andrewducker | Why I'm in favour of Proportional Representation

You've got different info in your little table than you give in your post.

There was a 3% error margin.

(Fixed, thanks)

Yes. Not forgetting the hereditary peers in the hous of lords of course. Yours is a system that sucketh.

Actually, I'm slightly in favour of hereditary peers.

People who are trained from an early age in logic, rhetoric etc. and aren't at the whim of "bread and circuses" mob rule.

It's not ideal, and the current system allows elected government to override the House of Lords (as they have done recently) so it's not "undemocratic", but it puts a sensible brake on knee-jerk legislation. Or does when it works properly.

And the nice thing about it is, most of the "hereditary peers" never showed up anyway, so they had no effect, but the ones that cared about people and law *did* along with the life peers, and other Lords that covered the legal and religious sides of things.

hereditary peers. People who are trained from an early age in logic, rhetoric etc

Er, what? I mean, some of them are/were, but SFAIK the rough correlation between class and educational achievement fails utterly at the 'actual nobility' end of the social scale.

just because you're trained in Logic doesn't mean you're good at it :-)

But there does seem to be a correlation between "class" and going to public schools (or is that a media myth?) and public schools are known for getting better educational results than non-public schools (or is that another myth?)

I have no easy way of determining the average set of educational qualifications of hereditary peers who actively participated in the House of Lords, nor of the appointed Lords ... I'd imagine that the legal Lords all had law degrees, and most of the political Lords had either suitable university backgrounds or on the job training(!) (not all obviously).

I guess the "myth" is how many of the hereditary Lords have Eton/Harrow/St.Pauls/whatever then Oxbridge educations ... and that's where I've made a total assumption and am willing to admit I don't know.

Again it would be interesting to see how many Lords voted (on average) before the recent changes, and what the proportions were between hereditary nobility and political/legal/religious appointees

But there does seem to be a correlation between "class" and going to public schools (or is that a media myth?) and public schools are known for getting better educational results than non-public schools (or is that another myth?)

Yes, those correlations are broadly correct, but it gets terribly complex, and depends on what you mean by 'class' (many anciently-aristocratic families are more or less broke) and what you mean by 'results' (many public schools famously do very badly on 'value added' measures of results). My understanding - admittedly somewhat anecdotal and stereotypical - is that your actual nobs tend to be different to your aspirant upper-middle-class types, in that they're a lot more relaxed about whether you actually get any qualifications or any of that new-fangled book larned.

My (educated but unfounded) guess is that a very large percentage of hereditary peers will have gone to a public school, but on average won't have done terribly well (particularly given that they went to a Good School). The percentage who have a degree (never mind one from Oxbridge) might be a little higher than the population background (since pretty much all with the ability will have gone through) but will be substantially lower than, say, the membership of the House of Commons.

The Law Lords were a bit different - all a bit old hat now (it's Supreme Court these days), and it was a bit confusing (i.e. I never properly understood it) but basically being a Law Lord was a special sort of life peerage which you got by first being a Very Senior Judge. And to do that you needed to first be a Judge, which required earlier being a barrister. Obviously, family connections would help you come to the attention of the Lord Chancellor and speed promotion, but if you were a complete shower at any level you wouldn't make it.

Exactly.

So it's really hard to make any good guesses about the qualifications of the Lords who showed up at the House of Lords, debated and voted. But I have a strong suspicion that you'd find them better educated (whether with a piece of paper to show for it or not) than the general populace. Far too many of the current House of Commons are career politicians, funded by corporate interests and at the mercy of the "bread and circuses" mob for me to be sure they will pass "good" law ... so having a second chamber that has a different spread of backgrounds and isn't directly answerable to the populace through an election, gives a chance for law to be made better ... and if the House of Commons doesn't agree, then they have the power to overrule the House of Lords and pass the law anyway.

You'd prefer our system where you only get two choices and the congressional elections are spaced out so as to almost guarantee that a president elected to a four year term will only have 18 months of a friendly party running congress to get anything done, followed by two and half years not being able to get anything done because the opposing party controls congress?

No, really not.

Dude; Congress is elected using pretty much the same system we use for the Commons. Just because you have 2-year terms and the insanity of a directly elected executive doesn't actually change the basic voting system.

Are your conservatives like our conservatives? Is your Labour party like our Democratic Farmer/Labor? Are the Lib Dems like Greens?

Kinda, probably not, and almost certainly not :->

Your conservatives are so right wing that there's no real equivalent over here. Your democrats are more like our conservatives, our Labour party _used_ to be actively socialist, bot nowadays are fiscally central, and quite authoritarian. The lib-dems are actively liberal.

> Your conservatives are so right wing that there's no real equivalent over here.

Yup.

Though... UKIP? :p

Or BNP.

Wait, the British Nationalist Party is not only very much like our GOP, they actually use some of the same media consultants as our GOP.

Our Conservative Party are what you would call liberal Democrats.

