) then "the one with the most votes"you ask anyone in the street "how can you tell which party has won an election" and it's virturally certain they'd reply (if not "f- off"
Except that's not true under FPTP
Feel free to ignore the practical concerns I raised, do! Presumably giving, oh, the DUP or SNP kingmaker status would "broadly reflect the way people actually vote".Yes - just imagine thinking that the results of an election should broadly reflect the way people actually voted
As opposed to one-party, endless coalition, single-ideology rule. Not what I call an improvement.
Presumably Mr Cameron is aware that PR would finish the Tories as an independent force. Don't know what Mr Brown's motives are with the alternative vote nonsense, but how many voters are going to give considered thought to ranking candidates in order of preference? It'll turn elections into a lottery.
Most of them, I would have thought.
What are you basing that on? Most voting is tribal. You vote Labour or Tory because your family/friends/community has always done so. You might as well try to use logic and statistics to get people to change football teams. If you've not reached your first choice by a process of reason, what chance do two, three and four have?
If you're going to have FPTP, you do need a straight choice between two candidates. On that I agree. Where there are more than two choices, it simply does not work. As I said, you can end up with a government that the majority of voters despise being elected repeatedly.
Another thing to say about this: Offering people the opportunity to express preference in this way will make them think. It also ensures that the huge numbers who, for instance, still essentially want socialism can vote socialist without feeling that their vote is worthless. The numbers who currently vote tactically, in a way that necessarily depends on them second-guessing others' votes, often wrongly, belie what you say.
So let's have a rule that if a government fails to get 50% of the votes the result is voided and the election re-run. That would be an incentive to our decrepit, elitist parties to listen to the people they claim to represent.
Or it'll make them stick down the other options more-or-less at random. Which leads to a lot of poorly thought-out results. Which is far less representative than at present.
The tribal hatred engendered by Baroness Thatcher's demented market fundamentalism may be waning, but it's not gone. I agree that if the Tories imploded and were replaced by a proper conservative party, they might pick up votes from floating voters. Which would only entrench the same two-party dominance, if anything.
Amen. It's MPs' independence that needs to be restored. PR will just lead to closed lists (you can bet that Labour and the Conservatives will adopt a form that allows them to increase their power) and more centralised, more remote parties. FPTP creates a close link with constituencies when parties are general mass organisations.
It's because I'm a conservative that I see the damage Lady Thatcher's policies did. Market dogma and conservatism are not bedfellows. But her election was a reaction to the failure of a quarter century's effort to rig the economy, not FPTP. Without it we might have got a slightly watered-down version of Thatcherism, but it would probably still have happened.
All very sound ideas. I especially like the banning of central donations. Parties should be coalitions of independent MPs, not the dictatorial colossi they've become.
To state the obvious, Eire isn't Britain. Perhaps FPTP isn't suited to the intricacies of Irish politics (about which I claim to know zip). Or perhaps it would have encouraged Finna Fail's allies to broaden their base. It's a matter for the Irish.
