Electoral Reform

[UndercoverElephant]

This needs its own thread. Here's a start:

https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/how ... sentation/

[UndercoverElephant]

Is this the Daily Mail tiptoeing towards electoral reform?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... gners.html

Things might have looked very different after the General Election if the votes had been 'fairly' shared out.

Labour would still have come top and the Tories second under a 'proportional representation' (PR) voting system.

But, crucially, Sir Keir Starmer's party would have been denied its massive Commons majority of more than 170 seats – won even though Labour got barely one in three of the votes cast last week.

[UndercoverElephant]

https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/ ... ns-support

[oobers]

I’m interested in the hypothesis that PR would free parties to develop policies that reflect their membership and supporters values, rather than devising lukewarm policies that are designed to be inoffensive to a larger number of voters, in a desperate attempt to get just a few seats. This is definitely what has happened to The Greens over several decades. I actually think under this strategy, they have found some good media communicators but the trade off has been lukewarm policies and a loss of the core value of ecology. But I don’t know where to start researching this hypothesis - has it been borne out in other countries in Europe for example? And once in power sharing deals with other smaller parties, have they been able to implement at least some of their radical ideas?

[UndercoverElephant]

It is rather a difficult hypothesis to test given that the UK is the only example of a country with a FPTP system. The group of cases we therefore need to look at is everywhere else, which basically makes it impossible. There are several different sorts of PR in different places, and the political situation is also different everywhere, and is continually changing.

I am not sure it is possible to predict the effects of PR in any detail, but I don't think this matters. I think we need to PR as a basic point of principle, and the effects are an expression of the will of the people -- a better expression than FPTP can ever be.

[UndercoverElephant]

https://archive.is/w6CqD

Scottish Labour leader ditches support for electoral reform

Anas Sarwar said the public does not want a ‘big debate’, despite Labour calling for a more ‘proportional’ model less than two years ago.

No principles. Power-grabbing assholes the lot of them.

[dustiswhatweare]

Mr Farage may be the unlikely hero here. There are mutterings in the press that it's very unfair that Reform only got 5 seats on 14% of the vote. Of course other parties are muttering too (not Labour or the Tories), but for some reason Reform are the ones who get their voice heard whenever they speak.
If he were to make this a cause, it might have a chance of getting somewhere.

[Forever_Winter]

This needs its own thread. Here's a start:

https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/how ... sentation/

Thanks UE I was partially joking in a previous thread but you've beaten me to the punch

[UndercoverElephant]

Mr Farage may be the unlikely hero here. There are mutterings in the press that it's very unfair that Reform only got 5 seats on 14% of the vote. Of course other parties are muttering too (not Labour or the Tories), but for some reason Reform are the ones who get their voice heard whenever they speak.
If he were to make this a cause, it might have a chance of getting somewhere.

It is already one of his causes, and I am expecting him to make hay with it at Labour's expense for the forseeable future. Why shouldn't he? Makes him look progressive, and them look anti-democratic.

Reform potentially have a bright future ahead of them. Especially if right wing tory MPs like Suella Braverman defect, which is entirely possible if the new tory leader tries to take them back towards the centre.

[dustiswhatweare]

Uneasy bedfellows.

“There’s a point when both Labour and the Conservatives will see the current system as threatening their interests, and then they may start to think: ‘OK, we need to change this.’”


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ar ... t-the-post

[UndercoverElephant]

Uneasy bedfellows.

“There’s a point when both Labour and the Conservatives will see the current system as threatening their interests, and then they may start to think: ‘OK, we need to change this.’”


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ar ... t-the-post

Some experts argue that PR has produced more social democratic politics in Wales and Scotland, but others say it could also be a pathway for extremist politics, as has happened in some places in Europe.

"Extremist politics" = actually moving the Overton Window. It needs to move. That is the whole point.

[UndercoverElephant]

Telegraph: It's time to admit our electoral system is finished: https://archive.is/Queqe

This reflects one simple reality. The electoral system of First Past The Post (FPTP) works to deliver stable and reasonably balanced results when there are two large parties that command a majority of the voters. It is always brutally unfair to smaller parties, as Liberal Democrats and voters for both Reform and its predecessors and the Greens can attest. Its justification is that it enables stable politics and a Parliament that roughly reflects the two main sides in politics.

It no longer does this. The combined vote for Labour and Conservative at this election was a record low. Both sides of politics have fragmented. The division is greatest and the consequent negative impact largest, on the Right. Reform got over 14 per cent of the votes but only five seats. The Conservatives got 121 seats when a proportional share would have seen them get 154. On the other side, the Greens got four seats, the same as Reform, when a proportional result would have been 44. The Liberal Democrats, for once, got close to a proportional result.

All this is because the electoral system produces bizarre and unbalanced results when voters divide in large proportions between several parties rather than two. There are now two parties on the Right, with one slightly larger but not by much. On the Left we can observe the clear appearance of a block of voters to the left of Labour by several measures. This is almost certain to increase, as voters on that side are disillusioned by Labour in office and no longer feel they have to vote Labour to keep out the Tories.

In a situation where there are four or five blocs of voters who increasingly vote for separate parties, FPTP yields results that are not only wildly disproportionate and unpredictable but also unstable. The Labour Party should be as worried about this as anyone, despite its huge win. It would take only small shifts of votes for it to lose well over a hundred and fifty seats and its majority. Given the difficulties it faces in government this seems more likely than not.

Exactly.

Conclusion:

We are more like to see a prolonged period of multi-party politics. With FPTP that means wildly disproportionate outcomes that do not reflect the true divisions of opinion in the country and which are unstable and liable to be dramatically reversed. This is not conducive to good governance, regardless of your ideology. It also means that political debate is distorted because significant bodies of opinion (right now Reform and Green voters) are not represented or heard in Parliament.

Everyone, regardless of their politics should be thinking about whether we should reform the electoral system to make it more proportional and if so how. The main objection many have is that this will break the link between a specific community and representation but that is not necessarily true. The German system of additional members keeps FPTP seats but ‘tops up” representation. The Irish system of Single Transferrable Votes in multi-member seats (STV) could, if combined with reform and decentralisation of government, actually strengthen the link between representation and self-governing local communities and return us to the old system of multiple seats for self-ruling counties and boroughs. Worth thinking about and necessary to think about.

The political landscape has been transformed, and it has taken a few days for the implications to really start sinking in.

In the reddit thread on this quite a few people are saying "Ah, so the tories only care about electoral reform when it is the right that is the victim." While there is an element of that, this accusation of hypocrisy distracts from a more important point, which is that the actual arguments in favour of FPTP (and there are some) only make sense in an unambiguously two party system. This is a startling admission from a loyal tory newspaper, and only possible because Labour's vote share was so low that they are implying that it isn't just the tories who are losing their status as one half of a two-party system, but Labour too, regardless of their huge majority.

[BritDownUnder]

I like(d) the New Zealand system. I think it was called MMP. Half the MPs are elected in FPTP and the other half by PR with a 5% vote floor for eligibility. It got the minor parties in Parliament but not in too much of a proportion so as to attract protest votes from stupid electors and cause trouble. Keeps the Greens down unlike the Australian Senate where they effectively hold the balance of power and nothing gets done. NZ got rid of its upper house and does not seem too badly done by - indeed they had a fully updated and passed set of anti-terrorist legislation by Sept 14th 2001.