And another thing…

What I like is the way some self-confessed Labour Party members barge in on this blog from time to time with a markedly proprietorial, Spartist attitude to Tom’s views and actions.

They cut all the other commenters dead and go straight to ‘their’ man. And why not? What are the rest of the commenters but cybertories, monomaniacs, obsessive-ruminants, social inadequates, lonely keyboard warriors (warriors in their own estimation but really another word with a few of the same letters in it describes them far more succinctly). Yes, that’s us told, us members of the great British public.

Bloody Hell Tom,

You’re on form today! That’s two post I’ve agreed with you on (I was so shocked at my agreement on the first one I forgot to post on it).

And I sit at the other end of the political spectrum from you. Well there maybe opportunities for consensus after all.

For once Tom you’re spot on.

PR is absurd. It is anti-democratic. It removes the ability for individual candidates to be booted out and centralizes all the candidate selection to the party. That most definitely is not accountability!

A democrat is someone who believes in the people getting the party they voted for not there party you think they should have voted for.

And i say to “Fed up Labour MPs from the stone age”, you were very happy is suspect to support first past the post whilst Labour were winning election after election. TO change the system once you start losing is more than i little Stalineque!

Tom, you’re making so much sense now. All I need now is a post telling the British public to stop moaning about expenses and get involved in politics themselves if they want to change things.

“Why is everyone so bloody apathetic” might be a possible title you could use

So there is in place a deeply unfair voting system benefiting the party in power (benefits both main parties but Labour particularly), and anyone not in power who points out that it is blatantly unfair is just a sore loser.

What idiotic logic that is.

Refreshingly honest for an MP – hopefully we’ll see more posts like this dotted around the place, and less about ‘the system’ causing every ill in politics.

Tom

when you are hungry half a loaf seems like a lot and waiting eighteen years is an awful long time.

PR or FPTP? You are right to say that it should not be decided on partisan advantage.
The system which is fairer should be adopted. In my opinion, that is PR. Convince me that FPTP is fairer and I’ll go back to believing in it.
But just out of interest, what would the combined Labour/Liberal vote look like in elections since 1945?

Voting systems should not be gamed to deny one party access to power but, if you believe in real democracy, then neither should it seek to exclude citizens from governance.

As a Lib Dem living in a very old labour Council in Scotland (yes there are a few left) my representation, the representation of my beliefs, the people who stand up and give voice to my voice are just two Lib Dems out of 30-odd. If it were not for the PR system my voice would not be heard and my beliefs would not be represented.

Why do you want to deny my that Tom?

Ben:

“..PR is absurd. It is anti-democratic. It removes the ability for individual candidates to be booted out and centralizes all the candidate selection to the party….”

How is everyone having a say in the government we get rather than the 26% who currently decide who the government is – less democratic? Duh!

And where exactly do “we” the voter get a say in who the candidate is for any party at present under FPTP?

I would suspect that the real reason Tom doesn’t like PR is that it poses a real threat to Labours virtual stitch up of the vote up here.

The reason AJ is suggesting it is that he knows that under FPTP – Labour will be annihilated as a political party by the electorate – it’s called “damage limitation for Labour” and PR is his only hope.
Thankfully it won’t work and Labour WILL be destroyed at the coming General Election.

Rightly so for being so abjectly corrupt when they were elected in 1997 to clean up politics LOL Who would have thought that they would instead make the Tories look ultra-clean.

I’d imagine that most voters now believe that New Labour has been undermined by those who cling to the last century nostrums of Olden Labour.

Which is why they’ll be voting Conservative…where they perceive the Blairite flame still burns.

They may be right, but true Blairites will have a chance in opposition to make a case for the original.

I think the current voting system for Westminster guarantees the Tories and Labour absolute power even when they win far less than even 50% of the vote. I don’t think that can be a good thing. I also think if people are apathetic its because they are fed up with either one or the other of these Parties and with a system that panders to both. I am old enough to have endured the period which led to the reign of Maggie and her cohorts, then Blair, now Brown.

