Given that the Labour Party has been elected by just 22% of the electorate is it not now time to change the voting system?
Granted their is an absolute need for a new political party and for more choice but 38.7% of the electorate didn't vote presumambly because they thought it would make no difference.
Many smaller parties do not get votes because people do not see them as being able to influence things at a national level yet this election showed their was support for independent MP's and for Respect.
The Lib Dem's who when they had just a handful of MP's talked of little else other than PR now (unsurprisingly for the opportunist party that they are ) having grown in size hardly mention it.
Is it not now time PR became the mantle of the left in this Country as a step towards ending the disenfranchment voters feel in this country?

It is time for a change in the elctoral system, but which party, once they've won by the first past the post system (with a healthy majority) will honestly tear that system down and replace it with a fair and representational system?

I don't think that is a fair comment at all. I think they realised that people were getting bored of them harping on about it all the time.

I think PR is a very good idea - it worked in the European elections, why not here?

very interesting arguments for PR -
Basically the arguments for the first past the post systems is that it allows for a strong government. But it is very very unfair.
Surely a govenment should be a fair representation of the countries wishes - thus Labour recieves 37% of the vote and then has the right to goven unquestioned, the 63%, who voted for a different option. Surely this is not right!
I like the idea of a PR system which allows the voter to cat their vote in order of preference, thus take away any form of tactical voting which is ultimately unfair and unrepresentative.
I'm also all for the emergence of more single issue candidates and independent MPs --I feel with the first past the post and party lists - we are moving towards a centralised system, taking power away from the poeple and towards the central parties. This leave people cold and allows for bland party suits to take the MPs job while the free thinkers are left out in the cold.
My biggest concern is that people are not engaged in politics -by bringing in a PR system increasing the importance of independents and removing the two/three party monopoly this has to be a good thing.
Any move toward PR will be resisted by thre parties as it strips away their power and increases the power of the electorate.
Finally I was looking at the cabinet this morning and I was thinking how many of them has actually done a days work outside of politics -- hardly any of them - Prescott being an exception.
We are being run by people who have done nothing real with their lives - how sad for us all!
Compare this to 25 years ago when the idea of a career politician did not exists - you had to have done something before hand - be it business, military or factory floor.

I can think of only 1 valid argument against PR, and that is that a certain area doesn't have ONE representative on a national level, they can adress with local issues. That's a link we miss here, but on the other hand there is plenty of local government to make sure local issues can be adressed me thinkest.

But changing the voting system is not a popular issue and won't win any party votes I think... so it just doesn't change, ever.

I agree Leontien - it is important that we have local representation in a national parliament. I'm sure a simple PR system can produce a local representative while also empowering a national government.
I'm positive over the coming years technology should empower the country to be able to modernise the voting system - to mass vote online and demand increased democracy. Everything else in our lives has been modernised from our jobs to our spending habits. We have choice in all out lives we never had before (the tories and labour keep banging on about choice). So lets have more CHOICE in our democracy! How many of us had to vote labour out of fear.
It seems to me a move toward PR (but away from party lists) is the was to bring back some real characters and arguments to Parliament rather the the approved list of lightweights currently filling the corridors of power.
As you say there is not the political will to change our voting system at present unless it works in favour of one of the two main parties. Just like the reform of the house of Lords was made to balance up the parties rather than address democratic issues - kick out out the 17th earl of bastartardy and replace with the 1st lord of Stamford bridge Tony (I'm a real labour man haha) Banks.

I've lived in England five years and I still don't understand how proportional representation works. All I've been able to gather from the discussions about it, is that it seems like you pick your top three candidates, and then.... something happens, and you get an unstable government with a Prime Minister who might be, say, Labour, and a president who might be conservative, and then they fight alot, and then the government collapses, so you do it again a year later, because it all went so well the first time....

Sorry, obviously I'm not getting it. Would somebody mind terribly explaining it to me again? I just don't understand how it works.

Parliamentary politics are so complex. A parliamentary system seems to be what happens when people overthink politics over the course of 500 years or so. But I wonder if that is actually better than if you just cut to the chase.

Isn't what you really want one man one vote? I know it's sort of the McDonalds of democracy, but isn't it also sort of the fairest? What if you just elected your prime minister directly? Is that bad solely because it's the American system? Are some systems considered better merely because they're more complicated? Isn't simpler sometimes best?

