Back during my now long-vanished and pleasingly non-woke schooldays, a kindly Geography supply teacher once told my class how to infallibly remember the difference between stalagmites – which reach upwards from a cave floor – and stalactites – which reach downwards from a cave roof.
“Imagine the cave is a woman, lads,” he said, very possibly in the voice of the late Bernard Manning. “If the tights come down, you might get up!” Say that in front of an Ofsted inspector these days, and you would be immediately struck off by the Teaching Regulation Agency. To be fair, though, none of us ever did actually forget the difference between stalagmites and stalactites again after that.
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‘The only solution is for the two parties to jointly campaign for changing the voting system. If they don’t, both face electoral oblivion.’ Which is precisely why the Government will not sanction change.
Farage stepped aside in the previous GE, and the Conservative Party betrayed their voters, and their own.
That’s the problem: too many Remainers, Managed Decliners, and Arts and Humanities graduates, especially with PPE, History and Politics degrees. Few have any idea of Industry, or Reality.
The main counter argument is that even though most people didn’t vote Labour, most of them voted for left leaning parties, even if we charitably don’t include the Conservative party in that group.
More broadly, regardless of the voting system, the make up of parliament will be representative of the political preferences of the body politic.
However, PR has the following going for it:
The deal making of political factions is done more openly, rather than within parties.
Minority parties like Reform can’t be ignored forever. In the UK, it is a very plausible strategy for the Conservatives to keep freezing Reform out until such time their support dies away. You can’t do that in the PR system for very long.
A coalition government may be less likely to push through crazy niche policies, where those don’t require a Parliamentary vote, but do require consensus within the coalition.
PR would need an approach for maintaining the link with constituency MPs though.
It might be interesting to see what is actually happening in Wales. The reorganisation using a PR method seems to have resulted in larger constituencies. Don’t know what the geographical effect of that will be.
What could work is to divide the existing number of constituencies by ten, but then for each constituency to send ten members, selected via PR in the constituency, to Parliament. The MP in the constituency with the highest vote gets to represent it formally, i.e. do MP’s surgeries etc.
Minority parties like Reform can’t be ignored forever. In the UK, it is a very plausible strategy for the Conservatives to keep freezing Reform out until such time their support dies away. You can’t do that in the PR system for very long.
With a PR system – as recently demonstrated by German state elections in Thuringia and Saxony – even freezing out a majority party is easily possible provided all the minority parties agree about that. Not to mention that most minority parties will never reach the quorum necessary for votes for them to be officially counted at all.
A coalition government is usally just an excuse for all parties silently dropping whatever was in their manifestos after an election because “our coalition partners won’t accept that” and thus, effectively betraying the peope who voted for them who won’t get the policies they were promised before the election, while the partycrats get all the lucrative posts they were really after and “present government policy” basically continues unchanged.
In some countries parties must indicate before the election who thaey might join in a coalition. Besides, the proper answer to your correct criticism of the Cameron-Clegg administration is we need more honest politicians and greater accountability.
The Tory party members and MPs quietly allowed Cameron to adopt LibDem policies (probably because he always preferred them to his own party’s) so they must carry responsibility too.
Net Zero is the direct result of proportional representation and the eternal coalition governments that brings, in Germany where the Greens held the balance and so were able to get their idiot policies into the mainstream in return for supporting which ever major Party would give them the most.
We don’t want small Parties representing small portions of the populace represented with their small ideas.
For Reform to be successful it must grow by attracting people with the policies we want.
‘Everybody gets what no one wanted’ sums it up on many of these things
Diversity is our strength.
Perhaps they could form a Conservative Reform Alliance Party, in effect – although the name might not work too well.
“Ironically, the reason the 2024 election result was so distorted was that Reform ‘stole’ large numbers of votes from the Conservatives, thereby splitting the right-wing vote in many constituencies and allowing Labour to come first.”
Nope. The reason the 2024 election result was so distorted was that a large number of deluded right of centre voters still voted for the conservatives, thereby splitting the right-wing vote in many constituencies and allowing Labour to come first.
No delusion. This right-of-centre voter voted Conservative because local polls showed strong support for the Conservatives, not Reform. Adding to this support was potentially more effective in keeping out the Left than voting Reform was. Reform is in any case incapable of forming a government.