I remember a massive consultation exericse set up by the Scottish Parliament in its early days. Loads of community groups participated and high on the agenda for many was PR at Local Council level to break the stranglehold Labour had on so many Scottish Councils. I would add that many on these groups were from traditional Labour backgrounds. I also remember some Labour Councillors finding the subject hilarious and claiming that it would never happen. Well it did and it was a very good thing too although they still don’t think so for obvious reasons. The lost a lot of muscle and a lot of power.

PR is not perfect but it at least attempts to produce a more accurate reflection of the voting pattern than the current voting system does.

Silent Hunter – “And where exactly do “we” the voter get a say in who the candidate is for any party at present under FPTP?”

See Bethnal Green and Bow. The electorate decided they didn’t want Oona King and so voted against her (or rather, didn’t turn up). Open primaries (those words are being spoken a lot these days) would have sorted this as the local people would have decided on a Labour candidate they wanted and would likely have beaten Galloway (who won by 823 votes on a 51% turnout).

FPTP doesn’t benefit Labour specifically. The constituencies as drawn might benefit Labour now, but that’ll change and benefit the Tories at some point. It’s no doubt incredibly hard to sort it out so nobody has a benefit. FPTP ‘benefits’ those who win the people’s support, that was Labour and will be the Tories. How is a system where the Liberals hold the die any better?

We’ve also got to accept that a Government can’t be representative or everybody, it should represent what most people want (ie. centre-right policies). How could we have a Government that Liberals, Tories, New-Labourites & Socialist-Labourties could be behind?

Then we end up with that nonsense of a cabinet of many parties. Thatcherite economics, Liberal foreign policy, New-Labour education, English Socialists in charge of BERR or whatever it’s called, BNP for Immigration Minister, UKIP for Europe Minister? It’s barking mad.

It’s also incredibly hard to determine what people wanted with PR. The commenter that Tom refers to suggested 60% of the people wanted some social democratic nonsense, because they voted Liberal or Labour. I don’t think most people who voted Labour at that time did, or would vote for Labour again if meant LIB-LAB govt. I’d say the majority wanted a centre-right party and voted (New-)Labour or Tory for that reason.

I don’t think it makes much difference what sort of system you have if the people that system returns are of the calibre we currently see in Parliament. A bunch of crooks are a bunch of crooks regardless of how they get there. It’s how you get rid of these crooks and start over that is the difficult problem.

Once they have gone how do you stop the remaining MP’s feeling all persecuted and passing even more draconian laws than we have seen lately to stop the public ever finding out what they are doing again? Tricky problem. The best solution I have heard proposed so far is that every MP currently sitting should be sacked and banned from ever holding public office again. After all they are all complicit in this for either fiddling or turning a blind eye. That way we could at least start again with uncorrupted MP’s and none with a grudge who may poison the new intake.

Do you do anything other than straw men on this issue? I know the commenter in question set one up, but I await your final proof, based on the fact that some mentalist online is clearly wrong to claim that PR improves the weather, and gives all children broader smiles.

“Instead of trying to manipulate the electoral system so that we can exclude the Tories from power (even when their policies have more support than those of either of the other parties) why not actually try to win people’s support with policies they like?”

For starters, manifesto pledges don’t carry through to policies, so your argument is only in favour of better politics and spin, not better governance. Secondly, you ignore the point that winning the election (i.e. getting a minority of eligible voters onboard) does not indicate having the people’s support.

It would be nice to see people in important positions such as your own to demonstrate the ability to think beyond simple black-and-white, winner-takes-all, as-long-as-I-get-people-to-vote-for-me-everything’s-alright.

I don’t want to exclude the Tories from power, nor Labour, nor the Lib Dems, nor the Greens, etc etc. I don’t hope for electoral reform because it favours my own personal politics. I simply want my vote to count, and Parliament to represent the people.

