The Labour Party is divided over the question of electoral reform. Apparently the top dogs in the party are content with ‘first past the post’, whereas the activists and members are keen on ‘proportional representation’. This is natural enough. Those at the top are concerned with power; those at the bottom are concerned with not being ignored.
Anyone who has any respect for good order – as opposed to what Professor Robert Ford of Manchester University calls “the injustices of our current electoral system” – should defend the first past the post system. I think it will survive, if only because it has a reassuringly English name.
To read the rest of this article, you need to donate at least £5/month or £50/year to the Daily Sceptic, then create an account on this website. The easiest way to create an account after you’ve made a donation is to click on the ‘Log In’ button on the main menu bar, click ‘Register’ underneath the sign-in box, then create an account, making sure you enter the same email address as the one you used when making a donation. Once you’re logged in, you can then read all our paywalled content, including this article. Being a donor will also entitle you to comment below the line, discuss articles with our contributors and editors in a members-only Discord forum and access the premium content in the Sceptic, our weekly podcast. A one-off donation of at least £5 will also entitle you to the same benefits for one month. You can donate here.
There are more details about how to create an account, and a number of things you can try if you’re already a donor – and have an account – but cannot access the above perks on our Premium page.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
‘Once in a while, as in 2010, a third party is significant. But in general in the United Kingdom we concern ourselves with two parties.’
Except, that now, the two parties are not that diametrically opposed. Two cheeks of the same a se, some might say.
Sadly true. Of the mainstream parties* I would class all of them as big-state woke socialists apart from Reform. Sadly only 14% of those who voted chose Reform.
*Labour, Tories, Lib Dems, SNP, Greens, Plaid Cymru, SDLP, Sinn Fein. Maybe the DUP are not, but they are tiny at UK level.
Farties?
After the referendum only about 50 MPs wanted to leave, the rest wanted to remain or or take any deal that heavily favoured the EU.
During lockdowns only about 50 MPs consistently opposed lockdowns.
PR would have given us a GREENLIBLABCON coalition.
Different voting system, same politicians, same result.
MPs don’t criticise last night’s rioters, they criticise Farage for criticising last night rioters.
Exactly. Western democracy is an illusion, one that massages the ego of the masses by making them believe they have power. The proles have no power and very little influence in any western policy or direction of travel. Until everyone is able to see their sleight of hand we’re utterly screwed. And by the time they do (if ever) it’ll be all over.
In recent years we have seen both Conservative and Labour parties taken over by factions which the majority of people don’t want to vote for. If we had some version of PR we could vote for the faction we wanted and the Tory wets could all join the Lib Dems and the far Left could join the Communists / Greens.
That faction was called Reform – 4million voted for them but 6million voted Tory. Guess they are either asleep or thought the Tory record was good. Baffling.
Voting concentrates power in one place = tyranny, and is the antithesis of democracy the fundamental principle of which is spread power equally throughout the population, so each has as much as any other, preventing its concentration in one place, preventing tyranny. Tyranny of the majority is no better than any other tyranny.
Anarchy! – they scream, Mob rule!
Does anyone out there believe our system of Government is not a tyranny and mob rule?
That said. The problem with the discrepancies of our electoral system was identified years ago. Too many MPs; disparity of population numbers between constituencies; demographic homogeneity of many constituencies certain to produce same outcome each time (safe seats).
The agreed solution was to reduce number of MPs to 500, redraw constituency boundaries to even up numbers, and diversify (politically) the demographics.
This however – proposed by the Conservatives – was sunk without trace during the Conservative – Lib Dem coalition when little Cleggie realised it would mean in future the Lib Dems would be lucky to get a handful of seats rather than the disproportionate number under the existing arrangements.
What poor memories people have.
When I started reading I asumed the article would seek to justify why a party that just got about a third of the votes could take office and revoluntionise the country. It is forecast to change the constitution in ways to make it almost impossible to reverse and to establish a legal obstruction to undoing the re-entry into the EU which it also presumes to want.
Perhaps the author will address that issue.
In passing, I have not noticed instability in the German system since it came about on the instructions of the Allies after WWII. At least, I had not until the current German administration decided to ban a competitor which is doing too well for its liking.
