advertisement


UK, and USA, Voting FPTP Systems

wacko

pfm Member
are increasingly confrontational in an internet age to the point it is tearing each country apart. They are also undemocratic which kind of defeats the whole reason we vote. How to get out of this blind alley to a destructive future ? I'm not sure muddling on is going to work much longer.
Countries like NZ reformed their voting system: how does that happen ? Is there a roadmap to consensus or do we have to wait for a rogue PM to put the country first ?
I know the arguments against PR: it is not beyond the wit of man to devise a system that works.
 
PR tends to produce hung parliaments, which is the ideal way to avoid extreme political agendas. It goes down well in Countries with reasonably well-educated non politically polarised populations.

It'll never catch on here. :(

To a point. It can also lead to disproportionate influence of minority parties as horse trading over alliances becomes necessary. I would like to see a far more representative system but not one where the tail ends up wagging the dog. But it's true that FPTP produces large majorities that most of the population did not support.
 
The/any agenda for electoral changes is in the hands of poiliticians and by and and large, politicians in the UK do not beleive that hung parliaments/coallitions work, with pretty good reason based on previous experience, I would sugggest.

PR would give parliamentary seats to some highly objectionable characters, or certainly would have in the past - the NF for starters.

Also bear in mind that PR comes in numerous flavours, it isn't ever as simple as people imagine.
 
It can also lead to disproportionate influence of minority parties as horse trading over alliances becomes necessary.

Not a bad thing in my book, but unpopular with those who lean further to the Left or Right.

PR would give parliamentary seats to some highly objectionable characters, or certainly would have in the past - the NF for starters.

More objectionable than some of the characters currently sitting in the house? :rolleyes:
 
It’s like the free speech argument, in a way. People have a right to say what they like, within limits. It’s a human right. So Freedom of expression includes the right to espouse political views, again within limits. Which implies the right to associate with like minded people, eg, in the context of a political party.

Provided the political party isn’t proscribed, people should be able to vote for it, and as a minority they should be afforded the same sort of rights as other minorities. In principle, at least. So the fact that PR would be more likely to give these minority interests a voice, is, in principle, a desirable outcome.

You can’t just give rights to people you like or agree with.

Perhaps the better way to tackle the problem of minorities having disproportionate influence would be to improve education so that fewer people support the undesirable minority parties in the first place.
 
Perhaps the better way to tackle the problem of minorities having disproportionate influence would be to improve education so that fewer people support the undesirable minority parties in the first place.

Utopia does not exist.

Odd-ball, offbeat, strange and outright widely objectionable views and beliefs are not restricted to the ill-educated and/or ill-informed, very, very far from it.
 
Utopia does not exist.

Odd-ball, offbeat, strange and outright widely objectionable views and beliefs are not restricted to the ill-educated and/or ill-informed, very, very far from it.
No, but you can work to keep them in a small minority.

And anyway, politics is, or should be, about striving towards your personal view of Utopia, surely?

Let's not let the best be the enemy of the good here. Just because PR has flaws is no reason not to adopt it in preference to the fundamentally broken FPTP system. We could view it as a reasonably well-tested move towards something better, which we haven't yet defined, but it'd be a big step in a positive direction.
 
You surely all know that PR will immediately boost the chances of the alt-right in the UK, as it did in France and Germany to name a few ? Not that they would ever enter a government, but they could play nasty games with their, say, 10 per cent of the votes provided they unite. OTOH it could work in favour of Labour in the end...
 
You surely all know that PR will immediately boost the chances of the alt-right in the UK, as it did in France and Germany to name a few ?
Yes, of course. But Parliament has 650 members. If a small minority of them were from UKIP, or some legitimate far right party, that would be manageable. It probably follows that a small (but hopefully growing) minority would be from the Greens, too, which would IMHO be worth the irritation of dealing with the far right.

Thing is, if you give the far right a voice, you neuter it to some degree, because part of its appeal is that countercultural schtick.
 
So what's your point? You said first that my two positions were contradictory. Now you're saying that they need doing in a particular order, which implies they're not contradictory but complimentary. I'm not sure you have a clear argument you want to express here. But if you come up with one, I'll try to engage with it.
 
Yes, of course. But Parliament has 650 members. If a small minority of them were from UKIP, or some legitimate far right party, that would be manageable. It probably follows that a small (but hopefully growing) minority would be from the Greens, too, which would IMHO be worth the irritation of dealing with the far right.

I guess it means that divisions that we know exist will be more visible; centre vs hard splits in either party would be played out in Parliament, not behind locked doors in party HQs.

And minorities don't have to hide in major parties or lobby sympathetic MPs - you'd see exactly where a vote or proposed motion comes from and get a better view of what's behind it.
 
You surely all know that PR will immediately boost the chances of the alt-right in the UK, as it did in France and Germany to name a few ?

It would also massively boost the Greens, Lib Dems etc, so it would balance out. The key advantage of PR is it denies any form of absolute majority to a party with a minority vote-share, thus we’d largely be spared the extremism we have seen in recent decades of alt-right Tory rule. Israel excepted (a unique position) PR seems to balance out slightly left of centre, as that is where populations tend to balance out. The hard right we see in the UK, US etc is a byproduct of a system deliberately designed to return an increasingly out-of-touch conservative establishment to absolute power time after time. It very deliberately throws away non-establishment votes.
 
But Parliament has 650 members. If a small minority of them were from UKIP, or some legitimate far right party, that would be manageable.

Not arguing one way or the other but as a data point, in the 2015 election, Ukip would have been third largest party under PR

PR vs FPTP

Conservative 240 vs 331
Labour 198 vs 232
UKIP 82 vs 1
LD 51 vs 8
SNP 31 vs 56
Green 25 vs 1
 


advertisement


Back
Top