system gives that party over 8.6% of the voting power in the UK parliament as a consequence of being geographically concentrated, they have even more voting power roughly in line with the total population in that area. By the same reckoning, If Labour had worked with another party to achieve some sort of Government, does that mean that Richmond in Yorkshire could claim that it was unfair for them to legislate as the Conservatives polled over 51% of the vote there so the UK government doesn't represent them?
Had the referendum last year gone the other way, those living in the UK constituencies north of the England/Scotland border would be negotiating their separation and deciding on how they would run what would eventually become a separate nation. But it didn't go that way so as even Nicola Sturgeon say in public, this election was about representing Scotland's views* in the UK Parliament, and not a referendum or about separation from the UK, so get used to it.
As a slight aside, if all those parties wanting PR got what they wanted, UKIP would at the moment have more power in the UK Parliament than the SNP.
* I can't repeat her words verbatim as I can't locate a reference.
Butts
Veteran Member
Well I have just returned from Portsmouth where I spent Election Night in the company of my Brother and his "middle class Prosecco Socialists" who were crying into their guacamole when the BBC Exit Poll was announced.
As the only Conservative I was in my element and enjoyed a night to remember. When it became apparent the Tories were going to achieve an overall majority the tears were flowing into their muesli and granola
My view is that as the largest party in England, the second largest in Wales and third in Scotland they have every right to form a UK Government.
Congratulations to the SNP who achieved a magnificent result in Scotland, if only we had won that 2nd seat things would have been even better. The Panda Jokes would have rebounded badly on Labour and the Lib Dems.
Let's dispel this nonsense about lack of Tories in the North of England (mentioned earlier in the thread) Carlisle, Penrith and the Border etc etc - geographically this is The North of England not Lancashire and Tyneside etc.
Why has Cymru not been mentioned once again, two Tory gains from Labour and Plaid Cymru (despite sexy Leanne) came nowhere. If only we could have got Ynys Mon back I would have been even happier.
As for The Greens and UKIP they also bombed, did anyone seriously believe it would be any different ?
Most of The Polls were about as reflective of the actual result as The RailUK Forums one I instigated ..hee hee :roll:
All in all an excellent night
As the only Conservative I was in my element and enjoyed a night to remember. When it became apparent the Tories were going to achieve an overall majority the tears were flowing into their muesli and granola
My view is that as the largest party in England, the second largest in Wales and third in Scotland they have every right to form a UK Government.
Congratulations to the SNP who achieved a magnificent result in Scotland, if only we had won that 2nd seat things would have been even better. The Panda Jokes would have rebounded badly on Labour and the Lib Dems.
Let's dispel this nonsense about lack of Tories in the North of England (mentioned earlier in the thread) Carlisle, Penrith and the Border etc etc - geographically this is The North of England not Lancashire and Tyneside etc.
Why has Cymru not been mentioned once again, two Tory gains from Labour and Plaid Cymru (despite sexy Leanne) came nowhere. If only we could have got Ynys Mon back I would have been even happier.
As for The Greens and UKIP they also bombed, did anyone seriously believe it would be any different ?
Most of The Polls were about as reflective of the actual result as The RailUK Forums one I instigated ..hee hee :roll:
All in all an excellent night
I'm not sure I call 3.8% and an astonishing 12.6% of the vote having 'bombed'. The SNP only did a little bit better than the Greens with 4.7% (hint - there aren't many people in Scotland).
We all expected the insanity of FPTP to present their results so inaccurately though, if that's what you meant
TheKnightWho
Established Member
Well I have just returned from Portsmouth where I spent Election Night in the company of my Brother and his "middle class Prosecco Socialists" who were crying into their guacamole when the BBC Exit Poll was announced.
As the only Conservative I was in my element and enjoyed a night to remember. When it became apparent the Tories were going to achieve an overall majority the tears were flowing into their muesli and granola
My view is that as the largest party in England, the second largest in Wales and third in Scotland they have every right to form a UK Government.
Congratulations to the SNP who achieved a magnificent result in Scotland, if only we had won that 2nd seat things would have been even better. The Panda Jokes would have rebounded badly on Labour and the Lib Dems.
Let's dispel this nonsense about lack of Tories in the North of England (mentioned earlier in the thread) Carlisle, Penrith and the Border etc etc - geographically this is The North of England not Lancashire and Tyneside etc.
Why has Cymru not been mentioned once again, two Tory gains from Labour and Plaid Cymru (despite sexy Leanne) came nowhere. If only we could have got Ynys Mon back I would have been even happier.
As for The Greens and UKIP they also bombed, did anyone seriously believe it would be any different ?