One point which you have omitted is that a majority Government can immediately undo the work of the previous lot based on political ideology. Rwanda cancelled for instance and probably others to come too. With PR and the consensus involved, there is more chance that legislation will be retained in the long term. This could be significant where changes are made which are almost impossible to undo such as Devolution, comprehensive education, destroying oil well infrastructure, putting solar panels and windmills on farmland, Equality and Rights legislation, etc.
The problem as I see it is not with the system, it’s with the voters. I guess we will just have to suck it up because we are in a minority here.
Great article. Thank you.
Single Transferable Vote (STV) is the way to go.
The ‘local MP’ has been useless for some time now.
The political parties, at the moment, have the most say in appointing the candidates, no different to STV.
STV gives a dynamically changing political scene where new parties can come and go, vital in correcting ‘groupthink’.
STV also allows party groupings to gang up on the state bureaucracy when it, as now, becomes over mighty or captured by ideology.
Most important of all, STV militates against the ‘tyranny of the majority’.
First past the post has outlived its usefulness.
How many really feel a sense of exhilaration at the sacking of the Conservatives when viewing their replacements, voted in by just over 12% of the population?
And, most telling of all, STV would allow a real and effective Lockdown Sceptic political party to be born.
I voted for a Lockdown Sceptic party where I live. Had a choice of two actually. A few hundred others did. Tens of thousands didn’t. We’re in a tiny minority. For now, the game is lost.
The fundamental error in this text is that it assumes a vote under FPTP is the same as a vote under PR, ie, a vote for a party. But that’s not true. The UK is divided into a number of constituencies and voters in each constituency elect a MP. This MP may or may not be a member of a party but that’s really irrelevant here. The outcome of this is a parliament of people who each have their own democratic mandate to be there as they have all been elected by voters in their constituency. All of these people are incentivized to do something for their constituents because they need them to get re-elected.
In a PR system, voters don’t vote for MPs but for parties which end up getting a share of the parliamentary votes proportional to the share of voter votes they got. This means individual MPs have no democratic mandate, only parties have. MPs are incentivized to do what their party leaders want them to do because they need to retain a promising position of the ordered list of party candidates if they want to remain MPs. Party leaders are incentivized to propose policies enough of the electorate wants to vote for. But as governments will almost always be coalition government formed by a number of parties with conflicting policies, no party will ever get to implement the policies it proposed to voters, only the subset of them other coalition partners are willing to live with.
Almost all MPs are now party ‘placemen’.
The political party is to where their loyalty lies, not to their constituents or their country.
When their party achieves power, government patronage through appointments ensures most toe the party line.
Two ways out:
Pay MPs more to give them more independence.
PR
The UK voting system is principally sane but has been corrupted by vested interests. PR systems are principally insane because they have designed by these vested interests.
Take Germany as example: 26 years have passed since the last Kohl government. For 22 of these 26 years, 85%, the SPD has been in government with various coalition partners. The CDU has been in of government for 16 years, 62%. It really doesn’t matter how the people vote, the chancellor will always be from the CDU or the SPD and the SPD will pretty much always remain in government. By strange coincidence, CDU and SPD collectively designed the German political system and have kept refining it since 1949.
The overwhelming majority of political parties have always been and will always remain excluded from parliament.
That isn’t even true, RW. Take a look at the system used for the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Greater London Assembly. It retains the constituency member for every area, but also delivers a roughly proportional parliament.
They’ve roughly copied the German system which has constituency MPs except that they’re mathematically neutralized: Should a party win more constituencies than its vote share would grant votes to it, the other parties will receive compensation seats to restore proportionality.
BTW, I have no idea what you believe to be “not true”.
Then if neither PR nor FPTP produces a government that can be called truly representative we need more direct democracy as in Switzerland.
“…there is much advocacy of so-called direct democracy, with frequent referenda, with the Swiss constitution as the template. In actual fact, the Swiss model is a blend of representative (or parliamentary) democracy with advisory referenda. Switzerland has a sophisticated electorate which has matured over many decades, and its system would not be rapidly transferable to electorates which exhibit an ingrained and widespread habit of not voting on the issue on the ballot paper but, instead, of abusing the vote to express opinions on quite unconnected matters.”
Taken from http://www.fuzzydemocracy.eu/fzyenglish/PR.html
More extensive discussion elsewhere at that site.
There a less people living in Switzerland than in London¹.
