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Comment by dignick | Hacker News Reader

Like in the US, democracy in the United Kingdom is faltering. Our first past the post electoral system means the Tories can retain power with a third of the (active) electorate voting for them. Labour believes first past the post serves them well, but it doesn’t, because they would have been leading a coalition government in the last several elections under Proportional Representation. Instead it requires Labour to be a very broad house, meaning Starmer struggles to take strong positions on anything because he doesn’t want to lose votes from different groups (mainly from the centre right based on his recent statements). In a proportional voting system each party can be more focussed on having a distinct set of policies and beliefs, which can be debated openly with other parties without fear of alienating a large proportion of their base. It is clear that this is the core problem in the UK, Brexit was a symptom of this issue because people felt their vote actually counted and they wanted to protest against the neoliberal establishment. Now that the implications are becoming clear, a majority want to return to the EU. If Labour win the next election their position will be very fragile, and I’m unsure they will get more than one term.

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Here in Israel with proportional representation, every small party has outsized power since every one of them has enough power to vote down the current government by joining hands with the opposition. As a result, decisions that are undesirable by the majority are consistently made.

We are currently after an election but before forming a new government and as part of the coalition negotiations the upcoming government is trying to pass several laws to weaken Israel's democracy, including one that effectively strips the Supreme Court of its ability to override non-constitutional[1] laws and directives (and let's not mention the personal legislation).

I suspect then that the problem is not specifically in the voting system, and the voting system at best can be a contributing factor.

[1] - Technically Israel doesn't have a constitution and instead has "Basic Laws" that serve a similar function, let's not get into that :)

This is interesting. Does Israel have parliamentary supremacy? In NZ we have MMP which is proportional but Supreme Court rulings on law do no "override" action as parliament is still supreme. So it can't override laws perse.

If you have a constitution (I'm not sure what happened after you rejected Australia's, but you're still in there and it's not too late to join) then the Supreme Court can override laws which it deems unconstitutional.

You are correct and it looks like I misunderstood my own countries system of government. Thank for the correction :)

> Here in Israel with proportional representation, every small party has outsized power since every one of them has enough power to vote down the current government by joining hands with the opposition.

If small parties' power is such a problem, why don't the big parties form another grand coalition? Or form Scandinavian-style pre-election pacts with the small parties?

[Edited to acknowledge grand coalitions aren't a foreign concept in Israel]

Simple, because you aren't going to form a coalition with parties radically different than yours, you choose those that are mostly aligned with you. But now any party within the coalition, even a small one, can force the coalition to listen to them, because the alternative is to form a coalition with parties even more at odds.

That's the dilemma the big parties face. By choosing not to deal with each other, they empower small parties. Without actual majority support, they (rightly) have to compromise with somebody.

What are the radical differences between Likud and Yesh Atid?

(In fact, they did form a government coalition in 2013, which lasted about two years. And then there was the 2020, where the two biggest parties in that election, Likud and Blue and White (of which Yesh Atid was a major constituent), formed a government. So it happens. I'm not sure the current two biggest parties, Likud and Yesh Atid, have a radical difference in policy platform. (the most radical things the newly elected coalition government is putting on the agenda are not really from Likus). They certainly are not going to form a government together this time, but I don't think it's because they are radically different, exactly.).

You're making the common mistake that these parties are about their platforms, not their leaders. It's not so much a difference between Likud and Yesh Atid so much as a difference between Netanyahu and Lapid, with Netanyahu's struggles to avoid a corruption verdict and Lapid's insistence that elected politicians must not continue to serve after indictment.

Lapid and other center-opposition leaders have all indicated a willingness to negotiate with a Likud without Netanyahu at the helm.

To add to this (which I feel is also a partial answer to lambertsimnel's original question here), if we look at politics as an iterated prisoner's dillema, the center-left parties have chosen a "tit for tat" strategy whereas Binyamin Netanyahu has chosen an "always defect" strategy.

Of particular note, at the start of the corona crisis, there have already been several failed elections. At the time, Benny Ganz's party ran together with Yesh Atid (and Telem) in a combined list, but since Yesh Atid refused to cooperate with Binyamin Netanyahu (after their own bad expereinces), Benny Ganz chose to split up the combined party and join Binyamin Netanyahu in the coalition, citing the importance of having a stable government for these difficult times (of COVID).

The coalition agreement stipulated that Binyamin Netanyahu will be the Prime Minister for the first two years and Benny Ganz for the final two years (elections in Israel are theoretically every 4 years). However, after two years, Binyamin Netanyahu disbanded the government (by manufacturing a disagreement so that the coalition could not vote together). Benny Ganz then learned his lesson.

(There are of course more disagreements and issues and a lot more nuance then what I can present in a short comment on an online forum, but hopefully this is a useful example to understand the sort of issues we are having)

Going back to my original post, I'm trying to say that the fact that whatever factors have lead to this sort of rotten situation (and that we stay in that situation continually) are the real problem, and not specifically the voting system. Even if we accept that proportional representation is the best system ever, it is not on its own enough to prevent the sorts of problems you see lately in democracies around the world.

I was replying to the comment, "you aren't going to form a coalition with parties radically different than yours."

But yes, it seems politics world-wide, the US certainly included, is increasingly more about personality, affect and identity/community -- and sheer competition for power between different players -- than it is about policy platform, agreed. Sometimes between parties which are actually not that different from each other. I think we may be agreeing with each other.

I think the reason that a "national unity" coalition government in Israel seems so unlikely currently may not in fact be that the major parties "are radically different from each other". (The coalitions formed may be, because of the outsized influence of minority parties on the flanks necessary to build the coalition, which is the whole topic of this thread -- why don't the major parties form a coalition to avoid that? I suggest the reason they don't is not that they are radically different from each other, disagreeing with the comment I was replying to)

I subscribe to the idea that the most important aspect of democracy is to be able to kick out the incumbents (and less important is that every opinion gets direct representation). I think for all the challenges in the US, it does this quite well.

I agree. And I'll point out that in the US 200 years ago, the only federal office directly voted on was house of representatives (not the senate, not the president).

The problem you have in the US is that you only have one alternative choice, so if neither choice is good, then you have no recourse

There are two components though. One is the ability to choose the party, the other is the pressure on a party to adjust so that it appeals to enough voters to elect it. If a party doesn't need to adjust to get some votes, as in proportional representation, then we (potentially) end up with coalitions that live or die based on narrow issues, which is what the original post I replied to alluded to. On the other hand, if you have two parties that fight over the votes, you come closer to having parties that optimize for broad appeal.

There are lots of problems with democracy (just fewer than the other potential systems as has famously been said). Imo a two party first past the post system can actually help regularize the will of the people by forcing parties to align with actually electable platforms and not dig in on single issues. Lots more to say about that, I just want to counter the usual rhetoric about how proportional representation or similar systems are somehow automatically better

Put simply, "when most of the thieving stopped, the thriving stopped."

Britain faltering is not "strange" and has little to do with political party, rather its ability to use violence to extract capital from productive outside entities and support its welfare state is nearing an end.

The Economist has a long history of avoiding the elephant in the room because the people running it are hopelessly biased.

Who are these productive outside entities who's capital is being violently extracted and why is this system (whatever it is) coming to an end?

I'm genuinely interested but you don't support your assertion with any evidence.

I think they are talking about the long tail of colonialism maybe. I locate Britain's suicide as very very recent - when they left the EU.

Please could you link that aritcle?