Very good question!
And the answer that the tories and labour always give too. I hate to side with the lib dems on this but they are right.
Regardless of the outcome surely the houses of Parliament should be a true reflection on the voting of the country. The present system is not - in 1951 Labour gained 51% of the vote yet the Tories won the election - how the hell did that happen??
Also the present system goves all the power to the main parties excluding pressure groups smaller parties and alienating many voters.
There are many different voting systems out there, most giving the option of two or more votes. But a PR systems also alows the voter to vote for whom they truely believe in rather than voting tactically (what a total waste of a vote) or for new labour due to fear of a racist Tory party. Is that all Democracy can offer us?
Virtually every country globally has a different system to the UK which proves the First past the post is not the only option. With one of the oldest parliamentary traditons in the world the UK should not be afraid to take the next step and seriously look at embracing a new form of PR.
If the fear of a new systems is that it will stop the like of Blair and Thacher having a 160 majoity well I can live with that.

Fucking Google It !

There are numerous different kinds of Proportional Representational systems in existence, obviously, I suppose that's part of the difficulty in understanding it, because rather than talking about apples and oranges, you're talking about apples, figs and bananas and oranges, if you get my metaphor. But from reading about them over the last five years, I've got the impression that far from a panacea, PR would be different from the current system, but not necessarily fairer.

Are you convinced KFAD that it would be fairer? For instance, in the current system, Lib Dems, Greens and the like are present in Parliament, but not powerful. PR would make more marginal parties present in Parliament (apparently), but not powerful. Would it be fairer in that it would make all the parties compromise more in order to accomplish anything? And is compromise what you want? For example, Labour forced to compromise even more with the Conservatives or (worst of all given the recent voting figures) the BNP?

Is a direct vote so anti-parliamentary that it cannot exist within the present system, I wonder?

MATA, what a load of nonsense you're spouting, tsssssk!
Unstable government? UNSTABLE?????? In italy maybe not over here (alas...)

I think most PR systems are made up of the following

1) Everybody votes for a person on a party list. How these persons come to be on this list is a whole different matter, but the point is you vote for a person of a certain party.
2) All the votes for each party are summarized.
3) Seats in the house are divided over the parties, according to the percentage of votes they got. Usually you need at least +/- 5 percent to get a seat.
4) Each party divides the seats in the house among the people on their list. Again, how this is done, is probably different in different systems. In holland they are usually allocated in a certain order, unless someone "low" on the list got loads of votes, then they make an exception. But here the party decides which persons fill the seats, but these persons must be from the list that was used in the voting.

After all this, a goverment must be formated. How? Usually one person from the biggest party is asked to go and talk to potential coalition partners. This one person makes an inventory of possible coalitions. The one he (and his party) thinks will have the most chance of succes is then formed. This coalition writes a plan of goverment, chooses ministers and such, and when they're in agreement, the cabinet is presented and 4 years of goverment start.

This has nothing to do with presidents btw, our country has a queen remember....

Sorry Leontien -- didn't mean to offend. I didn't mean "unstable" as in bonkers. I meant "unstable" as in, prone to frequent collapses. Which is, certainly, truer of some PR systems than others. Personally, I think of the Netherlands as a paragon of monarchial democracy.

However, I will point out that, to the untrained eye, the system you describe sounds more like representational of representational of monarchial democracy, as opposed to representational democracy. (I'm being tongue in cheek here, please don't take it the wrong way). And I'm wondering if, more seriously, you think that kind of system, in which the voters seem to be two if not three degrees of separation away from the person who actually takes the seat is better than just voting for the person who takes the seat?

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line after all....

As I said before, that's the only weak point in our current system, which could be vastly improved if the seats were just allocated according to the number of votes a person gets (first the seats are distributed among the parties, the parties then look who got the most votes...)

The benefits I think far outweigh this one weakness. If I vote socialist party, and "my representative" is a tory, how well represented will I feel?

As a matter of fact, my party would have NO seats in parliament, and I'd have to make due with a labour or tory twat as my representative. How easy would it be to make him/her see things my way....

In our system, I can go through party channels to get my local issues on the national agenda, because our party has 10 seats in the house.

The French Socialist government brought back the proportional system for the general election in 1986. (the proportional system was in place during the Fourth Republic)... Official explanation: to have a better representation for small political groups.
Real explanation: Mitterrand (who was president) knew that he was going to lose his huge majority at the next general election. To reduce the majority of the Right Wing Party (RPR), he decided to go for the proportional system.
The Socialist Party did lose the general elections: we had the first cohabitation in the fifth republic (a president on the left, a government on the right).

The two-ballot, uninominal majority system was reinstated for the 1988 general elections and has been retained ever since.

That's interesting, Domino. What's a he two-ballot, uninominal majority system, though? How does that work?

That means that there is a single candidate by constituency (whereas plurinominal means more than one candidate by constituency: it is the case for our local elections, when we elect our mayors and municipalities).

For the general elections (legislative elections), each deputy represents a constituency which may vary in size, but has on average 100,000 inhabitants. To win, the MP must have more than 50% of the votes.

How is the candidate chosen, in that case?

