I suggest you read it again if you don't understand. I suspect you do really - it really is simple, and you are not.
Answer to the (irrelevant) question: Defoe.
UK General Election 2015 | Conservatives win with an overall majority
- Thread starter langster
- Start date
I suggest you read it again if you don't understand. I suspect you do really - it really is simple, and you are not.
Answer to the (irrelevant) question: Defoe.
They are spending six billion on hs2 to supposedly relieve that problem.
If that's not enough how about we charge high earners in London 2% more income tax and 1% in the south east... Regional taxation just sounds wrong to me though and that's what the mansion tax looks like
I suggest you look up what a rhetorical question is.
I know what a rhetorical question is - no reason why I can't answer it though. I was hoping that by doing so, you might elucidate why it's relevant.
The SNP's very Scottish conspiracy...
As its supporters insist that MI5 rigged the Scottish referendum, voting SNP now requires faith in the unbelievable, says Andrew Gilligan
By Andrew Gilligan
19 Apr 2015
With its tearooms and old-fashioned shops, the attractive town of Dunoon, in Argyll, seems to epitomise Scottish moderation and common sense. But alongside the window displays of country wear and fresh mackerel, there are some much weirder goods on offer.
In the front window of Dunoon’s Scottish National Party campaign base, alongside posters and canvassing information for the local SNP candidate, Brendan O’Hara, they’re displaying for sale a new pamphlet which describes in detail how MI5 and John McTernan, chief of staff to Jim Murphy, the Scottish Labour leader, “rigged” last year’s independence referendum by creating thousands of fake No ballot papers.
The authors, nationalist activists from Argyll, first suspected the existence of the “McTernan Plan”, as they call it, on the night of the count. Their “extensive canvass returns” had left them “confident of success” in the area, but when the postal vote came in they were “astounded” to discover it was 70-30 against independence. What’s more, the postal voter turnout in Argyll was 96.4 per cent. “We had never before heard of such a high return in any democratic election,” they said.
The activists’ suspicions hardened when they learned that Mr McTernan, then a Labour commentator, had appeared on TV four days before the referendum saying that “postal votes are running very strongly towards No.”
“I couldn’t work out how it was possible to interfere on any scale with the postal ballot,” Andy Anderson, one of the authors, told the Telegraph. “You need the ballot paper number, the signature and date of birth of the voter. Then it occurred to me. All that information went into a computer – and who’s at the other end of the computer in London? MI5.”
Later this week, the Dunoon SNP campaign hub (officially the “Forward shop” and shared with the wider Yes movement) will host a public meeting to promote the conspiracy theory.
As Mr Anderson’s pamphlet puts it: “MI5 can produce the required number of ballot papers, of the right paper with the right local authority stamp…[and] even the correct signature from the computer image. All they need to do then is get their own staff to deliver the papers to the correct post boxes in the correct areas of Scotland, and bingo, the job is done.
“The Prime Minister can be informed that the objective has been achieved and McTernan can be tipped off in time for him to appear on the BBC, four days before the ballot boxes are opened, and tell us which way the postal vote is going.”
Rather more likely, of course, is that the Yes campaign’s canvas returns were wrong. The overall No vote in Argyll and Bute was a convincing 58.5 per cent, on an 88.2 per cent turnout, with the vast majority of votes cast in person. Postal voters are often more conservative than in-person voters, since they are older and more rural. And postal vote turnouts are always higher than overall turnouts; those motivated enough to apply for a postal vote are also more motivated to use it.
Mr McTernan’s foreknowledge is easily explained, too: though the postal votes were not actually counted until referendum night, they were opened beforehand, with campaign representatives present and able to peek at where people put their crosses. The No margin of victory was almost 400,000 votes, so MI5 would have had to visit an awful lot of postboxes.
Dunoon is far from the only place in Nat-world where this stuff is taken seriously. Robin McAlpine, a leading figure in the independence movement, told a fringe meeting at last month’s SNP conference that MI5 had “tried to, at worst, subvert democracy up here” during the referendum – though did not allege that the result was rigged, unlike SNP delegates at the meeting.