Most of The Polls were about as reflective of the actual result as The RailUK Forums one I instigated ..hee hee :roll:
All in all an excellent night
Being the largest party wherever is completely irrelevant - you should not have total control with just over half the seats and 1/3 of the popular vote. Utterly ridiculous.
Saying that parties did terribly because of a completely biased system is begging the question.
Apart from all the different possibilities for tactical voting, some of which work and some of which are only believed to work. That's why I love electing my Federal and State MPs using the Instant Runoff Vote (aka AV in the UK) where I can vote for who I want first, who I'd be happy to have in second, who I'd put up with in third and who'd be the lesser of two evils in fourth.
You would be hoping that Labour would be changing their tune on real electoral reform after this, they were the big losers of the system this time around.
Indeed. There are different forms of PR with varying degrees of complication.
The 'simplest' one which would also continue the legacy of local members in the UK would be to use an Instant Runoff Vote (also known in the UK as AV) for roughly 450 constituencies with an approximately equal number of electors (in Australia this is legislated as +/- 10% and regulated by the non-partisan Australian Electoral Commission) in each, and using the same votes to elect additional members. The percentages of the national (i.e. UK-wide) primary vote won by each party could then be used to add 100 extra non-local members to those parties which wind up with fewer seats than they would "deserve" as a result of their share of the national primary vote.
The strength of using the 'local' primary vote for the additional members is that you place local representation first, and party representation second. A party which does well enough to win more seats than their share of the national vote entitled them to (e.g. the SNP, or an Independent) would still get to keep all the seats they earned, they just wouldn't get any additional members.
How to pick the additional members is the sticking point with such a system - I'd be in favour of the system used in some states of Germany where it is the highest-polling 'losing' candidates of the parties, which ensures that a decent level of support (but not quite a winning level) is needed to get in as an additional member instead of just being a party hack on a list. This could have the effect of minimising the impact of a select number of marginal seats on the campaign strategies of the parties - if it's going to be a 50/50 seat then your candidate will get in either way.
Hare-Clark (the form of STV you prefer) is used to proportionally elect six Senators from each State of Australia at each half-Senate election, and allows for both independents and minor parties to gain seats. South Australia currently has an Independent Senator in the form of Nick Xenophon, who made history by being the first Independent candidate for Senator from any state to gain in excess of a full quota on primary votes alone at the last election, and at the previous election became the first Independent Senator ever to be elected without having first jumped ship from a party.
An additional member system could also honour Independents properly, if it allowed votes cast for Independent candidates to have the voter's second preference counted towards the national total for the purpose of electing additional members - maybe at half value only if the Independent got elected. Under this, a person could cast their vote for a strong local member first while also expressing their hope for the national-level policies of a party.
A good example of the sort of seat where this would be useful would be the Edinburgh South constituency where the incumbent Labour MP Ian Murray was comfortably returned on the back of being an excellent local member, with even the SNP party volunteer interviewed by the ABC admitting to voting for him. Fair play to him, even SNP supporters should be glad at such a victory for democracy and hope that their newly elected MPs will look to him as an example of how they should serve their constituents. Change 'Labour' to 'Independent' and you can see the value of such a system.
I'm a fan of Hare-Clark (the form of STV you support) for an upper house (e.g. the Senate in Australia) where you have large regions electing multiple members (e.g. a whole State) but not for a lower house as local members are still worth having.
For a Senate-style elected House of Lords (keeping the name for tradition's sake) elected using Hare-Clark, the UK would probably be best off by having multi-member constituencies using the same boundaries as the European Parliament constituencies with NI, Scotland and Wales as one each and England divided into nine. If the number of Senators/Lords from each was double the current number of MEPs plus two, you'd also get a bias towards regional equality (the extra two would be an extra 10% for SE England, an extra 17% for Scotland and an extra 33% for Northern Ireland) while still being roughly equal by population.
Going on the raw numbers of first preferences, you would probably be looking at SNP 5 and Labour 2. But re-running the election without tactical voting (which made up a small part of the SNP's gains) would probably change it to SNP 4-5, Labour 1-2 and Con getting the last seat on preferences. From memory, the last half-Senate election in Australia (where we are used to this system by now) had none of the six states electing any more than four of the seats on quotas being achieved just from first preferences, it does have the effect of opening up the field a bit.
To work properly, in my opinion it needs to require that the candidates' positions on the ballot paper be allocated at random and not grouped by parties - the Senate ballot papers here have an option to use the party's preferred allocation of preferences which is not optimal as the system can be gamed. The use of the Robson Rotation to randomise the advantage of being positioned first on the ballot paper would be desirable too.