I have always been in safe seats, even having moved around the country trying to be a productive system. Over the course of four general elections, in four different constituencies both north and south, the outcome of the election was already a given before I got to the polling booth. Why should I have any faith that the government is listening to or genuinely accountable to the people?

Erm, that should have been “productive citizen”, not system…

@ silent hunter

FPTP isn’t perfect, however it is more democratic and more effective than PR. My case:

1) PR candidates are chosen by centralised systems. The voter has no way of selecting individual candidates, or more importantly holding individuals accountable at the ballot box, for i dunno….abusing their expenses for example!

2) Generally speaking the party who wins the popular vote wins the greatest number of seats anyway. On only two occasions since WW2 has no this happened, in ‘51 when Labour won the popular vote, and Feb ‘74 when the Tories pinched it. This anomaly only rises because seats are of varying sizes. This is one part of the FPTP system that should be changed; all seats should be the same size.

3) FPTP generally works in favour of creating stable (if not strong) governments. Advocates of PR say it fosters compromise and debate and understanding. The truth of the matter can be seen in Italy (as an example) where government are lucky to last a year. Nothing gets done, chaos prevails. FPTP allows healthy (sometimes too healthy) majorities allowing reform to occur. PR means that every idea os half baked and half executed. I’m in favour of every government with a healthy democratic mandate having the chance to enact their reforms.

4) FPTP is at its best if parliament is strong and their are proper checks and balances. This is the only defective part of our current system if you ask me

That is essentially my argument.

@silent hunter

re. candidate selection:

1) join your local party of preference and you’ll have a key vote in the decision.

2) the Tories are rolling out open primaries in many constituencies (or so they say) which will enable everyone to have a say.

@ Jo

Both Thatcher and Blair won by huge margins in the popular vote. With PR they still would have been elected with enormous majorities! So what’s your point?

A learned friend who emigrated to Spain twenty two years ago said this to me,
“In Spain we have a government, in the UK it is two political parties fighting each other”.
Spain also has a much stronger regional power. Again, their local councils are not controlled by a particular political group.
When Spain withdrew their troops from Iraq, it was because the people gave bona fide reasons as to why they should not be there.
This is PR. This is democracy. Ironic when you consider that a country which had a dictator until 1977 is now possibly the most democratic country in Europe, even the world.

This is difficult, primarily because I like the stablity that FPTP gives (how many hung parliaments have there been in the last 30 years? – zilch), even if sometimes it makes for the cliched “elected dictatorship” and that the accountability (ha!) that having a single MP per constituency should provide outweighs the most decidedly unfair distribution of the votes. Unfair?

Well lets look at the figures for the 1997 “landslide”:

Labour: 63.4% of the seats from 43% of the popular vote.

Conservatives: 25% of the seats but 30% of the votes.

It is even more obvious from the 2005 election:

Labour: 55% of the seats from 35% of the popular vote.

Conservatives: 31% of the seats from 32% of the votes.

Is that fair? No. Would PR provide us with better government ? Jury is out.

Doesn’t wash Tom. Proportional Representation is the way forward because it’s the only way to guarentee electoral equality.

Do you deny that the value of a person’s vote currently varies by constituency?

Do you deny that currently the ratio between votes to seats is unequal?

Let’s look at the last election shall we? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/constituencies/default.stm

Labour had 35.3% of the vote, yet 55.1% of the seats
Tories had 32.3% of the vote, yet 30.7% of the seats
Liberal’s had 22.1% of the vote, yet 10.1% of the seats

Tell me, what’s fair about Labour getting an extra 24.4% of the seats for just a 3% lead on the Tories?

Tell me, what’s fair about 1.6% of Tory votes being outright discarded?

Tell me, what’s fair about a whopping 12% of the Lib Dem votes being flushed down the toliet?

How would you feel if the shoe was on the other foot? At the next election would YOU be happy to see 22% of the electorate back YOUR party only to see almost half of those votes ignored?