During the campaign itself Jim Sillars, the former SNP deputy leader, said it would be “naïve” to imagine that MI5 was not “taking a role.” Official Electoral Commission research after the result found that 42 per cent of Yes voters believed at least some vote-rigging had taken place.
Yet this is merely the most extreme example of how being a Scottish nationalist often seems to involve believing things which aren’t true. The SNP leadership doesn’t blame the spooks for referendum defeat (Alex Salmond prefers the BBC.) But a huge – and hugely-successful – part of their pitch at this election is that they are more progressive and anti-austerity than Labour. The evidence for this, however, is almost as scarce as an MI5 fingerprint in the referendum result.
The SNP has been the government of Scotland since 2007, with complete control over health, education and most other domestic policy, except welfare. It receives an annual block grant from Whitehall, guaranteed by the famous Barnett formula to be about 20 per cent higher per head than in England, and decides how it is divided up. It doesn’t have to follow the departmental spending choices made south of the border – and it hasn’t. In key areas, the government of Scotland has been significantly meaner than heartless, Tory-dominated England.
Between 2007/8, the SNP’s first year in power, and 2012/13, the latest available year, health spending in Scotland rose by 15.5 per cent, substantially slower than the rise in health spending in England (22.8 per cent) over the same period. Education spending in Scotland rose by 3.8 per cent, in real terms actually a cut and again far less generous than in England, where spending rose by 12.2 per cent to broadly keep pace with inflation.
In order to maintain its flagship policy of free university tuition while making real-terms cuts, the SNP has slashed the number of students in further education – sixth-form colleges, vocational training and the like – by more than a third. Maintenance grants for poorer university students have also been cut.
Since FE students are mainly working-class, and FE is the traditional bridge for the disadvantaged, the cuts will worsen Scotland’s already bad record of getting poorer students to university. Scotland’s “free” universities are significantly more socially exclusive than those of wicked, Right-wing England, where the policy is to charge the middle classes but target help on poorer students.
“Free tuition in Scotland is the perfect middle-class, feelgood policy,” says Lucy Hunter Blackburn, author of a recent report for the Centre for Research in Education Inclusion. “It’s superficially universal, but in fact it benefits the better-off most, and is funded by pushing the poorest students further and further into debt.”
Scotland’s actual spending priorities have been rather Thatcherite. Health and education rises have been held down to protect spending on enterprise and the new, SNP-controlled national police force, which has been flexing its biceps with massive increases in armed patrolling and stop-and-search. In its first year, Police Scotland stopped and searched 500,000 people, a number equivalent to a tenth of the country’s entire population.
As the former Labour MP Brian Wilson puts it, “ask supporters of the Scottish Government to name a single measure of the past eight years which redistributed wealth from the better to less well off and you can expect one of two responses. The first is silence followed by a rapid change of subject. The second is a list of measures which actually, whether they understand it or not, moved scarce resources in precisely the opposite direction such as tuition fees and the council tax freeze.”
Yet, for now at least, none of this appears to matter in the slightest. Educated and serious people believe that the referendum was stolen. Nationalist canvassers are blitzing council estates like payday loan companies, promising goodies up front but forgetting to mention the years of repayments. Doe-eyed members of the Scottish chattering classes embrace the SNP as progressive. True and relevant facts to the contrary are automatically dismissed as the lies of the Westminster elite.
As political scientists will tell you, voting anywhere is seldom a wholly rational choice, but is governed by people’s emotions and feelings. In Scotland this spring, national emotion appears to be sweeping all before it, and the SNP has been able to create an impregnable parallel reality. Enormous chunks of what was once a sceptical, questioning country are about to take part in mainland Britain’s first faith-based election.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/gen...760/The-SNPs-very-Scottish-conspiracy....html
Nicola Sturgeon: "It is with great pleasure that i introduce to you Scotland's Minister for Information, please give a warm welcome to...Alex Jones."
As its supporters insist that MI5 rigged the Scottish referendum, voting SNP now requires faith in the unbelievable, says Andrew Gilligan
By Andrew Gilligan
19 Apr 2015
With its tearooms and old-fashioned shops, the attractive town of Dunoon, in Argyll, seems to epitomise Scottish moderation and common sense. But alongside the window displays of country wear and fresh mackerel, there are some much weirder goods on offer.
