David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election | Hacker News Reader

David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election

bbc.co.uk

27 pointsjjar47 comments

Relevant to some here (and really every internet user), Cameron started his election campaign with a pledge to "ban encryption" if he was re-elected:

  - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30778424

  - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/01/david_camerons_.html

  - http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/16/obama-sides-with-cameron-in-encryption-fight/

I for one, will fight passionately against this, if he has the stupidity to bring it up again.

This makes no sense to me.

Ulster Unionist Party had 114,935 votes and got two seats. UKIP had 3,841,346 votes and got one seat. Conservative had 11,207,547 votes and received 326 seats.

It's broked. The party in power rarely see it as broked. Ergo, no proportional representation.

It still does not make any sense though. How is it possible that the amount of seats a party get seem so pseudo random?

Because it depends on geography as voting in the UK is based on who you vote for your local MP.

If UKIP's four million votes were entirely within 20 or 30 constituencies, they'd have won them all. But because their votes are spread out across the entire country, other parties pick up those seats instead.

The parties that do best are either those that get a ton of votes everywhere, or those that dig in and solely focus on specific locations where they can get a majority (the Lib Dems used to be good at this).

In short: The First Past the Post Voting system.

The Ulster Unionists will get that many votes but in a small number of seats in Northern Ireland. The Conservatives might just win by a small amount but in a large number of seats, each of which translates directly to an MP in Parliament.

For anyone who hasn't watched them , I can wholeheartedly recommend CGP Grey's "Politics in the Animal Kingdom"[0] videos for an brief overview of why FPTP voting is as bad as it seems.

[0] http://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom/

Suppose you have 20 districts, each electing its own MP, and each with exactly four citizens. One citizen in each votes UKIP, one votes Labour, and two vote Conservative. Conservatives will win 20 seats, despite getting only 50% of the national vote, and the other parties will have none despite getting 25% each.

You've got 650 marginal elections where people can only pick one party - and not a coalition through prioritized votes. Compare this to the US where each congressional election is usually between two or three candidates/parties.

This makes forecasts primed for surprises due to margins of error alone, not including other factors.

It's not random at all, it's just that the national vote doesn't factor at all (only the vote in each seat does).

It has the (often overlooked, IMO) benefit of a strong 1:1 connection between constituent and MP: even if you didn't vote for the MP, a majority of your neighbours did, and the MP is still your representative in parliament. Organising locally to boot out your MP is much, much simpler than organising nationally to shift balances of power. That has got to be a factor in keeping MPs (more) honest.

In PR, you can be in the deeply problematic situation that you like candidate A and dislike candidate B from party X, but you vote for A actually ends up going to B - in effect, you can only really vote for a party, not a particular candidate. This is a significant shift of power to the parties as they generally control (or heavily influences) who runs where and how the ranking that controls "spill-over" votes will end up. Parties are often run opaquely, through back-room deals and patronage, not terribly democratically.

The existence of "safe seats" in the current FPTP system, into which parties can (and do) parachute their key players makes your take on FPTP too optimistic. See my comments elsewhere for links about voting systems, already in use in the UK, that seek to balance local representation and proportionality. PR (and FPTP for that matter) can encompass a variety of actual voting systems with important differences between them.

I did not mean to imply that FPTP is flawless, it certainly is not - merely that it has some benefits and PR has some drawbacks that often get overlooked in the pursuit of "numerical fairness".

We had a referendum on changing the voting system in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vot...

The change was rejected 68% to 32%.

Some context though:

* the alternative was a bit rubbish, only a minor improvement to the status quo, compared with the systems already successfully in use in Scotland and Wales which combine local representation with PR.

* both main parties and their tame press convinced people that it would basically lead to a combination of anarchy, communism and fascism in order to maintain their hold on power at the expense of democracy.

The "tame press". Seriously?

Yes, seriously.

If you don't believe me, what about David Axelrod:

"POLITICO: But what about the press? You say it has disproportionate power here. Do you think Britain’s conservative print media is more powerful than Fox News?

DA: Yeah, I do. I do think the parties approach media as partisan players. So you see parties disseminating messages through the print media in a way that is unusual.

