So with two months to go before a referendum on the voting system it seems that some campaigning is starting up. The BBC has a couple of articles outlining some of the no and the yes arguments.
The question has been released: (from here)
‘At present, the UK uses the ‘first past the post’ system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the ‘alternative vote’ system be used instead?’
Currently I’m unsure which way to vote. In the general election I was all for the Liberal Democrats and their promises to bring in proportional representation. If that was the choice then I would be voting yes. However, I don’t see the alternative vote system as much of a change. Say the majority say no then the politicians could say that everybody is totally happy with ‘first past the post’ and the system is unlikely to change for a good few years. The yes votes win and then we are with a system that hasn’t really changed that much (see here. I’m unsure how accurate this data is though).
So what’s other people’s thoughts? Yes, no, undecided or abstaining?
I hate FPTP. It basically means I have never cast a meaningful vote in my life, as the places I’ve ended up living (semi-rural middle england) would happily vote in a turnip if it had the right colour rosette.
But AV is a neither-here-nor-there fudge between FPTP and proper PR. I’m not sure as a nation we’re ready for full PR… the idea of UKIP or Greens having any real say in policy doesn’t sit right, but I’d stil like some of the checks and balances that come from coalition politics (while avoiding political stalemate, which is always the downside).
Is that a general observations of the behaviours of minority parties in coalitions, or a short-term dissatisfaction with the current status quo?
Personally speaking I will vote yes not because of the current government, but because, even if the proposed alteration isn’t perfect, it’ll be proof to the British electorate that the voting system isn’t immutable, as most traditionalists seem to think.
I too am sick of throwing away my vote in FPTP elections.
I personally wouldn’t decide based on which party will benefit from it. I’d look at the question whether you want a winning candidate to have at least 50% of the voters (whether it be as first, second or third vote) actually preferring it over the other plausible alternatives. I’m not an UK citizen, but if I got to make this choice I’d vote yes.
I’m going to be voting yes. It’s not PR but it’s better than FPTP.
My concern is that it will not win because the rhetoric around FPTP sounds better and many people will vote based on that. Without thinking too much about it having a “strong government” and not letting the “loser” win the seat might sound like the best option.
If it passes it will hurt the Tories the most. Leaving aside the current distaste that many have for the Lib Dems, most Labour voters would prefer Lib Dem, and most Lib Dem would prefer Labour to the Tories.
It’s probably too late for me to re-register in the UK to vote on this, but I am a definite no.
Philosphically, I prefer the most popular candidate to win rather than the least unpopular. AV encourages a shift to the center, which I don’t think is a good thing.
Practically, AV reduces the likelihood of an overall majority. It therefore places whatever party is willing to be the swing party in the driving seat. What a surprise the LibDems support it. They want power over and above their support - the power to make or break governments. Ever since the Liberals (who I didn’t support but respected) through their lot in with the traitors from the SDP, they have been the most despicable political entity in the UK, running the dirtiest campaigns, being willing to sacrifice any and every principle they might have accidentally adopted in the past. Fuck 'em.
Well, the shift to the middle - aka the two main parties within a constituency - is probably happening now as well, since voters probably have a good idea what the likely candidates are…I don’t think strategic voting is entirely unheard of in a FPTP system.
Your second point is probably a fair, allthough - being from a PR system-country myself - I don’t have a problem with coalition Government. It is a mindset in which you have to acknowledge that parties won’t be able to keep all their promises and will have to sacrifice certain issues to get others. This doesn’t mean you can’t be critical about how parties make these decisions about what to stand up for and what not. In return for that you actually get a government that 50% (in PR at least - in AV there is still the possibility of a smaller percentage) voted for.
Exactly - that is why I prefer FPTP. Most popular in each constituency wins.
Blair didn’t get less than 44% of the vote. In 1997 Tony Blair got over 70% of the vote. The Labour Party received just less than 44% of the overall vote, making it by far the most popular party in that election.
Depends how you look at it! If I get 40% of the vote, and my two opponents get 30% each, it means 60% of people did not want me to win. The more parties you have to spread the vote the more chance there is under FPTP that a huge majority do not want the eventual winner.
This is why tactical voting is so popular - the Lib Dems do this all the time (“Don’t waste a vote on Labour, we’re the only ones close enough to beat the Tories”).
In a strict two-party system FPTP works OK, but as soon as you get other parties popping up (UKIP, BNP, Green etc) you end up with winning candidates with only a fraction of the overall vote.
The party that got 40% is the most popular. They may also be the most unpopular, but they are still the most popular. I have never denied that majorities often don’t want the eventual winner - I just don’t care, as long as more people want the winner than want another individual winner.
You’re making the assumption that every voter only wants one party to win. That isn’t true. Many voters would want one of two parties to win.
In AP a voter doesn’t have vote for more than one party. They only have to vote for and rank the canditates they want to win.
FPTP is designed for a two party system which doesn’t exist in the UK anymore. And in FPTP many people don’t vote for their very favourite party to win anyway as it would be a wasted vote.
I know it should be a binding contract with the electorate, but that’s long since been a polite fiction. There is effectively no penalty for a party that fails to enact a manifesto commitment. There’s a bit of noise about how people were promised a referendum or whatever, and then the government does what it wants.
There’s a flip side to that as well. One of the key attributes of FPTP is that it translates relatively small margins of victory into a solid parliamentary majority. There are definite upsides to that, but the downside is the winning party will immediately claim that they have a national mandate to enact every aspect of their manifesto (even if we know they won’t actually manage to). They don’t have such a mandate. They had a narrow victory, possibly reliant on tactical voting, and it’s almost certain that those who did vote for them did so on balance, not out of a whole-hearted commitment to all 36 pages of the manifesto.
So on balance, I’m quite happy with the idea that manifestos become a list of policy positions, rather than an apparent contract with the electorate. It’s a more honest reflection of their actual status.
Not really. It’s my impression that the majority of manifesto pledges are actually kept, or at least there’s an attempt to put them into law. Yeah, there’s some high profile failures to implement election promises, but by-and-large I’d say that manifesto promises are kept.
The problem with a succession of coalition governments is that you don’t know which manifesto pledges will need to be sacrificed by your party of choice as part of the coalition negotiations ahead of voting. In effect, you’re voting blind.
There’s some irony here in the vocal minority of Lib Dem supporters who are not happy with them reneging on their pre-coalition promises regarding student fees. Many of these disaffected Lib Dems are also desperate for proportional representation, yet if this were implemented, then we’d see the same thing over and over again.
Probably the same as in a FPTP system, the ideal set of policies that a party wants to achieve. After the formation of a government they can explain to their electorate what they won and what they gave up…it is up to the electorate to decide whether the made the right choices (next election). There is also the possibility of putting it before a congres of (all) party members and having them vote on whether the coalition is going to be formed (so a vote on the negotiation results).
Yes, but that’s less out of a sense of moral or legal obligation to the voters, and more because the manifesto is a pretty fair reflection of what a party wants to do with power. The difficulties arise when either it isn’t possible for political, legal or practical reasons to enact a particular commitment, or when a commitment was put in solely as a piece of electioneering with no real intention of carrying it out. In the former case, fair enough; in the latter, it’s probably better if we don’t regard manifestos as genuine committments, because then we can’t be fooled.
No, FPTP is designed for exactly the system the UK has - a constituent system - not the system people seem to think it has - a Presidential type system. This mistake was made earlier when someone described the 1997 Labour landslide as Tony Blair getting less than 44% of the vote. People don’t vote for the government, they vote for their MP.