In the front window of Dunoon’s Scottish National Party campaign base, alongside posters and canvassing information for the local SNP candidate, Brendan O’Hara, they’re displaying for sale a new pamphlet which describes in detail how MI5 and John McTernan, chief of staff to Jim Murphy, the Scottish Labour leader, “rigged” last year’s independence referendum by creating thousands of fake No ballot papers.
The authors, nationalist activists from Argyll, first suspected the existence of the “McTernan Plan”, as they call it, on the night of the count. Their “extensive canvass returns” had left them “confident of success” in the area, but when the postal vote came in they were “astounded” to discover it was 70-30 against independence. What’s more, the postal voter turnout in Argyll was 96.4 per cent. “We had never before heard of such a high return in any democratic election,” they said.
The activists’ suspicions hardened when they learned that Mr McTernan, then a Labour commentator, had appeared on TV four days before the referendum saying that “postal votes are running very strongly towards No.”
“I couldn’t work out how it was possible to interfere on any scale with the postal ballot,” Andy Anderson, one of the authors, told the Telegraph. “You need the ballot paper number, the signature and date of birth of the voter. Then it occurred to me. All that information went into a computer – and who’s at the other end of the computer in London? MI5.”
Later this week, the Dunoon SNP campaign hub (officially the “Forward shop” and shared with the wider Yes movement) will host a public meeting to promote the conspiracy theory.
As Mr Anderson’s pamphlet puts it: “MI5 can produce the required number of ballot papers, of the right paper with the right local authority stamp…[and] even the correct signature from the computer image. All they need to do then is get their own staff to deliver the papers to the correct post boxes in the correct areas of Scotland, and bingo, the job is done.
“The Prime Minister can be informed that the objective has been achieved and McTernan can be tipped off in time for him to appear on the BBC, four days before the ballot boxes are opened, and tell us which way the postal vote is going.”
Rather more likely, of course, is that the Yes campaign’s canvas returns were wrong. The overall No vote in Argyll and Bute was a convincing 58.5 per cent, on an 88.2 per cent turnout, with the vast majority of votes cast in person. Postal voters are often more conservative than in-person voters, since they are older and more rural. And postal vote turnouts are always higher than overall turnouts; those motivated enough to apply for a postal vote are also more motivated to use it.
Mr McTernan’s foreknowledge is easily explained, too: though the postal votes were not actually counted until referendum night, they were opened beforehand, with campaign representatives present and able to peek at where people put their crosses. The No margin of victory was almost 400,000 votes, so MI5 would have had to visit an awful lot of postboxes.
Dunoon is far from the only place in Nat-world where this stuff is taken seriously. Robin McAlpine, a leading figure in the independence movement, told a fringe meeting at last month’s SNP conference that MI5 had “tried to, at worst, subvert democracy up here” during the referendum – though did not allege that the result was rigged, unlike SNP delegates at the meeting.
During the campaign itself Jim Sillars, the former SNP deputy leader, said it would be “naïve” to imagine that MI5 was not “taking a role.” Official Electoral Commission research after the result found that 42 per cent of Yes voters believed at least some vote-rigging had taken place.
Yet this is merely the most extreme example of how being a Scottish nationalist often seems to involve believing things which aren’t true. The SNP leadership doesn’t blame the spooks for referendum defeat (Alex Salmond prefers the BBC.) But a huge – and hugely-successful – part of their pitch at this election is that they are more progressive and anti-austerity than Labour. The evidence for this, however, is almost as scarce as an MI5 fingerprint in the referendum result.
The SNP has been the government of Scotland since 2007, with complete control over health, education and most other domestic policy, except welfare. It receives an annual block grant from Whitehall, guaranteed by the famous Barnett formula to be about 20 per cent higher per head than in England, and decides how it is divided up. It doesn’t have to follow the departmental spending choices made south of the border – and it hasn’t. In key areas, the government of Scotland has been significantly meaner than heartless, Tory-dominated England.