DA: Fox is certainly very conservative, skews to the Republican side, but there isn’t a kind of lockstep between them and the Republicans. Fox tries to drive the Republican agenda more than reflecting it.

Here there are relationships between the parties and media outlets that are deeper so you see a lot of themes being previewed in the media in a way that you don’t see in the states.

POLITICO: Did you know what you were getting into?

DA: We discussed this when I signed on … I’ve worked in aggressive media environments before but not this partisan."

http://www.politico.eu/article/the-axelrod-exit-interview/

"Partisan" is very different from "Tame".

In certain usages "tame" and "partisan" are basically synonyms meaning "on your side" or "part of your team". "Tame" is particularly used when the assumption is that they wouldn't be partisan but in fact are.

Yes - "Tame" implies that you are not biddable by merely one special interest group, but by anyone willing to throw their weight around. A rather stronger accusation.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-...

The media tried very hard to make this sound complicated and scary. Ignoring its how the major parties elect their own leaders. [needs source]

Frankly changing the voting system would require everyone that votes to understand the implications of the system itself. From what I remember talking about the AV people would think of one thing that's different, call it a problem and no amount of explaining would matter.

An obscure note, parties do use AV to select their leaders, and for that purpose it's actually pretty good since there's only one position to fill. In a parliamentary election, adding some PR like in the devolved Scottish and Welsh assemblies makes more sense, and means AV was only a tiny improvement.

http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/additional-member-system

http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/alternative-vote

That's the 'first-past-the-post' system at work here. Sadly it's unlikely to change anytime soon :(

Well, at least there won't be too much overspending. So it worked out well this time.

Any democratic system is flawed - e.g. letting both tax-generators and tax-consumers vote.

Unionists are in the majority in the geographical areas of those two seats (the Northern Irish population is still a little segregated). UKIPpers are not in the majority anywhere (except Clacton, maybe!) but are spread across the entire country.

What's interesting from a game theory point of view is to have so many different parties with a FPTP electoral system.

You would expect a two party system.

It was, until this election, essentially a two and a half party system, with some other parties in Northern Ireland.

Its a matter of what exactly you want to represent in your government.

If you want to represent political parties then First Past the Post is horrible and seats by percentage is what you want. That would mean that their is really no reason to represent local needs since you really need to run a full country campaign and will probably pick dense packed areas to spend advertising.

If you want the geographic region (however you define it) to have a representative then the opposite is true. First Past the Post means they have to campaign locally if they want to get in. Percentage of seats by party means local campaigning is just a bit of nostalgia and a waste of campaign money.

It comes down to what do you value and what relationship you want between the voter and national government.

As a Swede without any insight into UK politics other than recent surveillance reports and internet censorships from the UK I can only say that this is disappointing for me.

It may be a shock, but surveillance played approximately zero part in these elections. They were fought primarily on the economy, with side orders of social security etc.

I get that you consider those to be important, but they were waaaaaaaay down the list in importance.

I posted on HN a while ago saying that there was no chance of this happening. Obviously it did and I was wrong, but I still don't think it's a big win for the conservatives.

Two or three things happened that undermined the competition and swung it imo;

1) SNP won big in Scotland

Although the SNP has pretty much pulled the policy sheet from labour and added a few Scotland specific things in, the vast majority of seats they took were from labour. Fears of the SNP deciding politics in Westminster also diminished labour support in England. For example, I vote labour but am pro-union so could never support the SNP directly or indirectly. Therefore I can't vote labour.

In a sense they were damaged by their own success, their whole plan was hinged on being the kingmaker for labour which actually instead of hooking onto labour support, actually cut labour support (drastically).

2) The crushing of libdems.

The lib dems lost 50 or so seats, a crushing defeat but a big loss was expected. The thing is, most of those seats flipped conservative, so we voted to punish libdems and the conservative party profited the most from it.

