Isn't this a little bit ridiculous:
Labour. Seats: 251, Votes: 29.3%
Lib.Dem. Seats: 52, Votes: 22.9% Labour. Seats: 251, Votes: 29.3%
Lib.Dem. Seats: 52, Votes: 22.9% Conservatives: South, land owners
Labour: North, working class
Libdem: Students all over the country spread thinly
For all the noise made about libdem in the run up to this election it was surprising just how badly they did. Even their share of the vote was only up 1%.
Almost every one of my friends and family in Scotland work in some part of the public sector - NHS, education, local government etc. I'm unusual in being self-employed/private sector.
Scotland has become a socialist country almost by stealth - a combination of government investment/bribery (Labour wanting to ensure a healthy majority north of the border, to keep the nationalist vote down) and death of traditional industries.
In Edinburgh you might see more jobs in the financial, media and other sectors, but that is not the case for much of Scotland.
Basically you can't look at votes which were cast with some understanding of how the system works, and pretend they were cast without that knowledge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sainte-Lagu%C3%AB_method
PR is a bad system because it decouples the government from local representatives. Instead you get a list of people none of whom may have any knowledge of or interest in issues that affect your local area.
(Yes, yes, I get your later point how the one elected is everyone's representative, but come on, in reality they're gonna follow their party line most of the time and if that's the opposite of what you think, you are shit out of luck)
Contrast that with Sweden where the constituencies and their mandates look like this: http://www.val.se/tidigare_val/val2006/mandatstat/mandfstat_...
I live in Stockholm city which has almost 600k voters and 27 mandates instead of just one. I voted for a smaller party, and they still got two members from my area, so I am represented in our parliament by someone that is both from my area and shares my political views. And so is almost everyone else, regardless of who they voted for.
In my opinion, this system is better because you have almost the same benefits as your system with smaller constituencies, but the proportional system doesn't punish smaller parties like yours does. If a party gets 20% of the total vote, they will have about 20% of the seats in parliament as well, which is as it should be.
BNP are not extremists. They're not blowing up Brussel to get UK out of EU.
It's democracy and free speech after all.
The point of the UK system is that a local level you are voting for the individual person you want to represent you. Sure they are usually a member of a party, but they don't necessarily have to have a history of toeing the party line. This does create some dilemmas (e.g. if you like your local Labour candidate but hate Gordon Brown, which seems to be a common theme). But on the whole, the local link is important. The candidate from any local area is likely to be just like the citizens who live there. That's how to get true representation.
We have this same problem in Canada, and it frustrates me to no end. (Our Greens represent 10% of the country and have 0 seats. That's 3 million Canadians with NO representation at all.)
An MP is a delegate from a constituency - and their legitimacy is only that they represent their constituents.
If whoever is elected represents you, why aren't they all classed as 'independent'?
Also, lib dems lost 13 seats they formerly held. If Lib Dem support really was solid, you'd expect them to at least hold on to their seats. They didn't.
The obvious one given the recent excitement around the 3rd party is the question "How many people wanted to vote Lib-Dem but thought that would be a wasted vote or worse would only help a party they really didn't want to win (note this works whether the hated party is Labour or Conservative).
Better to get it out in the open in an early stage.
"Rest assured the if there was a party-list proportional representation system in place, parties such as BNP would have an appallingly large number of seats" - i very much doubt this.
They strongly believe that Sweden is loosing its cultural identity and don't agree with the notion of a multi-cultural country, thinks immigration in general is a bad idea and when it happens it should aim for cultural assimilation (language tests, living here for 10 years etc..), these are all things you can have a serious discussion about. Maybe it's true that we are loosing our national identity, and there are points to be made why that might be a bad thing. None of that is undemocratic (as opposed to fringe revolutionist communist groups), they aren't blatantly racist (as opposed to the National Democrats with 0,06% in the last election that has a program about for a white ethnic Sweden and the destruction of non-Christian religious buildings), they aren't violent (as opposed to some fringe Anarcho-syndicalist groups) or saying we should throw out all the immigrants out of the country, but since we have no debate about those issues and have a national implicit policy of not engaging the Swedish Democrats they just seem that way. There are a fair many countries that have nationalists and real conservatives in government like that. In fact in a fair many countries it's not weird to be proud of your culture and openly express it.
Now I happen to disagree with every single thing they stand for even though I agree that we are becoming a more heterogeneous society, and my own views is that we should increase globalization, increase immigration, give more power to the EU and just generally disagree with the notion of the type of cultural conservatism that conservatives speak isn't an achievable goal. These are all views you can engage and make points for and against.
Second to them in size there's the pirate party (0,63% in the last election), which I don't think anyone really thinks its necessary to not give seats, since they aren't more extreme than the left party (reformist communists), the green party or the more free-market bent Moderates (European type liberal-conservatives) in any event. Then the Christian Democrats might not make the 4% after the next election loosing all their seats, and while I strongly disagree with the very foundation of their platform, I certainly don't think they are extremists (we don't exactly have overzealous religious people in this country).
So I don't at all understand who our so called extremists are and what makes them so dangerous that they will taint the majority rule of parliament to some extreme degree. We've had a reformist communist party allied with our usually-ruling Social Democrats for as long as I can remember. They've been in parliament itself since before WWII and yet I don't think we have overreaching socialism compared to other Scandinavian countries or say Canada.
People relate to the minority parties as they do to homeopathy, like they'll have some absurd position of power if they go in as a function of dilution. None of our current parties broadly support the policies of the Swedish Democrats, even if there's some overlap between them and the Peoples Party (European type liberals) and the Christian Democrats.
In this years election it also looks like the Swedish Democrats are going to go over 4%, what are we going to do then.. raise the bar? All this boils down to the majority censoring the minority. The worst part of it is that voting on a minority party is almost equivalent to throwing your vote away, since we don't roll to votes we deem as to small to count over onto peoples second choice so some people simply end up having no representation by design.
In the Netherlands they have proper proportional voting which is considered a good thing.
TL;DR We have no extremists that are even close to getting into parliament, only minority parties that are being branded extremists because they have unpopular but democratic platforms. Democratic in the sense that they are no worse than the current parliamentary parties.
We do but we only have 150 seats, not 510, so you need more votes to get a single seat (this acts as a barrier of 2/3%). However, it is true that you get many small parties in the parliament. Small extremist parties in the parliament is not a problem, as far as I know. Even if there were they can only talk, they can't do anything extremist. Some politicians are pushing to reduce the number of seats to 100.
I just meant that 4%, or some other limit, seems sensible to keep the BNP and other such parties out in the UK.
People will say anything you want to keep power/money, etc.
That said PR is still a better system for representing minorities and forming governments - so personally I favour a hybrid model, possibly with a different house for each system.
I'm not a BNP supporter by a long stretch but, if they get a significant proportion of the vote then IMO they should get representation in parliament.
I actually considered not voting, our ward is a pretty much foregone conclusion, proportional representation (in preference to first-past-the-post) makes all votes count and would encourage people to vote with their conscience rather than tactically.
Proportional representation is more correct, but certainly not more stable or efficient.
Update: that image is only HALF of the represented parties and seats!
I prefer this way where it could go either way (Lib/Con or Lib/Lab).
Fingers crossed.
Personally I think we should be concentrating on more pressing issues than electoral reform.
If Lib Dems had gained seats, or at least not lost so many of their own seats, they would have had a much bigger chance of getting reform.