Take a read, sign it, don’t sign it.
Your call.
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IS IT NOT THE CASE that i.e. 10% of people are mental and believe in i.e. white supremacy and i.e. brendan rogers and i.e. earth is only 6000 years old, but cos the mentalists are evenly distributed geographically, they invented the First Past Post system, so that 10% of MP’s don’t have to be race-hate scousers who disbelieve in dinosaurs?
Many thought that electoral reform had been kicked into the long grass after the Lib Dems got their shot, didn’t aim high enough, and missed. The 2015 general election was the least proportional in history. This issue has to get back on the agenda. The petition scheme is one of the few mechanisms we have to introduce it for debate.
I’m not sure anything will come of it during this Parliament. It’ll need a majority vote from the government, and even though I am expecting some friction between the leadership and the backbenchers with such a slim majority, I cannot imagine enough MPs on either side of the house going against self-interest. This system has yo-yo’d both parties in and out of power for generations.
The Alternative Vote was not perfect, certainly wasn’t proportional representation, and I’d never want to see it on a ballot paper again, but it had very few weaknesses when compared with First Past the Post. The usual happened tho; anomalous election results under AV were presented as the norm.
For all its faults, AV would have produced a system where every MP going into Parliament would have had some level of support from at least 50% of his or her constituents. We can’t say that about our present system, and the really crazy thing is that it’s the places where an MP can’t get 50% of the vote that usually decide the balance of power.
It is not the case.
It’s a talking point tho ain’t it pap? Or am I way off base with this? Do we need a proportion of MPs to represent the fringe mentalist community? If so, I would be v.tempted to stand.
Edit: Soz this is prob where ur gonna miss i.e. verbal and i.e. wes tender for i.e sensibly reasoned political debate!
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I am usually pleased when you properly dip your paw in the political pond, Bear. It is a decent talking point.
One of the odd outcomes of PR is that even though it delivers a proportional result, it can deliver disproportionate influence, especially when the terms of a coalition are being hammered out in the days following an election. A centre right party might have to engage the voting powers of a smaller party further to the right, that wants a couple of really right wing policies as part of their Faustian political pact. Again though, it’s something that doesn’t create too much practical friction. When really extreme parties somehow become part of the government, it’s usually because the place they’re in is pretty extreme to start with.
I don’t think we’re yet at the point where the British public would go knowingly go for a far right party en-masse. Their arguments, the most extreme of which are going to be made on selective and partial claims about one group or another, aren’t going to reconcile themselves with the day to day experiences of a majority of the famously tolerant British public. I don’t think they’ll wash.
However, what these parties put through their spinners on a cyclical basis is that their voters are disenfranchised, and that the system works against them, and it always washes clean because it is true.
Get 'em up there, I say. Let them make their arguments and let’s see if the British public ever buy them. My expecation is that if it PR ever did happen, and we did end up with a few extremist representatives among our body of representatives, they’d be working hand over fist to de-toxify their image, thus moderating themselves in the process.
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i know i’m prob sposed to fire back with something dumb, like pick you up on some small error, or ignore ur arguments completely and restate my original position, but tbh all that stuff you said sounds pretty reasonable to me pap.
I’m still not going to vote on beltch’s poll tho, the v.first line where it turns out the poll has been created by a kid made me sick to my stomach! What is wrong with kids today! They should be smoking crack and vandalising bus-stops, not making political polls!
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See I was thinking about this yesterday and what I thought was pretty articulate and framed my problems with AV, but when I come to put #FFFFFF to pixel it doesn’t quite come across.
There is nothing inherintly wrong with our voting system. We vote for who we want to represent us at Constituent level and the preson who gets the most votes wins! Trouble is when you take it up to making a parliament is where you are getting the issue. People start voting tactically becuase they don’t want Charlie Champagne Con in so they all vote for Kieth Kosher Kipper because they don’t want to vote for Liam Lager Labour! So that skews voting numbers disporportinately.
What then happens is that the small partie whinge that they had i.e. 10% of the public vote but no seats.
PR would probably sort that out as it’s a country wide election, but then who would you choose to represent you locally and why would you have an SNP MP representing you if you lived in Heliston?
Would STV or AV sort that out? Probably as people might not vote tactically but my mine gripe with STV/AV is that the person who gets the most votes doesn’t get voted in. It might be that the preson who got the most votes only got 48% of them and then through the process of STV/AV (if I understand it correctly) another person might get 52% of the vote because they were other peoples 2nd/3rd/4th choice and in some cases 1st.
Am I making myself clear enough? Maybe not like I said it sounded fine in my head as I was gardening in my garden.
My preferred system is STV. Under that, the constituencies are much larger and you vote for a party. The MPs are decided proportionally from the various parties in play. The result will likely be some level of representation amongst all parties across the country. Even if, say, Buckinghamshire only returns one Labour MP, a Labour voter has the option of contacting the MP and picking him or her to represent the grievance in Parliament.
I know that technically, party politics shouldn’t come into the representation you receive, but if you’ve got concerns about privatisation of the NHS, for example, and your local Tory MP voted for the changes, how strongly do you think your case would be made?
477,000 signatures now.
I’m not voting for it, anything that keeps lunatics like Farage from the door is fine by me.
I’m not so concerned with Farage himself, but having seen the depth of UKIP, I get where you’re coming from. I have a couple of them on my Facebook feed. They can be quite rabid, and that’s before you take any of the candidates that have said dodgy stuff into account.
That said, I do think that it is wrong for these people to have almost no political voice when they’ve amassed the approval of a considerable portion of the electorate. It does enable the same two parties to continue gaining power with very little thought to anything else apart from how to capture that ABC1 demographic.
I dunno, Arthur - I like to see things as they are, and would rather the likes of UKIP stood up in Parliament and had their arguments publicly defeated than get to claim that they are being jipped by the system. Outside of Labour and the Conservatives, all parties are, and that would include some effective counter-weights to UKIP’s tub-thumping.
The biggest problem I have with the whole out of Europe brigade is when it actually comes to a vote the same people who appear on the Jeremy kyle show have in part the countries future in their hands, Scary thought.