3) UKIP leveler

At the outset, Labour was set to be split by the SNP, and the conservatives split by UKIP. While the first happened (SNP won a lot of seats), the latter did not. UKIP did not make a lot of headway (for good reason probably). FPTP while it does have its flaws, does tend to keep "hated" parties out. Given the choice between conservative and UKIP most people vote conservative (tactically).

tl;dr scotland voted conservative, and we hated libdems more than tories

Interesting that Liberal Democrats still have larger % of votes than Green Party after all that happened.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but I get the sense that many left-wing Labour voters who might support them avoid voting Green (especially in the last two elections) for fear of "wasting" their vote.

It would be interesting to see if that ever changed under a different electoral system (like the buried AV, or PR), but I'm not sure that we're going to see such a change any time soon. A party that got a real majority on just under 40% of votes cast isn't likely to wipe away that victory with electoral reform.

But considering how high UKIP's vote was, despite returning only one MP, there may be more pressure to explore that idea again.

Many here voted lib dem in a bid to keep the Tories out, but would rather have voted green. We're a Tory seat for the first time in decades. Ho hum.

This also happened in my constituency

As an American, I wonder what the dominance of SNP in Scotland will mean.

What's the significance of being an American in your wondering?

"As an American" has apparently become a euphemism for "I know nothing about the subject, so explain this to me like you would to a small child".

It means I read the papers but make no special claims to regional understanding. Sheesh.

Just a joke, lighten up.

I think he's indicating that he might have as nuanced an understanding of what that may mean as someone from say, the UK or Scotland.

It seems they went all in on becoming king-maker to a Labour minority government. That didn't work out.

I see two possibilities:

1: They try to keep up the energy kick and scream bloody murder at every turn, but never achieve anything, as they have exactly zero leverage to affect anything in Westminster. They fizzle out, and nothing much happens and things return to normal. Their big shot, independence referendum, has been fired and can't credibly be reloaded and re-fired anytime soon. Even Nicola Sturgeon admits this.

2: They get down to business and negotiates as a serious counterpart for actual regional political influence. This means getting their hands dirty on actual politics and compromise and at least toning down the Tory-hate-rhetorics, which could prove a very bitter pill to swallow for their base. See: Liberal Democrats, 2010-2015.

They got "their hands dirty on actual politics and compromise" as (intially a minority) government in Scotland, and have continued to gain support ever since. I believe Alex Salmond was one of few political leaders ever to leave with a higher approval rating than when he started.

Apologies if you already knew that, but there's a lot of commentary about recently that seems utterly ignorant of those facts.

It's probably worth reflecting on your words here too: "never achieve anything, as they have exactly zero leverage to affect anything in Westminster". That's a double edged sword for people who want to keep the union together for the benefit of all.

Getting their hands dirty in Westminster after the heavily anti-Tory (and anti-Labour, too) campaign is quite different from doing the same in Holyrood. I lack the required insight, but was local Scottish campaigns ever that aggressive?

Unionists leaders would certainly do well to make sure the Scots feel part of the union - but with a SNP in scenario one, Westminster is unlikely to be the venue for that.

They could work directly with Holyrood on efforts, or work directly through non-devolved powers.

The Labour party has adopted something referred to as "The Bain Principle" which means they voted against anything that the SNP voted for, even ideas that they initially supported or suggested themselves.

That's fairly aggressive.

Meanwhile the SNP where working together with the Tories in the devolved parliment to get things done (despite popular lore, there are actually Conservatives in Scotland and with PR they get a proportionate number of votes in the running of the parliament).

> one of few political leaders ever to leave with a higher approval rating than when he started

Clinton, who else?

Optimistically it will mean a prompt for the UK as a whole to have a constitutional shake-up, with the House of Lords abolished and replaced with some kind of regional assembly, more devolution within England, federalism, and some kind of PR system introduced mostly to undermine the SNP but accidentally making the voting system better. It may make leaving the EU less likely, as the knock-on effect may be the break up of the UK so that Scotland can remain in the EU.

Pessimistically, it means an acrimonious break-up of the UK to the detriment of both sides, though that depends as much on what the Conservatives have planned as what the SNP wants and is able to do.

Devolution within England will be disasterous for the NHS, thus likely to happen.

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