Between 2007/8, the SNP’s first year in power, and 2012/13, the latest available year, health spending in Scotland rose by 15.5 per cent, substantially slower than the rise in health spending in England (22.8 per cent) over the same period. Education spending in Scotland rose by 3.8 per cent, in real terms actually a cut and again far less generous than in England, where spending rose by 12.2 per cent to broadly keep pace with inflation.
In order to maintain its flagship policy of free university tuition while making real-terms cuts, the SNP has slashed the number of students in further education – sixth-form colleges, vocational training and the like – by more than a third. Maintenance grants for poorer university students have also been cut.
Since FE students are mainly working-class, and FE is the traditional bridge for the disadvantaged, the cuts will worsen Scotland’s already bad record of getting poorer students to university. Scotland’s “free” universities are significantly more socially exclusive than those of wicked, Right-wing England, where the policy is to charge the middle classes but target help on poorer students.
“Free tuition in Scotland is the perfect middle-class, feelgood policy,” says Lucy Hunter Blackburn, author of a recent report for the Centre for Research in Education Inclusion. “It’s superficially universal, but in fact it benefits the better-off most, and is funded by pushing the poorest students further and further into debt.”
Scotland’s actual spending priorities have been rather Thatcherite. Health and education rises have been held down to protect spending on enterprise and the new, SNP-controlled national police force, which has been flexing its biceps with massive increases in armed patrolling and stop-and-search. In its first year, Police Scotland stopped and searched 500,000 people, a number equivalent to a tenth of the country’s entire population.
As the former Labour MP Brian Wilson puts it, “ask supporters of the Scottish Government to name a single measure of the past eight years which redistributed wealth from the better to less well off and you can expect one of two responses. The first is silence followed by a rapid change of subject. The second is a list of measures which actually, whether they understand it or not, moved scarce resources in precisely the opposite direction such as tuition fees and the council tax freeze.”
Yet, for now at least, none of this appears to matter in the slightest. Educated and serious people believe that the referendum was stolen. Nationalist canvassers are blitzing council estates like payday loan companies, promising goodies up front but forgetting to mention the years of repayments. Doe-eyed members of the Scottish chattering classes embrace the SNP as progressive. True and relevant facts to the contrary are automatically dismissed as the lies of the Westminster elite.
As political scientists will tell you, voting anywhere is seldom a wholly rational choice, but is governed by people’s emotions and feelings. In Scotland this spring, national emotion appears to be sweeping all before it, and the SNP has been able to create an impregnable parallel reality. Enormous chunks of what was once a sceptical, questioning country are about to take part in mainland Britain’s first faith-based election.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/gen...760/The-SNPs-very-Scottish-conspiracy....html
Nicola Sturgeon: "It is with great pleasure that i introduce to you Scotland's Minister for Information, please give a warm welcome to...Alex Jones."
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They can't seem to accept that they lost.
In fairness they should prop up the labour party then have a referendum over the whole of the uk
Something like
Do you want to boot the jocks out
I'm sure they would get independence then
I doubt the SNP can believe their luck having Cameron as their chief recruiting agent. He can't let a day go by without pointing out to the Scots how powerful a vote for the SNP could be, from a Scottish point of view. I realise his target audience is actually the English, but the result is complete cock-up.
It's crazy to think they could end up the third largest party in Westminster, according to the news earlier. Particularly when you think of the size of the Scottish population relative to England's.
With about 4% of the national vote as well. It's not going to go down well.
Do the SNP really want a one. It was just that the pro independence voters never seemed pro SNP. It was mentioned a number of times that if Scotland had got independence the next step would of been to get rid of the SNP(No one actually seemed liked Salmond let alone thought he was good politician. More that they liked what he was offering).
I still think a referendum will in be in their minds but I'll be surprised if we get anywhere close to have another one in the next 10 years.
To be fair, not everyone is like that. I voted Yes and will vote SNP, but can accept that we lost the referendum, and that there shouldn't be another one for a considerable period of time. Every party has its share of idiots.
I guess if that doesn't put renewed focus on FPTT nothing will.
Given the Tories campaign against AV, it would be great for FPTP to bite them in the arse
Tory press and the party itself going heavy on the "SNP ransom" idea today, will probably be their main campaign argument until polling day now that the Ed smears haven't hit home with the public.