It supposed to be someone from the area. Usually, it's someone who has already been involved in local politics (being a mayor or something...). I'm not sure how it works, but I guess that this person must also convince his/her party that he/she is the good choice.
But, to tell the truth, the big parties (Socialist Party, UMP - the right wing party) do not hesitate to put someone who is not necessarily known in the area - especially when the constituency is an easy seat. For instance, where I live, at the last general elections, the socialist party put Elisabeth Guigou (former minister in the Jospin government). She had never lived in the suburb. But she failed to win the seat of Mayor in Avignon (south of France), and it was pretty sure she would win the seat here...

I guess that the same in the UK...

Yes, I'm completely put off by the fact that, in Britain, MPs don't have to live in their constituencies. It may be irrational to be bothered by that, but it really bugs me that my MP lives on the other side of town, and always has. So when something goes wrong with the garbage pick up here, it doesn't affect her. Or if the police in my district are on the take, it's not her family who will be affected, and so on.

I would be happier if they had to live among us, although I know perfectly well that if one is an MP one is probably wealthy enough not to be affected by the lack of decent supermarkets in one's district anyway. Still, I'm with you on that.

So, in terms of your parliamentary candidates, they are all picked by the party, and then you either take their choice, or you have to vote for another party?

I know that's not unusual at all in parliamentary systems, but I cannot help but see it as a bit anti-democratic. I like the individual freedom of somebody running who might have pissed off the party, but is still running as a member of that party, just because they want the job.

I wonder if there's a way to get the best of both worlds.

?????

I didn't know garbage collection was a national issue? You go to your MP with that? We go to the city council for that, same with corrupt cops.
If you run for city council you have to live in the city you run for.
That's why I'm not that bothered that I don't have a local representative on national level, local issues never make there anyway...

Well, if I were to go to the local administration (London doesn't have a city council, per se) and they were completely incompetent and did nothing (say, for instance, I lived in Hackney), then, yes I would write to my MP and complain. If she happened to live in my neighborhood, she might have heard her maid complaining about the same thing, and maybe she would have some idea of how it felt.

I have never had a problem writing to my national rep. Once, in America, when I was having problem with the gas company in my city, I wrote my Representative in Washington and he took care of the problem the next day. It's amazing what quick response you get when somebody gets called by a nationally elected representative's office.

Scares the bejesus out of people.

Officially, french MPs have to live in their constituency. My MP, for instance, has moved into my city. She's not too bad: she is very active in the area But I can't help it, everytime I see her, I'm just very doubtful... I know she'll be away as soon as the Left wins the next general elections: she'll be in the government, and then somewhere better...


The parliamentary candidates are not necessarily picked by the party, but they have to be back up by the party.
As to vote for another party, it's difficult, when you know that in some constituencies, the small parties don't have any chance to be elected... and sometimes, you don't have any choice anyway: you only have one candidate for the UMP and one candidate for the PS (parti socialiste) at the end...

One of the big weaknesses (among others) is that you usually have candidates who are professional in politics. And usually they're men. Women have much more difficulties to get elected in this kind of system, because the parties are more likely to pick men (to be sure they'll win). All the women MPs talk about the difficulty for women to be picked by the party.
On the contrary, women do much better in proportional system: we have a "parity law" and parties are obliged to get half women half men on their list (and it works). We have the proportional system for the regional, departmental, cantonal elections... as well as for the municipalities elections (but it's not exactly the same system)... and for the european elections. Women are much better represented.

Our city councils have also quite a lot of power. And I would do the same as you.

The national assembly has to work for the whole country.
But the basic idea, in the french system anyway, is that you need MPs who come from "real life" to talk about "real life": Not to defend some specific and local issues, but more to use their experience in local areas to improve national laws and propositions of laws.

I once had a boyfriend who was the son of a former MP and cabinet minister. I remember having a long conversation with him about the fact that his dad had grown up in his working-class, northern constituency, but as soon as he was elected he had to be in Westminster for most of the year. He described to me his father's increasing detachment from his constituency, and from the lives and concerns of his constituents, as time went on and he rose through the party ranks.

So you may not like it that your MP lives across town, but for the majority of people their MPs, even if they maintain a home in the constituency, spend most of the year hundreds of miles away because they have to maintain a Westminster presence. I think this would be a difficult issue to address.

So, basically that one advantage of your system has it's limits as well

Those of you who still strive to support the case for proportional representation will probably be aware that one of the UK broadsheets is running a campaign to bring about this change.

If using an electoral system that not only gives people a say about who runs their government rather than simply who their MP is, PR undoubtedly has greater potential to give more people the inspiration and the will to get to the polling stations (as well as subtly encouraging us all to think not just what someone else may vote for, but what they may otherwise need us to vote for).