The present disproportional representation system establishes in-yer-face injustice at the heart of our politics. Cynicism is the lesson it teaches.
“Reform is in any case incapable of forming a government.”
Labour too, as they have made clear in just 100 days…
Voting for the Tories as the least-bad plausible alternative has worked out so well over the last 14 years. Reform were credible, just needed people to vote for them, which they did not, and here we are.
Yes. In an election, each person should just vote for whom they want to win. This “tactical voting’ is logically false, and just another piece of fukwittery that keeps the uniparty in power. However, since the government are at war with the people, anything which prevents them from doing anything they want to do is of great benefit to the populace. So PR would be better, but if Clegg hadn’t committed the most blatant and cowardly political betrayal in recent history, we’d already have it. How anybody votes for the lib dems after that confirm my suspicion that the majority of people are stupid.
“In an election, each person should just vote for whom they want to win.”
Indeed. If there is no-one you want to win, spoil your ballot paper (ideally) or don’t vote. Obviously no party will represent your views 100% so it’s up to each person to decide how far they want to compromise – but voting Tory after 14 years of betrayal, with Reform as a credible alternative, seems like madness.
It is madness. Similar I guess to the mathematically challenged people who do the lottery. They appear to think their vote can swing the politics of the whole country, rather than the fortunes of a local candidate.
Dead on
It should be mentioned that voting should be compulsory, or rather, at least turning up at the polling station and writing “they all deserve to be hanged” (or whatever) on the ballot.
I have to admit that where voting IS compulsory, the results are not necessarily encouraging. (Australia).
The Swiss system appears to be reasonably effective. But Switzerland is very much smaller and doesn’t suffer from many of the deliberately self-inflicted wounds that our scum politicians have eagerly adopted.
I forgot to add that “None of the above” votes should ALWAYS be counted and declared as such.
I agree- as a separate category from spoiled ballot papers. Like the US presidential elections I think they count what they call “write ins”
I’m a natural conservative (with a small c) and will NEVER vote for the Tory’s again after what they’ve done to our country, they need to be gone
Me too
me neither.
It’s a betrayal.
It’s amazing what polling, and a bit of propaganda, can do. This mighty political change will take some time, and pain, but Cameron’s and the Last ‘Conservative Party’ government’s betrayal could yet be the end of prosperous Britain.
The Fincancial Times needs to grow a clue or two. The UK is divided into constituencies and (some subset of) the people living in a constituency elect an MP for it with simple majority vote, ie, the candidate with the most votes becomes MP. There’s nothing “distorted” in that unless it’s assumed that only PR is the proper voting system and that outcomes which differ from the one a PR-based voting system had had are thus somehow defective.
Parties generally fare better when they’re the unavoidable and unresponsible(!)¹ middlemen between an otherwise disenfranchised electorate and government. PR is also much better for (rich) “politics influencers” because they’ll only have to buy party leaders and not individual MPs. But so-called democracy doesn’t exist for the benefit of party leaders and the people who have them in their pockets.
¹ In a typical PR system, party leaders select candidates voters may vote for and the MPs which get elected in this way are usually expressively absolved from having to care for what voters want. In contrast to this, they have every reason to remain in good standing with their party leadership because otherwise, their political careers will be swiftly over as they will either get a worse place on the next party list or none at all.
In the days when the two biggest parties of the time could regulary get 85% or more of the votes case from 75% or more of the electorate a FPTP system was fairly representative. Now they get under 60% of a 65% turnout it is not acceptable.
Labour has a huge majority with which to impose its evil policies based on 20% of the electorate. That is distorted.
That’s not distorted because Labour candidates won the vote in the overwhelming number of constituencies and the “nation-wide vote share” is a fictional statistic of no consequence for the political system in the UK.
Alternative Vote – also known as ‘Anyone But Them’.
There is only one right-leaning mainstream party – Reform. The “Conservatives” are just pretending. 86% voted for leftist parties – some of them might still be under the delusion that the “Conservatives” are actually conservative, but there’s not much hope for them.
IMO the top priority for the right is to persuade the public that socialism doesn’t work. I can’t see much hope of that happening though. Most people went along with “covid”.
