The reaction to my blog entitled ‘Dangerously anti-democratic’ has been interesting. It’s clear neither left or right can agree on how parliamentary seats should be drawn for fear they favour the other.
The answer, of course, is to scrap the absurd system and have larger seats returning at least 10 MPs.
If Cameron wants just 550 MPs this is the only way to deliver it.
If you agree:
Support the campaign for a referendum to bring in true PR.
I know Cameron won’t: that’s why I think my blog was correctly titled.
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Each seat should have around 100,000 constituents, no?
Otherwise our votes continue to be unequal.
If the EU election is a model, no thanks. We could only select off party lists. The party that I would have voted for put, at the top of its list, someone I was not at all keen on who had used the party machine to parachute herself in so I voted otherwise.
Keep the one-member constituency system and have single transferable vote, so one has a second choice if one’s first is not in the top two.
And move parliament to a building where there are not two sides facing each other, that leads to confrontational politics and excludes points of view that do not lie on the continuum.
Cameron won’t because he doesn’t believe in PR, which seems quite a good reason not to support it. I don’t like referenda because we are a representative, Parliamentary democracy. See the perils of plebisictes in Switzerland where some very odd, indeed dangerous in my view, measures are passed.
Oh, and I can’t resist being obtuse: how are we going to decide the result of this referendum – simple majority (i.e. FPTP) or PR (so, say, 70% of the population vote under FPTP and 30% under PR)? The former? I thought so…
FPTP may have weaknesses but is infinitely preferable to PR. If you want to see how bad PR is take a look at Israel, whose government is essentially paralysed. Or Italy, where they spend practically all their adult lives going in and out of the voting booths. The worst thing is that it would leave a third party (in this case the Lib Dems) permanently holding the balance of power despite only getting 15-20% of the vote. Now THAT is anti-democratic.
Peter, the counterpoint to the situation in Israel and Italy is the devolved administrations in Great Britain, which are more proportional than FPTP and have minority control, but still seem to function reasonably well.
Paul,
You might feel that the UK system works well, but surely the crux is that since 1979 there has only been one elected change of government (in 1997). That doesn’t seem likely to make people feel that their vote counts for very much. Having said that, I’m not sure that a permanent coalition with minority parties (either the Liberals or BNP, UKIP or the SNP) holding the balance of power would be that great either. Did anybody ever find a third way?
mad foetus,
Did you address that comment towards me by mistake, as you replied to a point which was the opposite of the one I made.