¹ This is true for a majority of the statelets the western colonial powers established in central Europe to rid themselves of undesired economic and political competition by the states which had formed there without their meddling.
My essay from 2019 “What is wrong with proportional representation” begins:
Proportional Representation (PR) is the favourite alternative to remedy the glaring defects of the First-Past-The-Post system of electing representatives (deputies, MPs). Discussion of second rounds (as in France) and voting by listing preferences (like the Alternative Vote, rejected in a UK referendum in 2011) has abated.
…….
There are several – partially related – objections to PR. The first is that it depends on political parties, rather than individuals, as the sole vehicle of political opinion. Political parties aggregate thinking on disparate issues and present the electorate with a package or bundle (in Latin: “Fasces”).
This aggregation facilitates group-think. A citizen who is dissatisfied with the composition of the package has the option, theoretically, of joining a party and influencing its policy choices or choice of candidates. In actual fact, social dynamics are such that this involves engaging in what is diplomatically called compromise and, less diplomatically, horse-trading. It is time-consuming in the extreme, and the prospects of even minor success are remote. It is, in diverse and perverse ways, power that plays, not the force of reason or reflection. Pressure groups and lobbying come to the fore to distort policy. Hence citizens are normally deprived of precision in the voting booth. Often they must vote for the least bad party.
A second objection is that PR works by default with party lists. These have the effect that, unless party support collapses entirely, the electorate cannot vote out leading politicians (i.e. a decrease in party support can only vote out those lower in the list: you cannot vote directly against the leadership). Proportional Representation is hierarchical without sufficient transparency on the formation of the hierarchy. It favours incumbents irrespective of performance.
A third – and crucial – objection relates to the thresholds regularly applied for representation under PR. This can be seen starkly in Germany, where no party winning less than five percent can obtain representation, but also in the elections to the European Parliament. It can be argued that it is this that has resulted in the dead-end (or consensual) politics characteristic of the Federal Republic since before unification. More gravely, similar considerations apply to the European Parliament.
Under PR, each party is incentivised to maximise its share of the vote and is therefore bound to make itself nearly all things to nearly all men. This is a recipe for populism, understood as the gross simplification of issues and reduction of policy to just a very few issues (the economy, taxation, environment, immigration, crime, welfare). It is, incidentally, obvious that representation for these issues needs to be voted on separately, as advocated by Fuzzy Democracy.
If there is to be PR, then the threshold rule needs to be exactly reversed – by not counting any proportions over five percent. This way established parties have no incentive to pander to the electorate. They can advocate necessary, but unpopular policies without fear of losing extra votes.
This is not, of course, an adequate solution. The adequate solution is my “Fuzzy Democracy.”
It will be objected that having a dozen or score of parties would lead to it being impossible to form an executive or “strong and stable” government. But there is mostly no need for government to be unitary. Policy in one grand area of political concern does not always have much connection to that in others, and it is only the fixation on party “loyalty” or tradition that imagines otherwise. The demand for such unity leads to horse-trading and the widespread disrespect that politics and politicians suffer from. It is anti-democratic.
. …. Continued at http://www.fuzzydemocracy.eu
Das Problem der Weimarer Republik war nicht Paralyse in Form von Zersplitterung sondern SPD in Form von „Wir wollen aber Geld ausgeben, das wir nicht haben, dh eine zweite Inflationszeit hervorrufen.“ Deswegen konnte nach Müller keine parlamentarisch gestütze Regierung mehr gebildet werden und das Notverordnungsregime trat an deren Platz. Im Prinzip war das eine SPD-tolerierte Minderheitsregierung. Die SPD hätte jede Notverordnung kippen können, allerdings praktisch nur, wenn sie bereit gewesen wäre, eine Reichtstagauflösung und Neuwahlen zu akzeptieren, von der sie die gewählte Volkszertreter aus sehr guten Gründen keine Vorteile versprachen.
Es mag einen Teil BRD-Geschichte geben, der nicht auf Lügen basiert, aber den hat noch niemand gefunden.
