The PR Problem

ndm

-- Labour only won 35% of the vote at the last election yet ended with 356 seats. The Tories took 32% and won just 198 seats. That produced a clear result, for sure, but hardly one that accurately represented the collective will of the people.

The impact of first past the post is, of course, far greater for the Lib-Dems who got almost 2/3 the votes of the Labour Part but just over 1/6 of the seats.

Given teh manifest failures of its governments, Israel would probably be better off with a Belgian government.

ben

Of course, it's a bit tricky to call a system "proportional" when a lot of people under Israel's de facto rule are treated as a good deal less than voters and something less than people.

A proportional vote held by all the people who are ruled by Israel would have an interestingly different outcome.

Kevin Barry

'Of forms of government let fools protest/Whatever is best administered is best'

Who says Alexander Pope isn't down with the kids?

cuffleyburgers

Given the abject failure of all recent attempts to reform aspects of Britain's constitutional arrangements, I would resolutely oppose tinkering with the voting system.

It only matters because government nowadays is so blessed big, and determined to interfere.

Government was not noticeably worse when women or the poor were disenfranchised. We still managed to beat the French, the Spanish, and build an empire that was the envy of the world and run it with 10000 civil servants.

Nowadays it seems to take some 2000000 public servants to (mis)manage our one small country despite office automation, email, photocopiers, and whilst we appear to be better off, the actual improvement is only proportional to the general increase in wealth and improvements in health care and so on.

Reduce government back to the basics, maximum 100000 on the public payroll plus the armed forces, obviously, and an end to the creeping authoritarianism we have seen so spectacularly under blair and brown, and nobody will give a monkeys which party has prime minister, since it won't be run as a "democratic " tyranny.

In fact professional politicians shouldn't even exist. Parliament should only meet two days a week.

ndm

It might benefit Israel if the country had a rule requiring residence as a condition of standing for election. Avigdor Lieberman, leader of "Our Home Israel" doesn't even live there. As a Moldovan-born Israeli-transferee, he lives (in violation of International law) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. One of the answers in Human Rights Cluedo is Lieberman in the Territories with a Gun.

HFC

#cuffleyburgers - 'In fact professional politicians shouldn't even exist. Parliament should only meet two days a week.

What, Saturdays and Sundays to allow the MPs to make a living in the real world? Excellent.

Fergus Pickering

At the moment our first past the post system is particularly unfair because the constituencies are of different sizes and the little ones vote Labour. Once the Tories have fixed that it will be fairer, so much fairer that the Labour Party won't get back for a long long time. Atleast I hope that will be the case.

Nick Kaplan

Alex;

You are right that there is no universally fair voting system, but FPTP is infinitely better than PR.

The purpose of an election, for most voters anyway, is to elect a government, not to get a completely correct balance of MPs. This purpose is served far better by having FPTP than PR.

Under FPTP the winning party must get a very large number of votes (90% of the time it has to get a plurality of them) across a very widespread area. The people directly get to decide who forms the government and thus that government is held to account. Given that there is no such thing as 'the collective will of the people' it seems far more sensible to hope democracy provides accountable government, rather than collective government.

PR, on the other hand, is built on the illusion that there is a 'collective will' and consequently does not produce accountable governments because it rarely produces governments at all. Instead, politicians are left to decide amongst themselves who will form the next government, and usually this will not reflect the way voters voted, giving minority parties a hugely disproportionate influence.

David

Any system that produces 18 years of one-party-rule, followed by 13 years of one-party-rule (by a different party with remarkably similar policies) is failing to hold government to account.