I too didn’t realise that Glenda Jackson was still in politics. She must really be phoning it in these days.
Back on the hung parliament, I really think Nick Clegg is in an awkward spot right now. Reading some opinion pieces over the weekend about his dilemma, or trilemma or whatever, really brought it home to me how difficult a decision the Lib Dem leadership faces. If they ally with the Conservatives, that pisses off half the country, including many of their supporters and MPs. If they ally with Labour, ditto. If they decline any coalition and let Cameron run with a minority government, they get accused of ducking their only chance in a generation to change things.
And if they do make a pact or join a coalition, there are great dangers – if the coalition government is relatively successful, the major party calls an election in due course and wins a majority. If not, it eventually breaks down and the other big party wins a majority, the LibDems being tarred with the “failure” brush.
Trouble is, I don’t see how they can force a referendum on PR. The parliamentary numbers just don’t add up, and the Tories will give the bare minimum concessions on electoral reform that they can get away with. And even if the LibDems did get a referendum, the compromises they would have to make might be so unpopular that they’d lose the referendum. As I understand it, right now support for PR is only about 60%. That’s losable.
Luton South. Labour’s majority dropped to less than 2000. The Tories and the Lib Dems split the anti-Labour vote, so the Labour candidate squeezed through.
I think Hampstead got redistricted - Jackson used to be Hampstead & Highgate, and Kilburn is a very different demographic than Highgate. Hence the close race.
I was contemplating variants of PR that would allow for more local influence than the standard party list approach. Could you award seats based on the percentage of the local constituency vote won? So a candidate who received 42% of their constituency vote would get precedent in the list of who gets a seat for their party over someone who only got 24% in theirs. That way, the MPs receiving a seat would represent a larger share of voters, although it would potentially make for more turnover at election time. Would that work, or is that just needlessly complicating things and we should stick with STV?
*England has been in a dreadful state for some weeks. Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn’t come in, and there being nobody in Great Britain (to speak of) except Coodle and Doodle, there has been no government … Still England has been some weeks in the dismal strait of having no pilot (as was well observed by Sir Leicester Dedlock) to weather the storm; and the marvellous part of the matter is that England has not appeared to care very much about it, but has gone on eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage as the old world did in the days before the flood. *
Makes it more complicated, “needless” is much harder to judge.
Is there any view as to how many members are representing each constituency?
You can use STV from single member electorates to one 650 member electorate (with a ballot paper the size of a blanket).
The smaller the number of members per electorate, the greater the probability the party list will include identifiable local candidates with their own support base in addition to their parties.
STV in Australia for the Senate or the State upper houses means that the concept of “a good local member” disappears. This is not an issue here because the lower house is composed of single member electorates.
So you mean that each party would present a list, like “here are our most popular candidates, by share of vote in each constituency”. And then it would be a pure list system, with some mechanism to ensure proportionality? I’m not sure what that mechanism would be, though. One idea might be to simply take each list and allocate seats in Parliament according to the national share of the vote. So if Party A gets 35% of the vote, which equates to say 225 seats, you take the best-performing 225 candidates from Party A’s list and give them seats in the Parliament.
Trouble with that particular mechanism is that I suspect you would get multiple MPs from some constituencies, and no MPs from others. But that was just a first stab at a proportionality mechanism. Maybe, with some thought, we could come up with something better.
Not quite: to go all Sphinx on you for a moment… if the Libs get into bed with the Tories, don’t forget the Tories are also getting into bed with the Libs.
True, but somehow I can’t see the Tories makng any large concessions. Even if they make a few to get into power they can call an election at any time and neither Labour or the Lib Dems can afford another election campaign.
I think the best thing to do would be to stand aside, allow the Tories to form a minority government and pick and choose their battles on a case by case basis.
If Clegg strikes a deal with the Tories, which would presumably make Cameron the new PM, what Cabinet posts, if any, should Clegg ask for (as well as a commitment for a national referendum on PR)? What particular talents or background does Clegg himself have?
Yebbut we really REALLY need PR. Or more accurately, I really REALLY want PR. More chance of getting that with a LibCon coalition than a Con minority gov. Only slightly more, to be sure, but still more. Of course, a LabLibOthers gov would be better for that, but perhaps harder to keep everyone on message.