Vote for us because what the other guys want to do won’t work! is a stupid political argument to make. Humans usually don’t have any difficulties with coming up with lots of different ideas which are all unworkable in practice.
The so-called right would need to come up with alternate ideas they believe will work and convince the public of this. Privatize harder (not much left for that, anyway), promise to spend less money on useful stuff while ending up spending gigatons of it on stuff that’s guaranteed to be useless (“furlough”) and Back to the stone age to save the planet! at a slightly reduced speed won’t do.
“Vote for us because what the other guys want to do won’t work! is a stupid political argument to make.”
Depends on what you think government and the state is for. I want it to provide the bare minimum that it makes sense for some centralized body to provide with money collected with menaces – non-excludable goods and services. I don’t really want too many “ideas that work”. That’s where the trouble starts.
It’s a stupid political argument because A won’t work doesn’t mean B will,
ie, it’s perfectly possible and even pretty likely that nothing any party proposes before an election will work out in practice as – as I already wrote – humans are really good at coming up with lots of things which don’t make any sense.
And politicians even better than that…
It would be a good start if the barstewards had some skin in the game.
Promoting multi- billion vanity projects (HS2? Net Zero?) without a decent rationale and certainly without a credible cost / benefit analysis MUST be eliminated.
Quite. The current situation is seeing people realising slowly that the election result did not match what they really wanted, with immigration being pushed up to the top concern for a lot of voters.
How this will play out over this parliament is unknown, but so far by-election results have been quite bad for the government, next May will provide an interesting test of public sentiment.
Labour will be in for at least 5 years, maybe 10 or 15. Then the Tories will get back in, and not much will change, ad infinitum.
The real issue is that politics is now pantomime. Kneel is no more running the country than I am. Fishy was playing at the job and Boris admitted “even I don’t make the decisions.”
People need to wake up. Seriously evil people are running the world and our PM’s are well aware that if they don’t toe the line they risk being ‘Magafulied.’ So clinging to expectations of a political solution are utterly naive. Always remember…
Our salvation will not arrive via the ballot box.
Indeed. Any UK political leader who steps out of line will face intense pressure to say the least – and various mechanisms will kick in that may in the short term do damage to our country – reaction of the “markets”, international condemnation, sanctions. Countries are only autonomous in so far as they are able to withstand the consequences that their actions bring upon them. Much as I see the appeal and benefits of free trade, I would like to see the UK move towards a more self-sufficient position, particularly with regards to food, energy and essential manufacturing. Of course the current government is moving us in the opposite direction, carrying on where the Fake Conservatives left off.
The Fake Conservatives did nothing but start the process of demolition and gladly handed over to Kneel and his treasonous parasites to allow them to hurry the job along. The Davos Deviants are determined to take this country back to the Dark Ages and only a Churchillian figure has any chance of fighting back. Sadly there is nobody of that quality on the British political scene.
“Sadly there is nobody of that quality on the British political scene.” Probably not, and even if there were, I am not sure they would have the support, sadly.
The process of demolition has been in train since the idiot Major
I cannot make up my mind which of the following statements in this article is the more objectionable:
On point 1 – no party owns the voters
Point 2 – I seriously doubt if the word “right” has any meaning although “left” still does. I would like to know which is the second “right-leaning” party in Britain after Reform.
Point 3 – there is another solution which is competition. In that I expect Reform to win and the Tories to wither as they have no demos and no purpose save to get the leaders into cosy positions.
Point 4 – as much as I want to see a change in the voting system to make it reflect the voters’ choices, I also want a change in the HoL which is dominated by the old parties. The “right” can achieve power. Commentators thought when Mrs Thatrcher was in power that Labour was finished (but the Tory left gave them a leg up), they though NuLab could not be overturned and they thought we would be in the EU forver.
At 2019 the commentators thought Labour was so badly placed they could never beat the Tories and they have dismissed Nigel Farage and his supporters so many times yet here he is in a key position in UK politics.
Agree
Proportional representation also has its problems. In Germany, the old “conservative” parties (CDU/CSU) refuse to work together with the new, supposedly extremist party (AfD). They prefer to form coalitions with the Social Democrats or Greens.
It would be a very interesting task to develop a completely new system in UK, hopefully more representative of the population’s wishes.