This isn't quite right. U.S politics is much less party-centric than it is in many other countries. Basically, though you've got a vast majority of candidates for X or Y office who are either democrats or republicans, their platform tendencies can be quite diverse, even though they often go against the grain of their own party's nominal positions. It's somewhat subtle, but this detail of U.S party politics makes for a strong multi-party diversity of candidates even though there are formally only two parties that mean anything for votes.

This is how you can have, for example, a surprisingly moderate republican senator like Susan Collins, sharing the same party with someone like Trump. And then also in the same party, a Rand Paul type.

In the US? I believe the average age of a representative is 75 and most of them have been there for a very long time.

> average age of a representative is 75

Come on. It's 58. I didn't even have to type to check this, just "Search Google for..."

Congress? Sure. But the Senate? Median age there is ~69 years. Median term length? Nearly 14 years!

https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_current_United_States_...

OK, but members of the House are "representatives"; members of the Senate are "senators". So if you're going to regard mushbino's statement as referring to only one side, it has to be referring to the House.

It would be a bit odd if the median term length were much longer, and if you look at an actuarial table you'll see why. I guess that's one advantage to electing the ancient: built-in term limits.

I beg your pardon?

Re-election rates for incumbents in the US Congress are very high [0]. In the House, they haven't dropped below 80% for at least 60 years. The Senate is slightly less stable, but still way above 60% ever since Reagan was elected.

[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-ra...

But that’s because people like their representative. It’s everyone else’s representative they don’t like.

People love wasteful spending on jobs programs.

I put to you that it in fact does this terribly, because if the government shits itself midway through term there is no mechanism for removal or new elections, as there are in most other countries. Wait out the 4 year term (or two year cycle) and deal with the tribalism

The upside is that the regular cycle means elections are at predictable intervals. US mid-term elections already have low turnout. Snap elections after a vote of no confidence only would decrease turnout.

> I subscribe to the idea that the most important aspect of democracy is to be able to kick out the incumbents

In think you are wrong on both points. The most important aspect of democracy is that it produces a government that reflects the popular will; being able to throw out the incumbents—at which the US does exceptionally badly—has some instrumental value to that, but isn’t an independent goal. And the pervasive use of FPTP elections is a big part of why the US is bad both at tossing incumbents and at providing effectivelt representative government.

The majority can be struck down by a group of minorities? Or the plurality?

I think the issue is that recent governing coalitions' majorities in the Knesset (over and above what they need to appoint a prime minister) is smaller than an individual small party. Consequently, an individual small party could unilaterally bring down the government (or threaten to).

No, he's complaining that minority parties can join with the opposition to form a majority and consequently bring down the government (this can happen when government forms a minority government or relies on minority parties to form a government).

A shocking example of the perils of democracy.

if the minority parties work together with the opposition to form a majority representing a majority of the public surely that's a great example of real democracy in action, it may be a 'peril' to the governing party .... but at that point they represent a minority of the populous - this is not 'shocking' this is how a democratic country should behave

I live in New Zealand we have a proportional representative voting system (MPP), since we changed we've had coalitions and minority governments .... but we haven't had dysfunction or anarchy, largely I think because our parties know that if they go beyond the pale they wont get reelected

The problem is not that the minority parties can cooperate with the opposition to bring down the current government, that's indeed a good thing. The problem is that every coalition in recent years has been so narrow that any individual party in the coalition, no matter how small, is still large enough to bring down the coalition on their own.

And my point in general was not that proportional represntation is bad because it has this specific failure mode, but rather that our political climate has put us in the situation where the failure mode happens consistently, and so the real problem democracies are facing (in my opinion) are the factors that lead to this situation rather than specifically the voting system (which at best is a contributing factor).

> our parties know that if they go beyond the pale they wont get reelected

Ours know that going beyond the pale won't cause them any problems, especially for the smaller parties ;)

Is there a minimum quorum a party has to reach before they can enter parliament?

In Germany they need to get at least 5% of the votes. This was introduced because many small parties had made the parliament of the Weimar Republik unstable.

When New Zealand went shopping for a new electoral system in the 1990s, we ended up with one based closely on the German model, including the 5% threshold. The Israeli parliament was frequently pointed to as an Awful Warning of what would happen if we din't have the threshold.

Until 1992, Israel had a threshold of only 1%. Since then it has been repeatedly increased, and is now 3.25%. The parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe (CoE) recommends such thresholds be no more than 3%. [0] (Many member states defy this recommendation. Israel is considered non-European for the CoE's purposes, and therefore isn't a member state, but it is an observer. New Zealand is neither a member state nor an observer, but it does participate in some CoE conventions.)

The aforementioned thresholds are "formal" thresholds, but there are also "effective" thresholds, arising from district magnitude. In the absence of a single "at-large" (nationwide, in this context) district, districts need to be large to bring the effective threshold down even to 5%. (It depends on the seat-allocation method, but it could be about twenty representatives per district for a 5% effective threshold, and over thirty for a 3% effective threshold.)

Where the effective threshold is higher than the formal threshold, the latter has no effect. But where a parliament has districts with different numbers of representatives, districts can have different effective thresholds, so any formal threshold could have an effect in some districts and not in others. I believe this is the case in Czechia, Poland and Turkey (but I don't know whether the formal thresholds there apply nationally or at district level). On the other hand, the Netherlands has no formal threshold and a uniform effective threshold of only 0.67%. The effective threshold of Israel's Knesset would be less than 1%, but still greater than the Netherlands'.

[0] "58. In well-established democracies, there should be no thresholds higher than 3% during the parliamentary elections. It should thus be possible to express a maximum number of opinions. Excluding numerous groups of people from the right to be represented is detrimental to a democratic system. In well-established democracies, a balance has to be found between fair representation of views in the community and effectiveness in parliament and government." http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fil...

Now Benjamin Netanyahu is soon to be back in power. He's generally acknowledged to be a crook, but nobody else seems to be able to assemble a governing coalition. He's already been Prime Minister for 15 years.

Yeah, that guy has been around since forever. The only one I can think of that's been in power longer is putin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_state_leaders_...

Unless there are no minor parties outside of government, isn’t that offset by the risk of what they currently get from being in government being lost while the rest of government continues by bringing in one or more currently-out-of-government minor parties in exchange for prioritizing some of their priorities?

(Anyhow, there’s been extensive comparative study across established democracies and a number of positive outcomes, including greater public satisfaction with government, track with greater effecrivd proportionality.

You are correct in theory, it is certainly a technical possibility to avoid such a problem. In practice, this isn't done and isn't possible since the major factions are too at odds with each other to create such a situation. In particular, everyone in the center-left knows that there's no point in trying to cooperate with Binyamin Netanyahu because he is guaranteed to betray them and not uphold his part of whatever bargain they make. Everyone in the right knows that they can't cooperate with anyone outside of Binyamin Netanyahu because they'll be accused of being evil terrorist supporting leftists and will lose many votes in the next election.

The point I was making is that it is actually this dynamic (and the fact that it is legitimized enough that it is able to continue) that is causing issues and that whatever is creating it is the real problem. Proportional representation may be the superior system, but it is not the cure for the problems democracies are facing and so the specific system in use should not be blamed as the root cause of these problems and it is then in my opinion a contributing factor at best.

> In particular, everyone in the center-left knows that there's no point in trying to cooperate with Binyamin Netanyahu because he is guaranteed to betray them and not uphold his part of whatever bargain they make. Everyone in the right knows that they can't cooperate with anyone outside of Binyamin Netanyahu because they'll be accused of being evil terrorist supporting leftists and will lose many votes in the next election.