But, in percentage terms, how much does your councillors, MP, or PM influence the social needs of you and your society?

And how much do people, often sitting on the other side of the world, have their say in a split-second, without the moral or democratic acknowledgement to do so?

The second Gulf war is still fresh in the memory, but why is tobacco still available over the counter without prescription?

Or to put it even more deceptively ominous, what do the recent rail tragedies and the Sudan 1 scares (to mention but two) have in common?

Problems that failed to be spotted at their source, and then allowed to multiply, slipping through various ‘safety measures’.

Why, because:
i) the intentions of influence lie within too few hands, of which too many perceive public safety not to be sufficiently as much a priority as need be the case, and

ii) most people are forced to undertake such highly-demanding workloads that problems unwittingly created by one person are all too easily missed at their source by somebody else, as they are all under just as immense pressure to complete their own tasks.


Let me illustrate why we need something far more fundamentally radical than just a change of voting within our own national state.

The EU gatherings. Britain needs a rebate, because the French don’t pay enough into the EU budget.


Do we really need this?

I could say so much more. (I began to do so on the “Tactical Voting: ... Billy's other website” forum page.)

But I’ll simply let you guess what could happen if EVERYONE did this one day – in unison:

i'm not sure it's really the topic, but I can't help myself


The UK has already a rebate... since 1984 (Tatcher )
And it's not that France doesn't pay enough (it does pay more than the UK actually), it's that France is getting a lot (too much) subventions from the CAP.
But in the 80s, the CAP budget represented around 70% of the EU budget, today it's around 50%. Anyway, with the enlargment, there has to be a radical reform of the CAP (it won't work the way it is). And we also have to end the british rebate... As a matter of fact, the enlargment will increase the UK rebate. According to the figures (cf. website of the european commission, DG budget), if the rebate remains as it currently is, it will increase from 4 billion euro a year now to 7 billion euro. As a consequence, the UK, now among the four big net contributor of the EU (with France BTW) will pay less than Italy... even though the UK is today one of the richest EU member states! Besides, most of the other net contributor states regard the british rebate as unfair...

BTW, if you look at the Member States' contributions in relation to their population (i.e the contribution of the European citizens to the EU budget), it is the citizens from Luxembourg, Denmark and Belgium who pay the highest (followed by Holland and France). The citizens in the UK are among the ones who pay the lowest.

Anyway, at the end of the day, I think that Britain and France are the same here: they want to pay less when they should pay more ( to inject sufficient funds to support the EU enlargment process)

I'm not sure I understand your question. Personally, yes, I think we need an EU budget. We need to increase aid to poorest countries. We need to increase European Support Funds to help poorest european regions. We need to develop european education programme, such as Erasmus for instance, etc.

But, for sure, we don't need people to bring population against one another, to develop hate between countries and people... I'm getting tired of the whole thing between Britain and France (BTW, could you use France instead of "the French" don't pay enough)? And could you distinguish what is happening between governments (for instance between Chirac and Blair) from the relationships between "the British" and "the French"? I think it's a mistake to confuse this level of power with people on the ground who, in this forum anyway, share basic ideas and principles, whatever country they come from.



Sorry for that, and back to the topic...

Mentioning the petty way the UK's rebate from the EU is being reported was simply one point as to why individual state countries, and the boundaries that fundamentally divide us in legal, social and moral unity, need to go.

I am trying to open the debate of the 'need for change' to the lengths I firmly, and wholeheartedly believe, it needs to be broadened to.

There are so many other connected points I could raise to help illustrate this, but I hope you all have the imagination to be able to work the rest out yourself, given that image [above].

I'm sorry if I misunderstood you, in your previous post (I've got a good excuse though: i'm not an english speaker )

But I do agree with what you're saying.

It's a rather complicated problem really... Certainly I'm not over concerned by the raw proportion of votes this time - many people in safe Labour seats decided to teach blair a lesson by cutting his national share of the vote safe in the knowledge they'd still get a Labour MP anyway.

I'd be wary of losing a local MP without a bit more democracy and accountability at the local level... which we don't really do in this country at the moment.

Course the celebrated 'independent' wins of the last election were the guy in Blanau Gwent... reaction to high handed imposition of an official labour party candidate as I understand it - something that'd be hard to check under certain PR systems and the local hospital candidate (forest of boland is it?), a single local issue candidate who's really not got any appeal to anyone outside his home area.

dunno if any of our PR number crunchers could tell us how those two independents would have faired under their pet system.

For those of you (still) interested in this topic and keen to see the UK move towards PR, you may be interested in this pledge

Let me know of any of you sign up to Groundswell and I can count you in the people I've encouraged to sign up.

Signed up BG ... we have a group in the Labour Party which campaigns for proportional representation and I have been a member for many years ... Good Luck ...

Thanks Alberr