CDU/ CSU is really just one party¹ and they’re not only “forming coalitions with Social Democrats and Greens” but they will also have to cooperate with the two factions of successors of the former GDR state party (Linke and BSW) when exclusion of the AfD from everything is to be maintained. This used to be a red line in the past and I can still remember Andrea Nahles not becoming first minister of Hesse because her own party (SPD) revolted when it became known that she was willing to accept PDS support (predecessor of Linke) but these are principles of yesterday which just aren’t convenient anymore.
¹ Specifically, it’s an organizational union of a party which exists only in Bavaria (CSU) with a party which exists anywhere else in Germany (CDU).
“Labour was the only party that benefited from Britain’s first-past-the-post system”
Not really – other parties like the Tories and Lib Dems got a lot more seats per vote than Reform.
Anyway, Labour benefited THIS TIME. 2019 election the Tories benefited. Doesn’t the party that ends up forming the government always get less than 50% of the votes but more than 50% of the seats?
“At one extreme, Labour got 34% of the vote”
20% if voters shows it was far worse than that suggests.
Change the system? Have you actually looked, Noah Carl, at what is happening on the Continent with their eternal coalitions, proportional representation jiggery-pokery, where blocking alliances are formed to confound what people vote for.
Parties winning the biggest slice of the vote, but not able to govern because the other children won’t play nicely with them, or their Constitutional Courts rule them ‘threat to democracy’?
“Politics in Britain, as in every Western country, is increasingly multidimensional…”
No it isn’t! It is unidimensional – this is what most people are complaining about and that’s the problem. Have you been in a coma?
Western politics is technocratic, collectivist, elevation of the State over the individual, command economy, protectionist and quite determined to do away with freedom of speech. In other words rooted in the two evil, ugly sisters Socialism and Fascism.
The change that is needed is to constituency boundaries and reducing the number of MPs, to do away with safe seats and the immigrant hoards and their sectarianism.
100%
And for voters to wake up
For libertarian leaning people to support FPTP on the basis that it allows strong government is very odd.
I suppose I am “libertarian leaning”. I support extremely limited government, and only want a “strong government” for the time it takes to repeal a lot of laws and regulations and quangos we don’t need, implement a constitution that limits state power and enshrines basic rights. Sort of go back to the vision of the framers of the US system of government. This will not happen because these ideas have gone out of fashion, and changing the voting system won’t change that.
Seems like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic to me.
Whoever the public votes in to nominally “run the country”, in reality the establishment with its bureaucrats, NGOs and “institutions” make policy. The corporate media and politicians just sell it to us. The public decide nothing.
A few examples to illustrate:
Three different instances of why it’s the same no matter what.
Take any major policy and ask yourself whether it would be any different depending on the party in power. You’ll almost 100% of the time conclude “no”.
No chance. Of all the things you might want to happen this is never going to happen. You are stuck with Blair clones forever regardless of party. Forever might not be that long though given the precipitous decline of your country. I don’t mean it as an insult but it really does look like a dirty craphole now.
Agree, but it won’t be forever. Just until the RoP makes its move.
Democracy requires voters to compromise as none of us agree with each perfectly. PR dupes voters into thinking they can have ideal policies but then makes politicians compromise after the election. This tends to keep the same cohort in power. It is an interesting exercise look at voter share of governing parties where PR is used.
FPTP is good at kicking out unpopular governments and forcing voters to compromise. At GE 2024 public were keen to kick out the Tories so they voted anyone but Tories. At the next election let us imagine Labour being unpopular then voters will be have to compromise if they want to get to rid of Labour.
If we want a system that keeps the good bits of FPTP such as voters compromising, politicians appealing to widest portion of the electorate and clear constituency relationship but increase the fairness then we should consider Instant Runoff system.
It is far too soon to be second-guessing what Reform and the Not-a-Conservative-Party will do at the next election.
There won’t be a merger; but it is possible that a limited non-aggression pact could be reached.
It will depend on who becomes CON Leader and the performance of both parties in the next few years.
The first-past-the-post system was introduced when we were a two-party state. It is only suitable for a two-party state. We now have a multi-party state and need a system which gives weight to every vote. Currently, most votes are completely wasted. If you want your vote to count, you have to vote for one of the two people who have a chance of winning in your Constituency.
