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Comment by timthorn | Hacker News Reader

The UK has a two party system in terms of who will form the government, but there's a plurality of smaller parties acting as strong lobby groups - some even getting reasonable levels of parliamentary representation.

Case in point - without the threat of UKIP taking votes from the Conservatives, it is unlikely that the EU referendum would have been held.

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The UK's big parties are themselves a collection of factions held together by the inevitability of a two-party system. The ERG and Momentum are the most obvious, each pushing an agenda that, regardless of how much one agrees with it, has been incredibly divisive over the years: hard brexit and 'corbynism' (to avoid connotations of the 'S' word).

These have been big gambles by the major parties, the details and direction of which have mostly been dictated by marketing and in-fighting. Despite having multiple general elections with these as the main issues, the public has only been presented with coarse yes/no choices and false dichotomies.

In a multi-party system (e.g. proportional like STV) I'm pretty sure we'd see ERG as a separate party to Cameron-esque Tories, and Momentum as a separate party to the NewLabour/Starmer side of Labour. I'm not sure who would get the keep the old Labour/Tory names, though.

I still think FPTP is the UK's biggest political problem. The UK is crying out for a new left party to take over from the Labour party which is dysfunctional at this point. But it can't happen because the electoral system means that it would have to happen all at once which is unrealistic.

For context, imagine if a trove of whatsapp chat messages from inside the Clinton presidential campaign in 2016 revealed they most of the paid employees hated her so much that they were sabotaging her campaign and diverting money to down ballot races. This is effectively what happened in the UK in 2017.

The situation is similar in Canada - a significant number of people would support the NDP, but they're viewed as a spoiler. In my parent's riding, for instance, 55% of people voted for the two left-wing candidates, so the seat went to the right-winger who got the remaining 45%.

A concerted effort to consolidate votes behind the Liberals gave us Justin Trudeau, a do-nothing neoliberal whose hobbies include brownface and giving indigenous people's land to oil companies.

It's quite remarkable how many voting systems we have in the UK; STV, D'Hondt, AMS and so on. The parliament with all the real power, and the constitutional ability to erase the others at will, is of course entrenched in FPTP to preserve conservativism.

>it is unlikely that the EU referendum would have been held.

If the UK had actual proportional representation, it is also unlikely the EU referendum would have been held. The referendum was entirely a fault of the conservative government at the time, a gambit made not to appease potential UKIP voters but instead to satisfy in-fighting within the conservative party.

>some even getting reasonable levels of parliamentary representation.

Your definition of 'reasonable' differs from mine. Reasonable implies that the representation is fair/proportional to the amount of votes received. In 2010, the results were as follows:

Conservatives: 36% of votes, 47% of seats.

Labour: 29% of votes, 39.7% of seats.

Liberal Democrats: 23% of votes, 8.8% of seats.

A 'reasonable' level of representation for the 2010 election would've drastically reshaped British politics and the country would be much less divided than it is now. I feel strongly about this, since the UK used to be my home, but I couldn't bring myself to continue living there as a contributor to such a broken system.

Australia is similar as well. I'm not sure having more parties fundamentally fixes the issues. From my experience, parties just form coalitions that wind up taking similar stances to the US two-party system.

I will say though that the US two-party system seems to promote a deadlock / winner-take-all scenario that doesn't seem as common in other countries. So I do think having something like ranked choice voting will help. It's just not the full solution.

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