Our Labour Party is a mixture of people from liberal Democrats to what you would term Godless Communists (fewer of the latter these days).

The actual Liberal Democrat Party is composed of people who would definitely be classed as Godless Communists in the US.

Put it this way: all major parties, including the major right-wing one, make comprehensive free-at-delivery socialised medicine a central plank of their policies. To suggest doing anything else in the UK is electoral suicide.

I remember having a similar disconnect looking at dutch politics: despite a broad range of parties, some left, some right, some that sound nice to me, some that don't, ALL the major parties (with a few exceptions) from the socialist party, the central christian democratic alliance, the major left, middle and right parties, to the extreme right-wing anti-immigration party, have socially liberal leanings, and are in favour of gay rights, etc (or at least of not rolling them back!)

Democrats are a broad church party. Dean openly, and OBama covertly, support the Lib Dems (Obama's main campaign speechwrite was a Lib Dem activist from north London). But The Clinton/New Democrat faction is equivalent to New Labour, and the Old Labour have links with old unionised Democrats.

The confusing bit is the sane members of the Tories also support the Democrats. But the Dems are the right wing of the Lib Dems and Labour, and the left wing of the Tories...

US Greens aren't always as batshit crazy as our Greens though.

Hey! I know some very sane Greens!

Did you read the link I posted on Twitter about their manifesto?

I know some sane Greens, but their policy platform is a) still full of Woo and b) going to destroy chunks of the economy, 50% increase in alcohol duty would finally kill off a lot more struggling pubs, for example.

Target of 45% of GDP taken in tax, partially to stop growth of all kinds, regardless of whether it's good or damaging growth? Call it sane if you like, but I don't.

I think the salient point here is that America across the board is more right-wing than the UK, or indeed any European country. So yes, the Democrats, being the more left-wing party, get support from the unions, the poor and the deprived. That still puts them to the right of the Tories on most issues.

Right of the Tories on most issues.

The Democrats under Dean, Pelosi and Obama are right of the Tories? SRSLY?

Have you looked at the Tory policy platform?

On health care, neither Pelosi nor Obama even seriously considered a single-payer system. (Dean did, to his credit, but then he's positioned himself to the left of the party as a general rule in the last few years.) David Cameron has promised that no matter what other drastic cuts he makes to other parts of the budget, he'll match and protect Labour's planned spending increases on the NHS.

Or, for that matter, the Tories want to let toffs hunt foxes again, but they're not proposing that just anyone be allowed guns.

Didn't consider it not necessarily because they didn't actually want it; they only just got the watered down basterdisation they ended up with passed. And several are saying it's distincly the first step, etc.

They've dragged US health care to the "left" of where it was, significantly. Cameron plans to drag it to the "right" significantly in a number of ways (some of which I approve of, mostly I don't).

The NHS is such a touchstone issue he can't afford to be seen to be attacknig it (but look up Dan Hannan's comments on it, or Douglas CArswells).

Politicians react to their home electorate, Tories largely want to do things that they know they can't get away with, although given the collapse of their campaign they seem to be lurching right anyway.

If you're going to force a background colour for the table, please also force the font colour. My layout makes it impossible to read – as will anyone whose font is set to a lighter colour.

Sorry! I used an HTML generator to knock the table up and didn't think about that. Fixed it now.

Oh - and did you notice the Apple thing I linked to today? Really interesting interview with one of their early engineers.

Yes, I did – what do we reckon? Justification for the horrible App Store restrictions?

Interesting background on it, at least.

The thing is, that I can totally see it as a trade off. If you want people to produce the best applications for your system then you want them to make ones specifically for it, rather than just chucking together a bad port (as has been seen in a lot of console ports).

However, you're also locking out a lot of people that are happy to produce an iPhone/iPad application, but need to be economical, and produce one that is also an Android app, Palm app, etc. So Apple has to make a decision as to which way they go, and developers can then decide whether they want to make a trade-off too.

I think the problem is that Apple have decided to do this _now_, when people might already have sunk a lot of time/energy into producing apps that they are no longer allowed to distribute, and they are quite reasonably now angry about that.

When it comes to content restrictions I'm a bit more hard lined about it. In that if Apple want to turn themselves into Disneyworld and only let in things they consider "nice" then that's up to them, but if I'm going to have a phone, notebook replacement, etc. then I'm going to have one that I can read whatever I want on. And yes, stuff will still be available via the web, but I'm going to go for the most open platform I can, so that nobody can tell me that the apps I want to read/play with are forbidden knowledge. I've been installing apps on my phone for a fair few years now, without anyone telling me what I was allowed access to, and I'm not willing to lose that functionality. Other people might be happy to, or even overjoyed that someone is willing to provide a nice safe environment for them, but it's just not for me.

Quite how are you going to write a cross-platform that works on an Android phone, a Palm phone, and an iPad, though? It'll look rubbish on at least one of the platforms.