I for one think my vote should count exactly the same as everyone else’s, but it doesn’t and it’s wrong and an affront to democracy.

Just get the rest of Labour on board to think like you Tom and you might win the election after the 2010 one. Fair play and all that is very British. The fairness no longer exists and as you rightly say trying to change the system because one is losing the argument reinforces the reason that said person/people are losing the argument.

‘And if the Tories do win the next election, it will be because they won the argument ‘

errr no it will be because our party (Labour) became an empty shell with virtually no support base or actvists

So, like I said, now’s hardly the time for a debate on something as irrelevant to the expenses debate as electoral reform.

You don’t think some of the scoundrels in safe seats thought that safety was one more reason they could get away with it?

Well put Tom, but isn’t it strange that those so in favour of PR are the same ones bemoaning the possibility of the BNP gaining representation in the EP?

@James, yes. Safe seats can lead to complacent MPs who break the rules because they will win anyway. That’s a candidate selection issue though, which could be solved with open primaries, recall elections, and such.

PR would also take away the opportunity for people to punish their MP, and actually like their MP and wish to return him/her at each General Election.

It’s also a party issue, Cameron has purged his party of many of these figures. Brown hasn’t yet. Parties shouldn’t accept indiviudals who break rules, or the spirit of rules.

Tom

Many reforms happen on the back of something that seems unrelated.

I am pretty sure that it was the decisions made by the political classes, going unchecked and in an unaccountable manner, that led to the American Revolution.

Who checked and was accountable for MP expenses? The MPs.

It’s not entirely clear to me how, in practise, anyone could lose a popular MP just because PR gave an MP from a fringe party his/her seat? I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, just that I can’t quite grok the mechanics of it. Can anyone explain it in simple terms?

And for me, it’s not about ‘manipulating’ (changing?) the system to keep any party out, but to make it fairer for all parties. Of course the parties that do less well at any given time are more supportive of PR, as much as the ones benefiting from the current system aren’t. Human nature doesn’t make PR wrong. Quite the opposite.

Fed Up says “system that put recationaries (sic) in power with 40% of the vote while 60% of the voters back liberal and social democratic parties”

The present government are elected with under 23 % of the total vote, and the present Prime Minister with 0 % of the total vote, even within his own party. That is true democracy, eh, Fed Up ?

Alan Douglas

Well said Tom

“Fair votes” = giving the tiny Lib Dems the levers of Government when fewer than 1 in 5 of the adult population vote for them.

Hardly ‘fair’ ?

PR systems result in coalition governments, and that leads to weakened messages. Imagine the possibility that 45% of votes at the next election are for the Tories, 25% for Labour, 18% for the Lib Dems, 10% for various leftist minor parties, and the remainder amongst right-wing minor parties and independents.

The MPs would be proportionately divided, but we’d still have the possibility of a Labour-led coalition government, only pulled in opposing directions by their coalition partners. Meanwhile, the plurality of voters that voted for a single different party could be denied any representation of their policy wishes.

FPTP has flaws, but it nearly always produces a government with enough strength to push through a manifesto package chosen by a plurality of voters.

What’s wrong with coalition, Alec? I’m in a coalition with my wife, even though I’m stronger than her, and could ‘push through’ any proposal I wanted to. We discuss decisions instead. I doubt Iran would ever consider adopting the PR system, but we don’t want to be like the Iranian government, do we, or should I start making a stockpile of stones?

Odd, tho, innit, that electoral reform, promised to us 12 years ago, but discarded to concentrate on the enormously important matter of fox hunting, should suddenly be spoken about in Labour circles again.

Why! One might almost think they were worried about losing an election…

Alex C PR can lead to coalition governments and can lead to minority governments.

I think if you asked people in Scotland would you like the Scottish Parliament and local authorities to be elected first past the post the answer would definitely be no. People have got used to PR now. That would happen UK-wide too.