So, by your description, due to the polarizing influence of a particular personality (a—and I get that Netanyahu’s political longevity makes this east to forget—transitory situation) you have, despite (but not because of proportional representation) the dynamics of a two-party system with potentially influential potential defectors from a majority, rather than the normal dynamics of multiparty coalition building.

Guess what, that’s a fairly common state of FPTP independent of personalities; the potential defectors just aren’t conveniently marked with a different party label than the solid partisans.

Could you explain this a bit more? Surely if they are proportionally elected and have the numbers to outvote the current government, then they're representing the majority views, not minority?

In the UK, our government gets elected by winning 40% of the vote and therefore almost every decision it takes is against the wishes of the majority of voters.

PR should result in less of it, not more.

A simple majority may not be enough in certain cases.

Let's imagine a parliament with parties with these shares of seats (proportional to electoral votes): A = 50%, B = 33%, C = 15%, D = 2%. (Note: Not an actual Israeli parliament!)

Even for cases where a simple majority is sufficient, A would be able to overpower all other parties combined, had it one more representative. But with precisely 50% (or, funnier yet, something like 49.75%), it has to seek a coalition with at least one other party, even if every A representative is going to vote the same way (which is not a given). The smallest party, D, voting in an agreement with A, can turn tables with a guarantee; D's representatives will be courted by every other party, but by A's most of all.

For cases where a qualified majority, like 2/3, is required, a coalition is a must. A + C would narrowly miss it, and again D has an outsized influence. A + B would definitely make it, but usually A and B are opposed to each other. Thus the votes of C are worth more than their modest 15% of electorate represented.

OTOH B + C + D is enough to block any bill requiring a simple majority.

So C and D, which collectively represent 17% of electorate, will be able to command serious concessions from both A and B, which collectively represent 83%, but are usually opposed to each other.

(And no, something like A = 87% may be even worse.)

Electoral systems are very difficult to change. The party with enough votes to lead the change isn't going to be interested, because it's the system that put them in that position.

Edit: So we're talking electoral systems, referenda have a big caveat. Usually you vote a goal, but you don't vote how it's going to be implemented. The brexit was sold as a measure against Brussels' regulation and taxes...

The Uk had a referendum in 2011 to change the system and voted fairly conclusively to stick with first past the post.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternat...

That referendum was poison pilled with the “alternative vote” and sold to voters as a easy path to the BNP getting elected.

It was just as much party politics as the Brexit vote, not a genuine attempt at direct democracy.

And also the adverts of sick babies who would not get the funding they needed if the money was spent on implementating proportional representation. A similar lie was used to sell Brexit.

> And also the adverts of sick babies who would not get the funding they needed if the money was spent on implementating proportional representation

Proportional representation and ranked choice voting are orthogonal concepts. A referendum for ranked choice voting doesn't necessarily implement proportional representation.

No, but it would likely be more proportional than the current system in the UK where the last time a single party won a majority of the popular vote was 1931 and yet parties usually have a majority in parliament. Proportionality is not a binary thing. You can have more or less proportional systems of government based on the selection / election mechanic chosen.

Two points of note to add:

1. regulations around referendums (compared to general elections) are very poor and the "no to AV" campaign exploited this by running an extremely dishonest campaign [1]

2. turnout was < 50% of the electorate so one can somewhat facetiously imply from the result that the majority of the electorate don't care what the system is.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/feb/25/no-to-...

Worth remembering that the Tories only allowed the vote as part of the coalition deal, and then actively campaigned against it. The whole thing was a damp squib, and was designed to be

There was a referendum to change the voting system to Alternative Vote.

It's important to remember that the change on offer was itself deeply flawed. It was trying to apply a reasonable system for electing one person to elect a whole Parliament. However AV is not a form of proportional representation and would probably have resulted in an even less proportionate cohort of MPs at the following general election had the referendum result been the other way.

Some people were arguing at the time that it was a useful first step to establish popular support for the principle that FPTP had to go but others were arguing that AV was a poisoned chalice and voting for it implied that it was an acceptable alternative and would end the debate for a generation without really fixing the problem.

A lot of people who wanted PR saw the Alternative Vote referendum as a poison pill and voted against it. It's one of the reasons support for the Lib Dems subsequently crashed, as they were seen to have fundamentally sold out.

In any case, a referendum on whether to keep a fundamentally undemocratic electoral system is in itself undemocratic - there is no legitimate case for keeping an electoral system that effectively disenfranchises a substantial proportion of the electorate.

Democracy is remarkably robust and people fighting is not an indication that it is faltering. The UK has a long and proud history of tenuous balance between different groups that are all on the verge of doing violence to one another, the current era is remarkably peaceful and cooperative.

People are undercalling the effects of a multi-decade campaign against energy security in favour of environmentalist goals. The driver of the environment of cooperation post-WWII has been abundant cheap energy. That meant there was always a path forward where everyone was better off - which is no longer so obviously the case.

To be fair, it isn't just a policy problem. The UK is running out of fuel. But this article isn't going to the root cause of why people can't find an easy grow-the-pie solution to keep everyone working together.

https://www.britainremade.co.uk/

There are some grass roots efforts emerging to convince people of the importance of purely technocratic improvements that society needs. In this case, cheaper energy and faster transportation.

Absolutely none of that is true.

The UK has the highest energy prices of any country in Europe and - not coincidentally - its energy companies make the highest profits.

The UK could have promoted renewables, and did for a while. But the current government - like you - is actively hostile to decentralised solutions that work, and prefers to promote corporate choke points over energy supply that have put the entire population at risk of fuel poverty.

It's been the same story across most of the privatised industries. The concept of the common good has been replaced with an oligarchic dystopia in which a few corrupt winners shake down everyone else.

The root cause is neoliberal dogma, which has been aggressively promoted to the population since the 1970s. It was sold as "freedom". But it's only ever been used to justify increasingly extreme economic apartheid and incredibly poor strategic planning.

The UK is not a poor country. It's not even an energy poor country. But it's on course to having the poorest working population in Europe.

That's not the fault of windmills and solar panels, and it's disingenuous to suggest it is.

> It's not even an energy poor country.

Looking at the tabulated data [0], in 1965 the UK was roughly 200% the European average for per capita energy consumption. Now it is ~75% of the same. It has dropped in absolute terms too (dropped to ~75% of the 1965 figure). In fact, on a per-capita basis the UK is neck-and-neck with China. Nearly, actually it is slightly behind.

It looks a lot like an energy poor country.

> That's not the fault of windmills and solar panels, and it's disingenuous to suggest it is.

I'm not suggesting that. I assume it was decades of policy where people were asking "how do we kill off our cheapest source of energy", consistent with other western states. The UK - like everyone else - should have been focusing on how to secure cheap fossil fuels, how to bring down the cost of nuclear energy and loosening the regulatory state to accept that energy is needed despite NIMBYism. If the market says wind and solar are cheap then build those too, but only if they are cheap enough to make stand-alone economic sense.

Instead I suspect policy attempted to achieve an unachievable level of environmental non-interventionism and look like they are paying the price.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...

POSTSCRIPT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_electricity_production... - mission success! Fossil fuels being phased out without a ready replacement. A country becoming energy poor in one graph. Of course there'll be some political tension with these sort of fundamentals.

> in 1965 the UK was roughly 200% the European average for per capita energy consumption. Now it is ~75% of the same. It has dropped in absolute terms too (dropped to ~75% of the 1965 figure)...

> It looks a lot like an energy poor country.

I'm not sure that follows. Couldn't you also say "it looks a lot like an energy efficient country"?

The Core i7 in my laptop uses a fraction of the energy of the Pentium III in a desktop a couple of decades ago, but I certainly don't want to go back to the P3 today.