This is not true. There was never anything other than first past the post. One issue is being tied to geographically based constituencies. At fuzzy democracy I propose thematically based constituencies, such that you vote separately for different areas of political cocern.
For nearly ten years I have presented at fuzzydemocracy followed by dot eu a solution to these problems, a solution which was not conceivable last century. There is no longer any need for political parties, which have also degenerated from what they were at their beginnings. No time now to elaborate. Will Jones of Daily Sceptic refused to publish my alternative, which is short and precise, having entirely (willfully?) misconstrued it.
I have just posted (parked) the text Will Jones rejected at http://www.klasseverantwortung.de/endtimes/2.html It has 800 words.
It is not at my main site for these matters because the essentials have been there for years and this text was a journalistic formulation for the situation in July 2024. Posting at the main site would involve hours of work and add nothing to what is already there.
Completely wrong and reveals a deep misunderstanding of what the desired result is from an election.
First past the post works in almost all of life’s other endeavours and it has served the UK well, most of the time.
In any race there is only one winner, the fact that 5 other competitors may deliver 99% of the winner’s performance doesn’t matter, there is only one winner who is first past the pst.
First past the post forces also ransacked to make compromises amongst themselves to offer the electorate a candidate and dynamic most likely to appeal to the largest number of voters, not necessarily the majority, the largest number.
That means that Reform and the Conservatives have to put aside their differences and look for common ground, not try to change the rules of the road.
The cumulative outcome from 650 individual races in the UK is designed to produce majorities that can effectively govern, for good or bad. Proportional representation systems all produce weak governments except when they open the door to fringe parties like the Nazis who came to power with 32.5% of the vote and then exploited the system to gain total control from a minority base.
There is an almost universal misunderstanding of what Electoral Democracy can accomplish, or strive to accomplish. It can only give a direction of travel, not a road map. It is a further check & balance, able to pull the emergency stop cord on the runaway train. It cannot achieve even this as long as political parties hold sway.
The problem is how to aggregate opinion, often uninformed, and held with varying strengths. This has been achieved, albeit imperfectly, in the sphere of demand for consumer goods. My concept of Fuzzy Democracy is called fuzzy because it too cannot reflect opinion perfectly (an impossibility), but it comes far closer than anything else. The answer here is A Fixed Tally to Replace First-Past-The-Post. See my previous comments of an hour or so ago.
“Given that neither the Tories nor Reform is going to step aside for the other …”
But Farage and his party did step aside at the previous General Election, don’t you remember?
And then, what did the Conservative Party do: they continued implementing Socialist policies, started by Blair. The NET Zero policies were initiated by the Miliband brothers, in 2008, continued throughout the Conservative governments, and now Ed Miliband is back destroying British industries. These policies are Socialism in Action, ignoring the Laws of Physics, with increasing arbitrary, government control, waste and total incompetence. Blair’s constitutional changes are still wrecking the country, as described by David Starkey, reducing the power of the Crown in Parliament by evolving power to unaccountable unelected committees:
https://youtu.be/YErFxeH6jJA
Once bitten, twice shy!
And, in Europe we see that having the largest number of votes, doesn’t mean the leader becomes PM.
I agree. The Conservatives were captured by the treasonous globalist elite mob. They were not even hiding this fact, removing an elected Prime Minister and inserting WEF senior members. All their treasonous policies were following the globalist agenda to destroy small business and the white middle class. Loyal British people had an obligation to remove this traitorous party. The fact that the Labour Party has also been captured by the globalist WEF/UN mob just shows how they operate and have penetrated the British political system.
They have me stumped at ‘two right leaning parties’. Apart from Reform I can only think of the remains of UKIP.
The Conservatives were captured by the treasonous globalist elite mob. They were not even hiding this fact, removing an elected Prime Minister and inserting WEF senior members. All their treasonous policies were following the globalist agenda to destroy small business and the white middle class. Loyal British people had an obligation to remove this traitorous party.
The real point about the 2024 General Election is that, for at least two years before the vote, opinion polls predicted Labour getting a vote share of 45% or more This led politicians and voters to behave in odd ways. If the polls had predicted the actual Labour vote share more accurately, non-Labour voters would have behaved differently.