Another way of looking at it is that the SNP will end up with probably just under 10% of the seats in westminster and represent just under 10% of the UK population in their constituencys?
That said UKIP are likely to get 10% of the votes and much less less than 1% of the seats so you could argue that they will be the worst done to under a FPTP system but as I cant stand the racist loons perhaps thats one of the benefits of FPTP
Conservatives will probably end up with just over 40% of the seats as will Labour both with well under 40% of the votes.
A proper PR system seems by far the most equitable way to run multi party politics in a modern democracy but I cant see either of the "big two" parties voting for it so its unlikely to happen (plus the AV vote suggests that it may well not get passed anyway)
I had a long chat with a nameless politician over the weekend about PR, and tbh I have to say there are a lot of cons to the PR system that hadn't really occured to me before. While Im not sure FPTP is neccesarily better, I dont think its the no brainer it seems at first glance.
did said nameless politician represent one of the big two parties - not asking you to name them I'm just curious if any of the smaller parties have reservations on such a system as well?
They used to, they're in another related line of work these days. But still, tribal loyalties are no doubt a part of it.
Such as?
Yup perfectly true, but at the same time if a party got less than 50% of the vote nationwide yet was so efficient with it that they won 90% of the seats, it wouldn't seem very democratic. Yeah I'd actually say Labour are probably more against PR than ever now given that the Lib Dems have collapsed and UKIP have risen. Entertainingly, if the Tories are so existentially concerned about the SNP then maybe they should back a move to PR!
If you have the time, I'd be interested to hear the reasons.
Sadly tribal politics plays far to big a part in our democracy
Interestingly when you look at http://www.electionforecast.co.uk/
It becomes apparent how difficult it could be to form a government under PR
now the likelihood is under PR there would be a move from major parties (who are perceived as having a better chance of winning under fptp) but that would only exasperate the problem
Cons 34.2%
Labour 32.8%
Libs 12.6%
UKIP 10.5%
Greens 3.9%
SNP 3.5%
Plaid Cymru 0.6%
Others 1.9%
The only viable option for the conservatives would be to try and stick together something with UKIP and the Libs (57.3%) - but getting UKIP and the Libs working together will probably not be practical
For Labour lets assume UKIP wont work with them without the refferendum so they would need Labour, Libs, Greens, SNP to form a narrow majority at 52.8% (but that would probably be prettty difficult to hold together over New Nuclear weapons / powerstations, and cuts (that the libs may want and the SNP / Greens oppose)
We may end up in a similar poistion with FPTP but I doubt we would actually need 4 parties working together to get a labour lead majority
The problem with PR is that it severs the direct link between the voter and the MPs, and gives a lot more power to political parties. The latter also happens in FPTP (in the sense that in a safe seat party leaders can put basically whoever they want in) but at least in theory if there was a particularly cynical appointment or bad candidate the electorate could just not vote for them. In a PR system once you've voted for the party, who you actually get to represent you is completely out of your hands.
Basically the way I'd do it would be to have half of the MPs elected by FPTP, so you're voting for a person to represent you as a member of your area, and half by PR, so you're also voting for a set of policies. It's got its own problems, but I think it's better than either system in isolation. Failing that, something similar to what they do in the German Bundestag would be nice.
Basically the way I'd do it would be to have half of the MPs elected by FPTP, so you're voting for a person to represent you as a member of your area, and half by PR, so you're also voting for a set of policies. It's got its own problems, but I think it's better than either system in isolation. Failing that, something similar to what they do in the German Bundestag would be nice.
I don't follow - every other seat is PR/ FPTP, or a combination of both?
Note that I know nothing about electoral systems outside of Britain, the US... and a little bit of Borgen.
Edit - Oh, is it that everyone elects their local MP through FPTP, but that 50% of the MPs in government then get allocated through PR? Do those MPs then not have any constituencies?
Well the biggest issue is one that hadn’t really occurred to me. If we assume that we keep a similar MP<->constituency format but with MPs being selected based on a national vote, he reckoned that under a PR system about 150 seats that were Labour or Tory at the moment would go to other parties.