Do you reckon you have reduced your energy substantially since the 2000s? With no lifestyle compromises? A 25% drop is a lot more than a Pentium.

They're poor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#History covers most of the actual argument (and evidence) on why energy efficiency doesn't work that way. In an energy-rich environment the efficiency gains would go in to charging phones and tablets, or running extra cores and graphics cards. Or using electric vehicles. Something. Consumption wouldn't be dropping.

Personally, yes -- I have significantly smaller gas and electric bills despite being in a larger house in a colder climate as a result of better construction and insulation and more energy-efficient appliances. I also moved to a city where I can walk or bike for daily tasks so I fill up my (more fuel-efficient) car's gas tank about a quarter as often.

I'm not claiming this is the case generally across the UK -- I'm in the US and don't know the situation there. Just that it doesn't automatically follow that "I'm using less energy" necessarily equates to "less energy is available for me to use".

Heh, ouch. Hopefully that is a lesson to me in phrase my questions more carefully.

However, I don't think that is quite enough to show that Jevons' paradox has been avoided - you'll find that with the savings from paying less for heating and your car you have a bit more money left over - what happened to it? Because it represents the energy that was freed up. It isn't enough to say "Well I spent less energy on heating and petrol so total energy consumption went down". Maybe you consumed the energy as a capital good, or maybe it just got shunted to someone else to use.

It is really difficult to convince an economy to use less energy without some sort of legal or physical barrier. We'll find that you haven't actually caused a reduction in energy overall once the dust settles - because you haven't done anything to reduce the amount of energy production so it isn't obvious why it would have dropped.

The problem with your argument is that the energy cost of, say, charging a phone, is multiple orders of magnitude less than heating a room, and that in turn is many orders of magnitude from producing steel through recycling, and so on.

Comparable objects (a steel section produced in an arc furnace vs a steel section smelted from ore) have radically different energy requirements. If you legislate away the worst offenders (uninsulated houses) the raw drop in energy consumption is such that even if everybody starts leaving their lights on all the time, usage will still drop.

Here is a chart [0] of the UK's coal production over the last century+. And here is their oil production [1] forming the nice bell-curve-like plot of a country burning through their reserves. I'm sorry to be the one breaking the news to you, but trends like that have nothing to do with energy efficiency and everything to do with exhausting reserves.

In my opinion, they could probably have resisted this outcome by some judicious investment in making nuclear cheaper rather than getting distracted by the climate change nonsense. Maybe not, who really knows? Regardless these charts are the realities they face. The theory says they're running out of cheap energy, the stats indicate their running out of cheap energy. The decline in political quality suggest they're running out. Grumpy Brits flailing with things like Brexit suggest they're feeling some serious pressure to make changes. And unless something changes fairly radically, the UK has in fact become energy poor since circa 2008.

It could be worse, they'll probably survive. But coincidentally (<narrator: it wasn't a coincidence>), their GDP/capita has run in to a brick wall [2] and the effects from that'll be politically rocky. Democracy can cope.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Coal_Production.png

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Oil_Production.png

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

I think we're talking at cross purposes here. I read GP as saying that energy usage will always meet whatever capacity you can generate. I don't think that's true: if the economic return from energy usage doesn't cover the cost of producing the energy itself, then production will fall.

I also don't think the UK's role as a fossil fuel exporter/producer is relevant at all. The UK was essentially de-industrialized in the 80's for political reasons, and the energy usage is inefficient, also for political reasons. Many countries have never been fossil fuel exporters, and do not have the UK's sky high energy costs.

The biggest single cause of waste (and thus high prices) in the UK is uninsulated homes. This is caused by a lack of sensible building codes, which in turn is caused by a lack of sensible politics.

> . I also moved to a city where I can walk or bike for daily tasks so I fill up my (more fuel-efficient) car's gas tank about a quarter as often.

That's not an efficiency gain though, which is to his point.

This is one point out of many in their post.

I want to say - I did consider that as a counterargument but it is too weak. Moving closer to where your daily tasks take place is a reasonable way to make a lifestyle more energy efficient. It isn't necessarily a step down (why should we want to spend time in cars anyway?). It is potentially scaleable too, there are lots of examples of cities where people get packed in very tightly.

The issue is more that, while fader has demonstrated that they use less energy for heating and transport, they haven't actually demonstrated that they use less energy - what happened to the energy not going to those highlighted examples?

The key observation behind Jevons' paradox is that there is no reason for the aggregate energy production to go down just because some way of using energy gets more efficient. Since the payoff for the same amount of energy is higher, there is no economic incentive to produce less. Quite the opposite. Nothing in this example sits in contradiction to that, so there isn't a need to try and poke holes in a reasonable example of someone making their personal life more energy efficient to make the basic argument work. Plus there is the obvious practical evidence that economies only use less energy when there is an energy shortage, it is nigh impossible to find counterexamples that end well. The UK polity isn't acting like they have abundant free energy to play with.

Double or triple glazing, insulation, mandatory energy efficient building codes, fuel efficiency standards, energy efficient light bulbs.... 25% reduction is certainly plausible. I'm surprised it isn't more, but I guess some industries remain high consumers. The lifestyle compromise is more expensive buildings, which hurts at least in the short term.

The "neoliberal dogma" has made America the most prosperous country in the world. Your thesis doesn't compute.

Specifically it has made a small group of US citizens extremely rich.

As a country, looking at all citizens, the US isn't exactly a stellar example of wealth distribution, median outcomes, education, or health delivery.

except it really hasn't. America was dominant after WW2 and has mostly been costing downhill since. in the past 2 decades inequality has increased, life expectancy is stagnant, obesity is up, cost of healthcare and education is up. public transit is worse than it was in the 1950s. it's pretty hard too find a metric on which the US is doing better on than Europe at this point

Proportional representation also has its problems. Look at the Netherlands, which has 17 different parties in parliament and led to it becoming increasingly difficult to form coalitions, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021%E2%80%932022_Dutch_cabine...

Yes voters should just buckle down and vote for a big left/right party. Voters are getting too much democracy for their own good!

Agree. Look at democracies where two parties dominate. The choices look awful. Where is the center represented in UK and US?

The center is represented in the UK by Labour, and by the Democrats in the US. The left is not represented in either country.

In reality we don't really know where center lies in either country given the circumstance.

The “center” or “left” of what? The US is a country that’s as religious as Iran where a decisive majority disapprove of the Supreme Court’s ban on school prayer: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/13/south-carol.... It’s a country where 68% of Americans wouldn’t pay even $10 per month in energy bills to mitigate climate change: https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-pay-10-month-...

You might not approve of where the “center” is in the US, but Democrats absolutely represent the center left and republicans represent the center right of the actual American electorate.

Yes, but since the US is a more right-wing country than the rest of the developed world (healthcare, death penalty, taxes...), that would mean the Democrats are "centrist" and Republicans "right." Characterizing based on relativity to the developed world seems much more fitting, since we're discussing it between people mostly from other developed countries and in a thread about Britain.

Right wing on what measure?

With abortion restrictions in Europe, Europe looks further right than the US or Canada on that issue.

By all three measures I mentioned above?

When it comes to abortion, it's more of a wash. By one measure, US is now more decentralized, less federal gov., thus more right wing. 13 US states have complete elective abortion bans at all times, thus much more right wing. Most other US states have somewhat more lenient abortion laws, roughly ~6 weeks longer in general, thus more left wing.

If that's your best and only example, it only substantiates my case.

And Canada has no restrictions whatsoever on abortion.