—
The problem of the Weimar Republic was not that a PR system which didn’t exclude small parties led to a paralysed parliament but that the largest faction, the SPD, was simply unwilling to stop spending money which wasn’t there, ie, that it would have preferred a second hyperinflation over sacrificing its political pet projects. This prevented forming another parliamentaty government after Müller and led to rule by emergency decrees. Government was de facto a SPD-tolerated minority government as the SPD could have prevented any emergency decree from being actually implemented. But this might have led to the president calling a new election and the existing SPD MPs absolutely didn’t feel like running this gauntlet.
It’s conceivable that some part of the official history of the FRG is not based on lies but nobody discovered it so far.
—
The sole point of the minium vote share requirement is to hamper political competition with the two German state parties (SPD and CDU) and ideally, prevent it altogether.
First comment. The word “Leave” didn’t win the Referendum. The three words “Take Back Control” did. They summed up precisely why Sovereignty matters and why we needed it restored.
Utterly ridiculous article.
Honestly, how can it be defensible that Reform got 4 million votes and 5 MPs, and the Lib Dums got fewer votes but 72 MPs?
The antiquated first past the post system not only drives a two party parliament, but also drives those parties together so that they become indistinguishable. Look at the recent Kings Speech, which revived several “Conservative” policies.
If you can’t get change by democracy, people will obtain it by other means. That is the danger and our rigged and unfair voting system is pushing us that way.
Solution attached.
FPTP doesn’t work when you, effectively, have a One-Party-State ….. like the Westminster Uni-Party of LibLabCON who are, in turn, delivering the policies decreed by Globalist organisations like the WEF.
We kicked out Sunak and got Starmer. Nothing really changed.
The electoral system is indefensible when 34% of the available votes leads to 68% of the MPs. 14% leads to 5 MPs and 12% leads to 72 MPs.
The attached essay, 800 words, was rejected by Daily Sceptic a fortnight ago. It explains how every vote can be made to count, and we do not need parties.
An automatic downlink of a Word file makes me nervous. A PDF would be preferable.
No comment on the contents. As Myra submits below, I simply think new ideas should be considered and a ‘better’ solution found. One can consider how other countries vote or come up with something revolutionary, as long as it makes sense. Mandatory voting might be considered. Finally, experiment with the new system and, if it seems to work, continue in that direction.
Thank you. I shall generate a PDF for future. Tho personally it is PDFs I am wary of. Favorites for scams.
Otherwise go to http://www.fuzzydemocracy.eu/fzyenglish/siteguide.html for similar texts and the general idea.
Your suggestion about trials for new ideas is also made in my articles. My concept has better chances in countries which are not stuck in the mud and some articles are directed at other countries. For example, France and Germany (in French and German), but generally looking to central and eastern Europe.
So-called representative democracy doesn’t work when the people don’t have a real choice because all candidates and/ or the parties fielding them are in broad agreement on certain topics. Like, say, the necessity to combat climage change, the existential importance of unlimited immigration and (that’s a German special) that being anti-German is of prime importance. Even the supposedly conservative top candidate of the German CDU (Friedrich Merz) recently went on record stating that German nation is an anathema to him and that German people must not claim that they actually exist because otherwise, they’d obviously be Nazis which must not exist. Fiddling with the voting system is not going fix that. In particular, using a voting system where parties are mandatory deputies of otherwise politically powerless voters won’t fix that.
With FPTP, there’s nothing which stops independents from standing as candidates and people from electing them. In Germany, this is impossible. Or rather, it’s principally possible but practically completely hopeless and the way parliament is organized ensures that party control of the Bundestag will always be maintained.
I would like electoral reform and explore different new ideas for elections. PR is not the only option out there.
The author wants decisive government and is therefore in favour of the two party system. I am not. I prefer a balanced , nuanced decision making process, which is less likely going to lead to ‘decisive’ mistakes.
Two fundamental flaws in this article. But first, we vote for a Government to Serve us, never rule us, that would be a tyranny and fast approaching what we have. Censorship of speech is a classic indicator.
We don’t have a two party democracy. It’s already called the Uniparty, and the author is right to call out the feebleness of the opposition. But fails to question why.
Deep within the 28 page contract with the people carefully crafted by the Reform Party is the unprecedented golden line: “Reafirm British Sovereignty. Reject the influence of the World Economic Forum and WHO..”(p.22).
Until you appreciate that our Governments have Globalist masters and are following their Agenda 21 to World Government,
and outlaw their influence, our democracy will be a sham and our rights and freedoms will evaporate.