The problem is that means there’s about 150 seats where people get an MP that the majority of people in that area didn’t vote for. That’s nearly a quarter, so its not a fringe issue. While there’d be some efforts to link up MPs with appropriate areas, inevitably there would be some bad fits, particularly in England. Tory constituencies with Lib Dem MPs would be the most obvious jar, there'd be a good number of those.
The other related issue is that you harm the connection between local politicians and local areas. In many cases an MP is someone that tends to be from the area they represent. I suppose that’s diminishing these days, but that’s a bad thing anyway not a good thing. Good MPs tend to have a close connection with their constituency & are able to represent them.
Instead you end up with a situation where, if you want to be an MP, you have to do what’s popular in your party. Most parties in PR systems have a list of members, and once you’re high enough on the list you always get assigned a seat where available, as in Italy apparently. Which means that being a succesful MP is about playing to the party not working for the people who vote for you. It also becomes very difficut for an influential local person to work their way into national politics, the system would instead favour people who make the right connections down in Westminster. The obvious worst case scenario is a Parliament filled with career politicans. I hate career politicians (apologies, reader, if you are one)
I know this is a thread about national politics rather than local, so we talk about national issues, but certainly I think good MPs are both heavily involved in local politics and represent regional viewpoints in parliament. Just because two people in Manchester and London both vote Labour doesn't mean they agree on all the same issues & a local viewpoint does need to be represented. So I wouldn't fancy a system where the system for regional voices in Parliament was lost.
Now I guess you could change the entire system and not simply follow the old constituency boundaries but tbh I'd have to see such a proposal before I could say whether it sounds better than what we have at the mo.
There's a couple of other bits we talked about. One was about extremist parties getting a foothold, which instinctively sounds abhorrent. (With 650 MPs you only need 0.15% of the national vote to get an MP presumably). The other was something I've wondered about in the past which is a long period of ineffective Government as parties got used to rainbow coalitions. That could get messy, though I suppose it'd sort itself out in the end.
What's also true is that perfect is the enemy of good. Perhaps there are simply less cons than FPTP, even if there are still a few.
Yeah that's basically mixed-member proportional or the additional member system. There'd have to be a fair old discussion on the optimum system should there be the will to change it, but I'd say most are better than what we have now.
Yeah this. The biggest challenge I think would be sorting out the roles of the different 'kinds' of MP. In an ideal situation, the FPTP election would be far more geared towards non-partisan candidates who really want to look after their constituency first and foremost, as career politicians would be unlikely to take the more difficult 'get directly elected by local people in a constituency' route over the easier 'get onto a party list' route.
Thanks for that. I'd say there are genuine concerns at the loss of a constituency link, but as mentioned earlier there are ways to overcome that. Seats are usually also voted for on a regional basis rather than nationwide, so there are ways for the regional parties to have a strong say in candidate selection rather than have choices dictated to them by the central party, certainly not any more than is the case presently at any rate. Plus you can have open-list systems whereby you rank candidates for the same party when you vote, not just parties themselves.
On the extremism front, obviously something that has to be worried about given past history but for one thing you can have thresholds that have to be passed in order to gain representation (something like 2% is usually put forward), but it's also worth mentioning that an extremist party could gain an absolute majority in the House of Commons under FPTP with less than 40% of the popular vote. Whilst very unlikely, that's far more concerning to me than them attaining handfuls on seats in parliament where they can be argued against by all sides and never allowed near law-making positions.
This is already the case with FPTP though. Outside of safe seats, there are tons of constituencies where no party gets over 50% of the vote. Typically a party can win a seat with 40% of the vote, meaning 60% of people did not want that party to win
I would think from the context the meaning was clear. That the person selected was not from the party who got the most votes.
Send Labour to Coventry...
An excruciating video has emerged of a Labour candidate and councillor in a hostile exchange with members of the public after knocking on their doorstep in Coventry.
Two men are seen answering the door to Councillor John McNicholas, who appears affronted at being filmed.
One of the men asks him to convince them to vote Labour but Cllr McNicholas appears dismissive and beckons Labour’s candidate Colleen Fletcher to talk to the men.