Now do attitudes towards immigration and multiculturalism.

I’d argue Canada and the US are more “left” of Europe on that issue as well.

You brought up Canada, Canada being more left than US just furthers my point that US is more to the right than over developed countries. As to comparing European countries to the US on immigration; % of immigrants in the country

Switzerland: 29%

Sweden: 20%

Germany: 19%

Austria: 19%

Ireland: 18%

Belgium: 17%

Norway: 16%

Spain 15%

*US: 15%

Netherlands: 14%

UK: 14%

France: 13%

Denmark: 12%

Italy: 11%

US doesn't seem like any sort of above-average on your chosen metric either...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigrati...

The Democrats and Republicans already represent a range of the political spectrum, they aren’t monolithic.

And the US isn’t a Parliamentary democracy, so Congresspeople don’t have to vote along party lines (and often don’t).

I'm confused when you wrote "becoming increasingly difficult to form coalitions". Mark Rutte has been PM since 2010. Wiki says: "On 2 August 2022, he became the longest-serving Prime Minister in Dutch history..." Without specific examples that demonstrate a trend, the term "increasingly difficult" is editorial-speak. Also, look at NL economy for last 30 years. Looks pretty good compared to any other highly developed country. That is very difficult to do without a high functioning govt.

Yes politics is irrelevant what makes the Netherlands one of the best places to live is and always has been the economy.

Revolution happens when the bread runs out.

If that is what voters want, that is what voters should get.

Depriving voters of freedom to be represented the way they want because you don't like the outcome is fundamentally undemocratic.

Because the Tories will make things better? I mean they've had enough time at bat that it is obvious they can't.

Didn't the Tories run on making things worse 13 years ago (austerity)? Thanks to COVID, Brexit, and the war in Ukraine, they have succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

Actually no, they did not run on that. They ran on a platform of “sharing the proceeds of growth”, and then changed their mind after getting into office. I believe the outgoing minister left a (lighthearted?) note saying “I’m afraid there is no money left”, which was used as a partial justification.

08 financial crises the uk went full austerity and basically missed out on the economic boom.

US went on austerity too but it didn't stop them their economic boom.

Not true. The uk did, USA did not.

https://carnegieendowment.org/2011/03/24/tale-of-two-politie...

It is true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_Control_Act_of_2011

This is untrue: the austerity era did not begin until 2010, after the general election.

This was Germany's case for Tunisia's democracy. Tunisia ended up implementing a Proportional Representation system and I believe it's a good and well balanced system. On Paper.

Well, democracy in Tunisia imploded and exploded. So, yeah, be careful of things that look good on paper.

Honest question: did Germany have any say in Tunisia's voting system? Wasn't Tunisia a French protectorate? Do you mean more recently than 1956?

In any case, Tunisia is not the only country with PR. It's used a lot of places, including Germany (well, MMP, but pretty similar). Like any system it has advantages and disadvantages, but democracy in the Nordics hasn't imploded nor exploded...

> did Germany have any say in Tunisia's voting system? Wasn't Tunisia a French protectorate?

It's different, I think. Germany offered help (along with the EU) and Tunisia(ans) don't know any better so they took up the offer. Plus it was free help and free money. I don't think Germany or the EU had any malicious intentions, I think they truly wanted to help.

But big surprise: Tunisia is not a Nordic country! Apparently, what works there doesn't work here at all.

> Like in the US, democracy in the United Kingdom is faltering.

This is unfortunately not unique. India too has seen the rise of the right, and its democracy threatened and at a perilous stage. Many other countries have seen the rise of the right too. However, I feel this is a political pattern that can be observed historically and generationally, where the political spectrum switch between extremes of left and right, with brief periods of centrism. This can be observed in the last century too. The hard question is how long will this political effect last before we see it wane. Another question is how much the internet contributed to this and if we can do anything about it without trampling our rights.

When my side wins, democracy is healthy and vibrant. When the other side wins, it's faltering and corrupt.

Looking from outside, it honestly doesn't seem that's what's going on. Here in the Netherlands we have proportional representation, and while our democratic system does show signs of decay, it still feels way more healthier than the British one. Here we have 20 parties to choose from, which always leads to coalitions and compromises. Having to keep deciding between only two would feel incredibly constrained to me.

And I say this as someone who keeps voting, unsuccessfully, against our incumbent PM.

"democracy is under threat when people I don't like are democratically elected." Is it invisible to you how such statements are, themselves, bad for democracy?

The problem is that in many Western systems the people who gain power aren't democratically elected.

In a real democracy the big challenge should be how to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. However most of us aren't even getting that far because the people who gain power often don't even have the support or even acceptance of the majority.

You said

> In a real democracy the big challenge should be how to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority

But isn't that exactly what's happening? The minority (red) won against the majority (blue).

The grandparent is simplifying. The goal of a democracy is to respect the will of the majority while respecting the fundamental rights of the minority. If you're not doing the first step, respecting the will of the majority, then your democracy has already failed. A tyranny of the minority is strictly worse than a tyranny of the majority.

> A tyranny of the minority is strictly worse than a tyranny of the majority.

Not if the minority opinion is right. The ground truth matters.

Okay, how do you decide which opinion is right? Perhaps we'll... vote on it? You do see the problem here, yes?

We're talking about politics and democracy here. People will always have a diverse range of opinions on political issues where none of those opinions is objectively "right".

Hopefully one opinion that most would agree on is that in matters of fact any competent representative should pay attention to the knowledge and advice of experts.

The whole point of democracy is that we don’t agree on what’s “the truth” and who is “right” and need a process for deciding what to do notwithstanding those disagreements.

> In a real democracy the big challenge should be how to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority.

Protection of minorities has nothing to do with democracy, and is often anti-Democratic. In the west, minorities are increasingly being invoked by elites as pretexts for strengthening anti-Democratic institutions and overruling majorities.

Can you give an example? I'd suggest protections against "tyranny of the majority"/"mob rule" are a cornerstone feature of any successful democracy. The point is to ensure that it's not possible simply by force of numbers alone to elect governments who then enforce laws and implement policies that could significantly disadvantage any minority group.

The US Supreme Court is a good example. It sits as an elite Guardian Council that over the last century has overruled the public on numerous issues, ranging from contraception to abortion to same sex marriage to the death penalty. These rulings are not based on law but rather moral philosophy—specifically the libertarian moral philosophy of elites.

Protection of minorities is not a necessary feature of democracy. It’s a feature of a specific type of democracy. In the American system, it’s a feature that initially arose because elites sought to protect their property rights from the masses through constitutional checks on democracy.

Shadi Hamid at the Brookings Institute has done excellent work distinguishing “democracy” from “liberal democracy.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/us-democra...

Are you claiming overturning abortion laws was done on the pretext of protecting foetuses (who are a minority)?

Roe overturned abortion laws ostensibly to protect the minority of women who choose to have an abortion. In doing so, the justices replaced the moral philosophy of the public with their own moral philosophy.

Well if you really believe that then I assume you think they did the right thing by overturning Roe, so it seems like (in your eyes) it has a self-correcting mechanism in place. Except I gather that it's now the case that right-to-a-legal-abortion does actually have quite firm majority support from the polls that have been done? At any rate, I don't see either case as an example of the Supreme Court protecting minority factions against tyranny of the majority.

Protection of minorities has nothing to do with democracy, and is often anti-Democratic.

Exactly. And that means protecting minorities from abuse - particularly abuse caused by short-term or ill-informed policy making by politicians - is the big challenge facing any political system based on representative democracy. But before you can get that far you first need to have your representatives democratically elected in the first place and most of us don't right now.

