⨳Replace today’s archaic, anti-democratic, deeply damaging First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) electoral system with an optimal, fairer system of Proportional Representation (PR) at all future UK General Elections.
Advocates of STV insist on the right to call it PR, claiming, that it is they who invented. That is just stupid. If they demand PR the parties will give them party-PR. I do not want party-PR. Indeed, I strongly oppose the idea of parties even being mentioned in the definition of the electoral system. The aim has to be a preferential voting system.
The best option currently on offer, despite its flaws, is STV. But I will strongly oppose doctrinaire STV, which insists that all constituencies must be multi-member of equivalent size (e.g. 5). Where a town is artificially divided into 3 for FPTP purposes, then 3 is the right size for STV. And there are areas where anything more than 1 is unmanageable.
My own proposal would be to (a) go for instantaneous AV, (b) progressively and as fast as possible amalgamate into appropriate STV constituencies, and (c) initiate serious study of possible improvements to the STV/AV evaluation algorithm.
Notes:
- ⨳At the last UK General Election in Dec 19, it required, on average, only 25,900 votes to elect one SNP MP, 38,300 votes for one Conservative MP, 50,800 votes for one Labour MP, 336,000 votes for one Lib Dem MP, and a massive 866,400 votes for one Green MP (Caroline Lucas).
- ⨳This means the composition of the House of Commons and government in power is both unfair and fundamentally unrepresentative of the true ‘will of the people’.
The “will of the people” should be cited with caution. (a) Too often the mantra is “majority rule OK?”, which is interpreted to mean “minority repression is OK”. (b) If we always acted in accordance with the will of the people then we’d probably still have hanging and cock fighting, and no votes for women.
- ⨳It also causes huge, hidden damage to our political system, including: (a) increasingly frequent ‘Cabinet reshuffles’ and ever shorter Ministerial appointments; and (b) huge swings in government from 18 years of monopoly Conservative rule, through 13 years of monopoly New Labour rule, to nearly 14 years of mostly monopoly Conservative rule, all three periods ending in disgrace and tempered only by 5 years of coalition government with the Lib Dems from 2010 to 2015.
- ⨳Arguably, electoral reform is the single most important improvement among this whole list of suggestions.
- ⨳It is worth noting that, in 1909, Sir Winston Churchill said of FPTP voting, “The present system has clearly broken down. The results produced are not fair to any party, nor to any section of the community. In many cases they do not secure majority representation, nor do they secure an intelligent representation of minorities. All they secure is fluke representation, freak representation, capricious representation.”
- ⨳Another argument in favour of PR was expressed recently by Gavin Esler as follows: “The argument made against Proportional Representation, or one of the arguments made against it, is you’d end up with coalition governments. We have coalitions within our governments because they [MPs] don’t actually like each other very much – they don’t agree with each other. So, at least if we had some kind of PR system, we might actually have coalitions between people who, in open terms, reach agreement with each other, rather than stab each other in the back.”
- ⨳It should also be remembered that the Party Leaders of today’s two major political parties, Conservative and Labour, benefit massively from the insidious, almost automatic way in which FPTP effectively enforces ‘party discipline’. Think about this for a moment: if you’re an ambitious MP and you fall-out with your Party Leader, where are you going to go? To a smaller party with little or no chance of electoral success under FPTP? Answer: ‘no’; you stay where you are, however disgruntled you may be. [⨳This phenomenon is explored in more detail in a conversation between John Harris and Neal Lawson (Founder of the cross-party campaigning group, Compass) in a thoughtful Youtube programme at https://bit.ly/3P3WfcA (between c.21:46 and c.29:01).]