(ETA that last bit was replying to Walker in Eternity)
Apropos of nothing, I’ve just calculated the Gallagher Index for this election. It measures disproportionality of seats on a 0-100 scale, and UK2010 comes out to 15.1. Zero would be perfect proportionality. Not sure what 100 would represent. So I can’t really say how bad 15.1 actually is!
Also, here are the Banzhaf power indices for each of the parties:
Conservatives: 35.9%
Labour and LibDems: 21.7% each
DUP: 6.2%
SNP: 4.5%
Sinn Fein: 3.5%
Plaid Cymru and SNP: 2.3% each
Green, Alliance and that Independent NI woman: 0.7% each
Yes, H&K was nail-bitingly close – that’s my constituency! I voted for the Lib Dem candidate, and although I’m a bit annoyed that Jackson took it (she didn’t impress me at all at the hustings), I’m at least glad it didn’t go to Philip, who had some egregiously stupid ideas.
Apparently he’s a really good skier. Seriously, he’s not quite a career politician, but pretty close. Before becoming an MEP he was some kind of policy wonk in Brussels (i.e. EU politics). That’s how it is these days - politics is a speciality in itself, difficult to break into it from another career.
One possble cabinet post would be Chancellor of the Exchequer (i.e. Finance minister). Vince Cable of the Lib Dems is highly regarded as their nominee for that role, George Osborne of the Conservatives is not. Only problem there is that Chancellor is these days considered the most senior position in government, after the premiership itself. It would be quite a concession by the Tories to have a Lib Dem Chancellor.
OTOH, it is a relatively neutral role, politically. In any government, the Chancellor’s job is basically to say No to spending requests from other ministers. Chancellors are rarely popular with the rest of the cabinet. So maybe it makes sense to give that role to another party?
OTOOH, it wouldn’t leave any room for Clegg himself to have a more senior role. I suspect they would settle for Clegg in one of the other “great offices of state” (Home Secretary or Foreign Secretary), with Cable in there as something vaguely economic like Business Secretary or Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and a couple more less prestigious cabinet posts.
(I’m not saying that this is going to happen, because I can’t see for the life of me how it would actually work.)
I’ve mentioned it here before, but I do not like PR, because it diminishes the link between the constituent and the MP, the elector and the elected. I go for Approval Voting. Basically you vote for as many candidates on the list as you like, and the candidate with the most votes wins.
Here’s how it works:
You might have candidates Brown, Cameron, Clegg, and Griffin.
Elector 1 votes for Cameron & Clegg
Elector 2 votes for Brown
Elector 3 votes for Cameron & Clegg
Elector 4 votes for Cameron & Griffin
The 4 ballot papers are collected and the votes are tallied and Brown has 1 vote, Clegg has 2, Cameron has 3, and Griffin has 1. So Cameron is elected.
I don’t see why people who are undecided between, say, Cameron and Clegg should get twice as much say as people who have thought about it long and hard and decisively prefer one candidate. I think Alternative Vote is a better system than that.
But such a voter would get 4 times as many votes. Doesn’t seem very democratic.
I don’t necessarily object to a system that recognises consensus, but one that is actively biased in favour of consensus? To the point that non-centrist candidates could not get elected? I would not favour that.
Quartz, is the lack of link between the MP and voter your only objection to PR? Because there are several systems of PR and many of them do retain some measure of ‘accountability’, in the sense of the voters being directly able to kick out MPs they’re fed up with.
F’rinstance, I’m currently liking the look of an ‘additional member’ system. It’s not AS good as our current system as regards the constituency link. I suppose how good it would be, would depend on how many additional members there are vs constituency members. Then again I’ve also seen someone post on here an idea for how to select the additional members too - namely, those who did best in constituency elections go to the top of the party lists.
One other important point you miss about the current system and the ‘ejectability’ of politicians: as things stand at the moment, lots of us voters don’t like Gordon Brown much. But only the 80,000 in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath can do anything about it! I hope that isn’t the idea of voter accountability that you wish to defend.
ETA: oh wow, the previous post hadn’t gone up when I started this post!