In the west, minorities are increasingly being invoked by elites as pretexts for strengthening anti-Democratic institutions and overruling majorities.

Careful. Relatively few policies implemented by Western governments actually have a clear, verifiable majority of the public in support of them. For that you essentially need either a referendum or a clear result electing representatives on an explicit platform of implementing that policy and where that policy is known to be the deciding factor in voters' choice of representative.

For everything else in a representative democracy we elect our representatives usually based on some very narrow set of priorities and yet those representatives are entrusted with deciding on any government policy that requires a decision throughout their term of office. There is a very long tail of minor issues that can still profoundly affect the lives of many people yet where the representatives making the decisions certainly were not elected based on their position on those particular issues. Even on major issues situations will inevitably change during the term of office of elected representatives and their response to any emergency was almost certainly not something voters had an opportunity to consider before making their choice at the last election.

Representative democracy has obvious practical advantages over requiring direct democracy for every little decision any government ever makes but it also implies limitations on the democratic mandate granted to representatives and by extension on the legitimacy of any actions those representatives take on behalf of their electorate. Strong checks and balances are essential to keep representative democracy democratic. One common safeguard is to have constitutional rules about the most important policies where the powers of any current representatives to act in those areas are limited without going back to their electorate for a specific decision to change the foundational rules. Another is having a power of recall so that if the voters who elected a representative are unhappy with their actions then they can require a fresh election that might choose a different representative instead. Crucially both of those safeguards ultimately depend on an explicit decision by the entire electorate, which can and should be more powerful in a democracy than any decision by elected representatives.

"democracy is under threat when people ~I don't like~ who advocate the overturn of democracy are elected"

FTFY.

You really are not grasping how ubiquitously this concept is used. Biden has declared democratically elected people like Georgia Meloni and Victor Orban, and candidates like Marine le Pen to be dangers to democracy. It certainly isn't restricted to Trump. The fact that you jump to him shows how blind you are.

Democratically elected people can absolutely be a danger to democracy. I remember when Russia democratically elected Putin. In 5 years, all opposition TV channels were owned by the government and the oligarchs that chose subserviency over prison. In 10 years, elections were so blatantly fraudulent that voting became pointless.

Yeah but you don't see the problem with trying to influence the elections in Italy by obviously bad comparison between Georgia Meloni and Putin?

I don't see it as a bad comparison. Putin wasn't eating babies when he was first elected, either; but his background gave ample reasons for concern, which some people did voice at the time, and which was fully realized eventually.

You include Hilary Clinton in that? When she called Trump an “illegitimate president”?

We treat speech differently based on context. Yelling fire in the middle of the ocean with no one around is legally distinct from yelling fire in a crowded theater.

I would argue that without the intent or ability to act in a dangerous manner that this speech is legally distinct from the same statement with those qualifiers.

The realities of limited resources in our judicial system and common sense require us to make these distinctions.

The difference here, in my mind, is that Hillary Clinton was not able or intending to spur a grassroots coup that was dangerous to our Democracy based on her statements.

Why do you read Hilary’s comments in the best possible light and Trump’s in the worst?

Why the double standard?

Either calling into question our electoral system is ok or not ok.

It’s important we hold all people accountable equally.

What you’re seeing in India is democracy in action. Modi has the highest approval rating of any major world leader, nearly 80%: https://morningconsult.com/global-leader-approval. What you’re seeing is the majority of Indians overthrowing the minority of British-educated secular liberals that have ruled India since independence.

This is an excellent analysis of what’s happening in India: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial... (“The last of the post-partition generations are passing on, to be replaced by an indigenous leadership class more parochial and rooted in the subcontinent. The modern Indian culture war is a reflection of the decline of a once-secure, outward-looking cosmopolitan Western elite in the face of a rising Hindu nationalist movement, one that is relatively insular and inward looking. India is maturing, becoming culturally more self-confident, and shedding its post-colonial skin.”).

> What you’re seeing in India is democracy in action. Modi has the highest approval rating of any major world leader ...

If you think democracy is only about winning elections, then Hitler was a great democrat too.

> India is maturing, becoming culturally more self-confident, and shedding its post-colonial skin.

You mean the current indian leaders prefer to live in the past, fantasising about its glorious history while preferring to blame all its misgivings on "foreigners" to repress their feelings of insecurity with an equally dysfunctional sense of superiority complex?

How would Starmer needing to accommodate for instance, the Lib Dems on every position, be an improvement on this? Take the issue of housing policy for instance. Britain urgently needs more houses, but the Lib Dems turn up at every local election and by-election on a NIMBY platform.

The same for building new energy infrastructure- the Lib Dems famously blocked the building of new nuclear plants ‘because they wouldn’t be online until 2021/22’. The evidence of the Coalitions we’ve had is that they overall lead to pretty terrible decision making, and indecisive government on the whole.

Can't deny the issues with housing policy.

I feel your point on nuclear only paints half the picture. During their time in the coalition the Lib Dems did push for an expansion of wind power, with the subsequent ban on on-shore wind coming after their demise in the 2015 election. Also, the number of solar installations dived after the Lib Dems were dispatched with and the subsidies were removed.

In terms of "terrible decision making, and indecisive government" I believe this is a better description of all that has come to pass after the coalition with only a single party in power.

I understand your point. 'First past the post' may not be ideal for your country. For other countries, it is appreciated despite its inconveniences. Example: Québec. We inherited 'first past the post' from England. The results are obvious: small parties with significant numbers of voters in many ridings don't end up in parliament. But Québec is a rural province with only one city worthy of the name, Montréal, almost half the population of the province. That city has a demography very different to the rest of the province. In a proportional system, the will of the big city would simply sweep away the rural regions that don't have the same weight. People have learnt to accept 'first past the post' and any change would upset the balance that exists today.

I don't know if you've fully considered the alternatives here. Alternatives like Approval or even RCV (which admittedly has its own issues) don't at all weaken the rural vote here. Approval means all those rural parties can be voted for instead of having to be consolidated and also increases the chance that some city folk will vote for them. RCV allows rural people to vote for the longshot candidate they ACTUALLY want while making sure their vote isn't thrown away when their candidate does lose

This "balance" you're speaking of only benefits the duopoly that's developed BECAUSE of the FPTP system.

Organizations are like organisms. Organisms don't only have to replicate their DNA to be successful—they also need to replicate their environments (e.g. buffalo and elephants protected grasslands from being overrun by woodlands, pine forests making wildfires more common, etc). In this case these parties both have disproportionate power because of FPTP and are both interested in maintaining this "balance"

I appreciate your suggestions but would really need to see some simulations to digest the potential effects. Not that my opinion counts for much but it's always good to suggest alternatives when one criticizes. That said, the duopoly isn't always so bad historically. Many cases of individual candidates who broke party lines or walked the fine line. It depends to a great degree on party discipline or the lack thereof.

You could look at Australia (which has multiple "rural" parties), and which uses RCV (called preferential voting here).

you're probably asking for historical examples. Tbh I lack the knowledge of the specific politics of Montréal to think of the best comparisons, but if you want a more abstract toy to play around with the large variety of different voting systems available, I've made a toy just for that:

https://votevote.page/

sorry for the self-plug

You should do a Show HN for this actually

awh thanks :)

Maybe I will, but I've had this update pending (see preview here[0]) that adds some major algorithms that any self-respecting voting theory nerd would expect to see. I started my first software job right as I was wrapping that up though and never fully got through with it. Maybe this winter break I'll have time tho... I'd like to have that update out before sharing it more loudly

[0]: https://dev--votevote.netlify.app/

The problem with what you describe is that it doesn't merely prevent large areas from dominating the smaller; it actually allows the smaller areas to gang up and impose policies on the majority. Tyranny of the majority sucks, but tyranny of the minority is even worse.