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DynamicSpirit
Established Member
Might I suggest that you make your points by addressing the issues rather than making slurs on the motives of those who disagree with you.
I'm not sure how much of this thread you've read (I know it is very long), but some time before the election (and so before the election results were known), this issue came up and many of the same people now arguing for PR (including me) were making the same points then. I personally was opposed to the current electoral system even when it massively benefitted Labour in the Tony Blair years.
I'm pretty sure changing the voting system is nothing about Labour doing better in most people's minds. After all, thanks to FTPT, Labour is actually over-represented in the new Parliament. Under PR with the results from Thursday, Labour would have fewer than its current 232 seats, and the most likely plausible Government would have been some form of Conservative-UKIP arrangement. None of that detracts from the obvious unfairness caused by the current electoral system.
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table38
Established Member
But this is exactly the sort of negativity and scaremongering that lost the election for Labour.
Don't forget Labour were also gleefully predicting a triple-dip recession when we didn't even get a double. They were predicting crime would rise because of austerity and it didn't. They predicted no recovery (and Balls couldn't even convince the people in his own constituency to vote for him). They predicted unemployment would rocket and it didn't, hence the sudden lurch to whining on about "the wrong sort of jobs" which was about as good an argument as BR complaining about the wrong type of snow
Labour really needs to change it's ways in order to become an effective opposition. It's not the Tories fault that they won when all Labour had to offer was negativity and gimmicks.
But they never even admit their mistakes, so are doomed to just repeat them, which means they will probably lose again in 5 years.
Xenophon PCDGS
Veteran Member
Thanks for the Australian perspective. However, over in England, large numbers of the electorate appear to have difficulty in making a simple choice of just one candidate, so asking them to also name second, third, fourth, etc. candidates would be far too demanding on their mental capabilities....:roll:
I don't necessarily agree that STV in the Commons wouldn't work. There certainly is the risk of losing local representation, but provided the constituencies you're merging are reasonable in size I don't see how it's much of an issue. If you look at Glasgow, for example, I think people would be quite amenable to consolidating the city into one or two larger districts electing multiple MPs, because the existing constituencies are very small. The same could probably be said for other big cities like London, and even other areas such as Lanarkshire and Kent where the constituencies are geographically quite small.
I wouldn't suggest that "Scotland" becomes a Westminster Commons constituency, although I would agree that large constituencies would be appropriate for the Lords, but that larger constituencies for the Commons be created by merging, say, 2-6 existing constituencies depending on the local needs.
The difficulty I would agree definitely comes with the larger constituencies, though. Your "Ross, Skye & Lochaber" sized constituencies. To merge the Highland constituencies, for example, might see a large constituency running from Campbeltown to Caithness, which would certainly be unacceptable and you'd need to tread carefully in these areas. Even constituencies such as Moray (which is an entire council area in itself) would probably oppose a merger with a nearby constituency, and the same definitely goes for Orkney & Shetland and Na h-Eileanan an Iar. I think such a move would need to be done with sensitivity to local needs, and not a London-style "one size fits all" policy.
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And this is why PR doesn't work in this country, people demeaning the electorate by saying that STV (which exists in many countries and works perfectly well) is "too complicated" for the average person to understand.
A huge part of the reason people struggle to decide is because of tactical voting. A lot of people in Scotland were saying things like "I want to vote SNP, but I also want to keep the Tories out, so perhaps I need to vote Labour", or "I want to vote Conservative, but I want to keep the SNP out so voting Labour consolidates the unionist vote". I'm sure it was true in England, too, with lots of would-be UKIP supporters choosing the Tories over UKIP to keep Labour/"the lefties" out.
It's completely undemocratic.
STV (and AV, and other electoral styles where candidates are ranked) lets you consider other possibilities without compromising on your beliefs. For example, in Scotland, a voter may want to keep the SNP out, which at the moment would mean supporting the party most likely to beat them (say, Labour) even if you'd rather have someone else (say, the Tories). Under FPTP, the voter is inclined to select Labour as a compromise and that's all the say they have. Under STV, the voter can feel confident voting first choice Tory, knowing that if/when the Tories are knocked out of the race their vote is redistributed to their second preference (whoever that may be) and so on down the line. It eliminates the need to vote tactically, and I suspect that it would radically change our electoral map.
Yeah if we could stop demeaning the British Public as being 'too stupid' to understand anything other than FPTP that would be great. I find it quite insulting that someone could consider the majority of their fellow Britons incapable of understanding something that isn't all that complicated.
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