She says: “We are just doing some canvassing to see how much support there is.”
As the men ask Ms Fletcher about Labour’s policies on defence, Cllr McNicholas interjects: “They’re having a laugh, come on.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/pol...n-votes-Labour-party-doorstep-goes-wrong.html
An excruciating video has emerged of a Labour candidate and councillor in a hostile exchange with members of the public after knocking on their doorstep in Coventry.
Two men are seen answering the door to Councillor John McNicholas, who appears affronted at being filmed.
One of the men asks him to convince them to vote Labour but Cllr McNicholas appears dismissive and beckons Labour’s candidate Colleen Fletcher to talk to the men.
She says: “We are just doing some canvassing to see how much support there is.”
As the men ask Ms Fletcher about Labour’s policies on defence, Cllr McNicholas interjects: “They’re having a laugh, come on.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/pol...n-votes-Labour-party-doorstep-goes-wrong.html
Scotland sort of has this in our parliament with AMS. You have the constituency vote, but the regional list vote is what makes it PR. Problem is that you're picking from list candidates for the party and not individual ones, but still, it's better than FPTP.
The main issue would be a hung parliament. It would force parties into having to do deals which may go against their policies, which for example is what the Lib Dems did with the tuition fees. There would be uncertainty all over because when people vote a certain party they know what to expect while with a PR system you could vote for Tories and their policies and instead get UKIP calling the shots.
Also there's a fundamental flaw in that system as MP's would have to tow the party line and generally be in the leaders pocket. If they step out, off they go with little chance of ever getting back as an independent.
There would also have to be a reorganisation of the representative areas where within a region there would be a number of MP's on the list for each party in order for any constituency link to be preserved.
I have followed both systems closely FPTP (UK) and PR (Albania) and I can wholeheartedly say the FPTP is infinitely better not only for the country but for each and every voter.
Each and every voter? I'm about to vote in a constituency where there my vote will have absolutely no impact on the result, the Tory will win by 30% or more. Always has, always will. And this isn't just my constituency, the majority of seats in the country are classed as safe. That's without mentioning its inherent tendency to block smaller parties achieving representation and thus increasing voter choice. So whilst I appreciate you may prefer it to the system in Albania, to say that it's infinitely better for all in the UK is wrong. PR's in use for many (most, in fact) democracies around the world and very few want to change back (Italy did, I believe, but that was largely to do with an incredibly corrupt political class). See if any of the Scandinavians on the board want to change to our system. Or the Scottish ones when voting for Holyrood elections.
Is that you in the video Nick?
Exactly that. Each and every voter in it is represented by a local MP regardless of what party they belong to. Their voice is heard, respected and implemented by someone local to the constituency.
If it was a PR system then the MP would be assigned by the party, controlled by the party, and would serve the party rather than the constituents. It would pave the way for mindless MP's and mindless voters for that matter who will not support the local MP but a party in general. While you may think that your vote doesn't count because it will go against the winner, if you were to contact whoever becomes MP about an issue facing the local community or you personally they would be more than inclined to help you while under PR your vote wouldn't count either way if they are high enough on the list so they wouldn't really bother. HS2 is a good example of this. A lot of the Home Counties MP's rebelled against it as their constituencies would be highly affected without receiving any real benefits. In a PR system they would not have cared and would have been forced into it by their party by dangling their job in front of them.
There would be other problems for example in parties with extremist views getting their people into Westminster by getting a national share of the vote.
I appreciate that a PR system in the UK or any other western country would be streets ahead of that in Albania but the fundemental problems that lie within it are still the same.
Would PR allow you to vote against a particular individual? I once lived in a constituency where the Labour candidate was somewhere to left of Trotsky, so I voted Liberal. I then moved to where the Labour candidate was very good, so I voted for them there. Similarly I can imagine there are people about who would prefer a Conservative government, but wouldn't want to vote for some of their nastier candidates either.
I might be happier with single transferable vote.
I might be happier with single transferable vote.
Wow! 44 votes for the Tories! Do we have 44 wealthy people on Redcafe then?
Not necessarily. Systems like AMS in Scotland still have a constituency vote, and people are represented by a local MSP, whilst also having regional ones.