In the case of my small example: I am the rural vote so I don't see our collective force as tyranny of course. As long as basic rights are respected. Ours is a case of a region with specific identity and interests not shared by the single metropole so a purely proportional result is not ideal from our perspective. But I understand your point.

If the goal is to prevent the metropolitan area from unilaterally imposing itself on the rest of the province, all you really need for that is some kind of veto power. For example, a bicameral legislature in which one chamber is elected through some proportional system and actually writes laws, and the other one that represents all the various interest groups (under whatever representation formulas people find agreeable) and approves them.

> But Québec is a rural province with only one city worthy of the name, Montréal, almost half the population of the province. That city has a demography very different to the rest of the province. In a proportional system, the will of the big city would simply sweep away the rural regions that don't have the same weight. People have learnt to accept 'first past the post' and any change would upset the balance that exists today.

That's a very long-winded way of saying "some people's votes are weighted more than others", which is an inherently undemocratic principle.

Sure, I won't argue semantics. I and many others don't want a democracy that relegates us to an anachronistic minority.

> "some people's votes are weighted more than others", which is an inherently undemocratic principle.

Has there ever been, in the history of human civilization, any self-styled democracy that did not weigh the votes of some people more the votes of others? Whether by sex, gender, race, wealth, education, criminal status, party membership, age, or status as an elected official, I'm pretty sure every single democratic state has continuously subscribed to some non-uniform distribution of vote weights.

With modern technology, it maybe possible to create a truly direct and equal system where newborns have the ability to ratify trade deals, but this might not be desirable.

“Democracy” isn’t a unidimensional system. It’s a balance of many competing concerns. In particular, a key variable is not merely who wins the majority, but who votes. It wouldn’t placate Ukranians to say that if they became part of Russia, their vote would count just as much as a Russian’s. Simply winning 50%+1 isn’t sufficient. People must be willing to be bound into a body politic with other people to begin with.

Different voting mechanisms, along with federal systems, are a way of balancing those competing concerns. They allow you to form a larger body politic that would not necessarily be willing to be bound together in a simple “majority rules” system.

There are numerous ways to implement PR. The problems you mention can be avoided.

2015 was a disaster we never recovered from. Millions of voters voted for real change, and got ignored. But then the party who DID actually win the election pandered to those voters to try and win them over. We ended up with Brexit and a whole host of other related problems with populism, etc.

I blogged about it here at the time, in case anyone's interested: https://tinyurl.com/39r8r3rr

Isn't a parliamentary system effectively proportional representation? It's just prime minister that's first past the post, but from a proportional vote in parliament?

Labour is not going to save Britain. They are just going to redistribute money that is more and more and more "not there" anymore. The EU is not going to save Britain, they are having a crisis too. Nothing will save Britain, it is doomed for the next couple hundred years or so.

> Isn't a parliamentary system effectively proportional representation?

Not necessarily. Imagine a country with four parties. In each constituency, they respectively get 40%, 30%, 20%, and 10% of the vote. Under FPTP, parliament is made up of all reps from the 40% party, shutting out other voters. Under PR, depending on variety you'd get results closer to the distribution of the votes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation

But I don't think that's how it works? I think parliament works proportionally?

See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_the_United_Kingd...

It is not the case that the conservative party got all the seats.

Imagine there were 100 constituencies, and in every one party A secured 51% of the vote and party B got 49%. Under our current system, party A would have all 100 seats, and party B would have no representation at all; whereas under PR, A and B would (simpisticly speaking)split seats 51-49.

Worse, imagine that in 51 constituencies A gets 51% of the vote, and in 49 it gets 0% of the vote. This gives A a majority in parliament even though voters as a whole prefer B nearly 3-to-1.

Why do people criticise FPTP using these hypothetical scenarios that do not resemble the actual outcomes.

Because they do resemble the actual outcomes. The 2 major parties in the UK regularly get majorities in Parliament on far less than 50% of the vote. In the USA gerrymandering has been brought to a fine art. How can this not contribute to discontent, when the majority of people get a government they didn't vote for?

Exactly. A good example in the US is Wisconsin, where FPTP has been exploited heavily. See the top graph here: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-most-serious-c...

It’s not like they’d be content with a deadlocked parliament where the ‘government’ they voted for can’t enact any policies. It’s good that there’s two dominant parties, both fairly central, who continually moderate their policies to keep high levels of support, and after an election, one of them gets to actually govern.

First past the post means that everyone who didn't vote for the "winner" is ignored. No representation in their democracy.

As the other comment said, a party can in theory get 100% of the seats/power with 51% of the vote.

FPTP was more relevant when local politics mattered and local MPs actually made a difference to lives in their local area.

Post-war the only decision making that matters is at the national level which FPTP cannot represent fairly.

OP is using the term loosely, but the issue is with FPTP a candidate can win with one vote over 1/n percent of the vote. So if there are 10 candidates the winner need only 10% of the vote plus 1 vote to win.

That's an impoverished version of democracy.

Scaling effects matter. In practice there are many parties but most of the votes go to two of them.

And so the big parties have a disproportionate advantage. That's why there's no push from either of them to change the system and why it ends up essentially being a scam for the big parties.

The big parties continually moderate their positions so that about half the population wants to vote for them.

>Now that the implications are becoming clear, a majority want to return to the EU

Why not simply have regional votes to separate from the UK and join the EU?

Scotland tried not that long ago.

Our legacy governments make this very difficult.

Sadly, while many of our governments readily adopted the concept of representative democracy, they retained other oppressive aspects of the ancient systems which they replaced. The old monarchies claimed a right to rule their subject peoples in perpetuity, deriving their power directly from God. Our modern governments claim the same thing! Instead of that divine right flowing directly from God to the state, it flows from God, through your forbears who created the government, to the state. Isn't that slick? They derive their legitimacy from man's divine right to choose his own government, while simultaneously denying that YOU have such a right! It's the 'ole divine right to rule with extra steps.

So while you can choose who controls your government via democratic means, you'll have a helluva time choosing a new government, since the old government will waive the crusty old document that your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather signed and say that you are committing treason.

See the Catalan independence movement[0], or the official position of the UK government on the most recent Scottish independence referendum[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_independence_movement [1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/11/23/u...

Not saying it's worked out perfectly, but the US Declaration of Independence must count among those crusty old documents, and its preamble explicitly declares that throwing off such a government is the right and duty of the governed (admittedly preceded with some couching from "Prudence, indeed...").

True, true! I didn't mean to imply anything negative about old, crusty documents in general! Especially the ones, like The Declaration, that serve to clarify and bolster our common understanding of our natural human rights.

Because the voting map looked like this, and the UK just can't do that kind of subdivision:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/Un...

Also, look how narrow the margins are on that scale bar. Most of those regions would need to be further subdivided, and the whole of the UK would end up like Baarle-Nassau: Baarle-Nassau https://maps.app.goo.gl/aRn73rm1cz2fHznt7?g_st=ic

> Because the voting map looked like this, and the UK just can't do that kind of subdivision

The UK has plenty of experience drawing partition lines in other countries. I have full faith that they could manage it here if they tried.

Looking at the map, these would even be very clean lines by British standards.

The British Empire certainly did have a lot of experience of that, but it wasn't exactly good for the people on the ground where that had been done. One of those partition lines led to a 30-year low-intensity civil war that only ended in 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles

Another now has both sides pointing nukes at each other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India

> If Labour win the next election their position will be very fragile, and I’m unsure they will get more than one term.

This is my expectation, the Conservatives will have been able to "clean house" and remove a significant number of MPs who now have too much baggage. I expect a Labour government to struggle through the end of a recession, and have significant infighting.

The conservatives will capitalise on that and could take back control.

I just really hope Labour push through significant electoral reform in their first term.

I believe this is a common trend through the west. Here in Canada the current Federal Liberals won the last two election with about 30% of the vote which when you take into account how many people even vote amounts to something like ~5 million people in a country close to 40 million. The kind of overarching policies and rhetoric coming out of government is widely disproportionate to that level of mandate.

The Liberals are in a coalition with the NDP, combined the two parties received a majority of the popular vote.

A better example would be Doug Ford in Ontario. Ford's Conservatives received only 41% of the popular vote but took 67% of the seats.

The First Past The Post System needs to be retired, it is anti-democratic. Either run-offs or a ranked ballot voting system would be better.

Approval voting or proportional representation would be better, but sure

Yup. In France Macron hold total power with less than 30% of voters and less than 30% of good opinion in polls. His "pension reform" has everyone against it, the unions, all political parties but his own, even the employers association, but it will be enforced anyway. Democracy is dead, and it even began to smell.

Curious to see what HN's opinion on mandatory voting is. We have that in Australia and the sense is that it tends to dull the extreme fringes of the party platforms since they need to broadly appeal to the mainstream.

It is hard to disentangle the temperament of the populace from the voting system.

The UK and all former settler colonies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) all have very stable politics and that generally appeal to the median voter. None of them really have any extreme political incidents in living memory that I can think of. (maybe a few extreme incidents by their own standards but on a global standard they are still tame)

"former settler colonies". US and South Africa do not count? How about Latin America vis-a-vis Spain and Portugal?

I thought it was implied but I meant former settler colonies of the UK specifically.

The USA could be included and does have overall remarkably stable politics compared to most of the world. I didn't include it due to the length of time it has been separate from the UK, however there was substantial emigration from the British Isles to the USA in the 19th century with the settling of the West (more British went to the USA in the 19th century than Canada/Australia/NZ/South Africa combined and served as a 2nd large wave of Anglofying influence on the nation). I would lump it in with the other nations I mention as having overall extreme stable politics and high adherence to political norms that can be broadly characterised as the "Anglo model of politics".

South Africa is a bit of a unique case. Due to the Apartheid system it never had any of the sort of political stability that characterises the politics of the other nations mentioned.

The political culture of Spain/Portugal is massively different from the UK (especially at the time of the colonisation of the Americas) and the model of politics in the nations of South America is very different as a result.

Mandatory voting in a proportional representation electoral system feels like the best way to me. You can't force people to vote when their vote can end up worthless like with first past the post.

Not sure if you have PR or FPTP in Aus.

Neither, it's essentially a type of ranked voting that is often referred to as "two party preferred" on the assumption that for any seat, it will go to one party or the other, and it's likely to be one with the highest first+second preference count (not exactly how it works, but you can find the details online easily enough. A fairly typical scenario is that the ALP might have something like 40% of the 1st preference votes and the Liberals 45%, but the 2nd preference votes overwhelmingly favour the ALP and they take the win). There hasn't been any serious discussion over the need to revisit mandatory voting (personally I don't think it should be over a certain age - there's an argument those over 75, who are making up an increasingly larger percentage of the population, have undue influence on selection of a government whose job should be to put forward policies etc. that determine the long-term future of our country, which is of far more relevance to those who'll be alive to see it. I imagine once I'm past 75 I wouldn't be so concerned with voting in every election on that basis. But I'll admit it's not something I feel particularly strongly about.)

It's simply ranked choice voting (aka IRV) for the house. "Two-party preferred" is a system used by polls and news to try to convey how they think the runoff voting will play out, by picking the two candidates most likely to come first and second and showing their expected final tally.

The system used varies across the different jurisdictions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare%E2%80%93Clark_electoral_s..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Australi... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote#Austr... cover the majority of systems we have (most of the differences/changes are subtle, see https://antonygreen.com.au/inclusive-gregory-another-serious... for example).

I'm always going to be against adding more force and coercion. People are way too quick to reach for that as a solution to every purported problem.

I also think many of the people who are forced to vote will do so with the least effort possible and will keep voting for the same party they (and probably their parents) have always voted for without thinking too much about it or doing any research.

Proportional voting doesn't have to mean tyranny. Make the very first option on the ballot "I don't approve of any of the candidates here", and if it wins another election is held and nobody from the prior ballot is allowed to be listed.

Agree with this, the experience of workplace Covid mandates has left a permanent distaste in my mouth that will likely never leave.

I think the Greek way of choosing elected officials - randomly - within some reasonable sampling criteria, i.e. no criminal record, sound mind, at least >=X age would be better at this point. Professional roles such as city attorney can have corresponding pools of possible candidates.

It's like when you have an actively bad betting strategy, it would actually improve your performance to bet randomly.

  >  Australia and the sense is that it tends to dull the extreme fringes of the party platforms

even if thats true... you still have the overton window [0] to worry about (slowly lurching in one direction or another towards extremism)

still though, i feel its more fair if 99% rather than 30% of the people decide how they want to run their country

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

> Democracy is dead, and it even began to smell.

what's your solution?

We need better representation, and for instance designate Senators from random draw from the voters pool to make it a proposition force.

Also we need to dismantle most of the constitutional changes of the past 30 years, which created several layers of pretend democratic assemblies (city, metropolis, department, region) that nobody understands nor care about, and are only useful to feed a large crowd of professional politicians.

And most important, we must dismantle the rampant control of these by the state through the nationalisation of taxes. Almost all local taxation which used to be defined and voted by the city councils, departmental assemblies etc have been taken over by the state, which nominally redistributes the money but keeps control of it, effectively killing all local democratic processes and politics.

They had to coalition with another party to form a government with over 50% of the seats. It's more democratic than straight FPTP.

> Instead it requires Labour to be a very broad house

This is a severe disconnection from reality, the Labour party is totally ideologically possessed. 52% of the population voted for Brexit and not a single Labour MP supports it. Not a single Labour MP would ever dream of criticising the NHS system. Not a single Labour MP said a bad word about BLM.

The Conservative party are so broad they have everything except actual conservatives.

This is complete nonsense.

Quite a few Labour MPs supported Leave [0].

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Leave

Especially Corbyn, though of course he couldn't "support it" outright because that would mean agreeing with Tories (and he couldn't oppose it outright without angering a lot of Labour members)

Another rewrite of history. He backed Remain.

Very reluctantly, and probably against his own better judgment, at least that was the impression he created.

I agree, pre-referendum he backed Remain, but after that his position was not so firm https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-corbyns-ch...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/22/jeremy-corb...

Did he? Any support he gave was so tepid, I barely noticed.

He made more media appearances than Alan Johnson who was running Labour’s Remain campaign.

Corbyn is a lifelong Eurosceptic who voted against every expansion of EU power that came before him in his entire ~30 year career as an MP pre-2016. He only "opposed" Brexit in 2016 because he had to.

Electorate has moved on since Brexit has actually happened, even if the number who would vote differently given what they know today is much smaller than you might expect given how few think it was done well.

Labour's highest poll result this year was 57%, which is kinda nuts even given who was PM at that point — 20 Oct, Omnisis: https://www.omnisis.co.uk/media/1133/vi-005-full-tabs-201020...

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