Also, for all that the initial "hey, anyone can write apps for the iPhone, they're called websites" line from Apple regarding iPhone development was spurious and insulting, I think it's more justified for iPads.

Why would it necessarily look rubbish? It might not look _standard_, but that's not the same as rubbish. Being able to have 95% of the code the same, with the UI layer using different button styles would make support and development massively easier.

There's vastly more screen space on an iPad than a phone, though. If you try to blow an iPhone app to iPhone size, by all accounts it looks stupid. You pretty much want to start from scratch UI-wise when writing an iPad app.

And not looking standard is rubbish, when you're Apple and trying to launch a completely new type of user interface. Same reason as why the original Macintosh didn't come with cursor keys: you want to force people to think in a new way.

I don't give a damn what Apple thinks looks rubbish. _I_ get to make my own aesthetic judgements, thank you very much, and if Apple wants to restrict the applications that I run on my own appliance, based on what aesthetic judgements someone in Apple HQ makes, then they can frankly fuck off.

(ire not aimed at you, by the way, merely there to express the strength of my feeling on this issue.)

Think of this another way.

Suppose you're a city council that has recently decided to replace all the pavements in the city centre with large slabs of real actual stone rather than tarmac or concrete. It looks great, but it also means that when utility companies decide to dig up the road they need to take the stone slabs out and carefully stack them so they can replace them once they're done.

One contractor decides "to hell with that", digs a hole in the ground, fills it in, and replaces the missing slab with tarmac. From now on, that bit of street looks a little bit worse, because in the middle of a nice stretch of stone pavement there's an ugly bit of tarmac.

Fans of the broken windows theory of policing would even say that it makes it more likely that in the future another utility company will also choose to cut corners / do what it does everywhere else, and fill in a hole with tarmac or concrete.

Either way, because some people chose to ignore the new rules, the overall effect of renovating the street was spoiled.

Apple have recently launched the iPad, which has a much larger screen than any other touch-screen phone, be it iPhone, various flavours of Android, or Palm. Apple-written versions of the iPhone apps are notably different, and use much more of the screen than if they were simply upscaled versions of their iPhone equivalents; hell, a number of the standard iPhone apps weren't ported, because they're so simple that they'd look silly on an iPad.

The iPad is significantly different from any other touch-screen system currently in existence, including the iPhone / iPod Touch. This is a very good reason to develop with the iPad in mind, rather than using some sort of intermediate compatibility layer.

And, at the moment, Apple's aesthetic judgement is better than yours. They've had the advantage of very smart people spending a lot more time than anyone else has, individually, on thinking about how applications on such a form factor with such a user interface should work, and their design decisions have fed into the overall OS and UI. They've provided APIs for providing the standard sort of interface that they'd expect most applications to use, or at least start with.

Suppose a company comes out with a new form factor and/or user interface, and says "hey, guys, we think this is the best way to use this new product of ours", and then follows up with "and we'd really rather that you only stuck to this way of developing applications, not the way you're accustomed to, because really we think that's much better". Perhaps you should think "hey, maybe they're up to something" rather than saying "screw them, I'll just do what I've always done".

They possibly might be right. And if they want to put out good user guidelines then that's fine.

And if they want to say "Follow them or you can't write software for our platform" then I have no interest in it.

I completely understand your point, and I'm aware that what I'm about to say could easily leave me open to people paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin's point about people sacrificing a little freedom for a little security at me.

Having said that, how's Linux on the desktop doing these days?

Far more people than probably you or I would like put up with substandard computer systems because, eh, they don't care, or IT won't let them change. If said system is actually much more usable than the alternatives, then I'm not sure what the Right Thing to do is. Decide to develop for Android or WebOS or something, for purity's sake even though it's a far less interesting environment, at least at the moment?

Windows on the desktop is doing very well - and part of the reason for that is that anyone at all can write applications for it.

Android has trebled to 9% in the last few months. Apple is on 25%, so it's got a way to go, but it's doing pretty well, so far as I can tell. I'm getting an HTC Desire next, and last I heard Orange and O2 can't actually keep them on the shelves right now.

This is so frustrating. It is no wonder someone tried to blow up Parliament...

That was only because of the St. Mary's scandal.

The trouble is (as the Americans found out) that when you enclose most areas, you get a mix of people in that area that's not the national average. So in the US they have states with urban areas that are racially mixed, and predominantly Democratic, and rural areas that are far more white and Republican, and the relative proportions of each that can be called out in the vote (or disenfranchised, as in Florida) can serious distort the vote of that area ... then the Electoral College system says that if 55% of a state votes one way, then 100% of the Electoral College votes go that way.

In the UK you do get similar things, and the boundary changes coming in for this election are making some "safe seats" into marginals by trimming out some of the incumbent's votes and bringing in areas that are predominantly for the other parties.

And that's probably right ... in a constituency that is predominantly urban, then the MP they want and the party they want will likely be very different to an area that's predominantly farmland. It takes a mighty swing to move Hackney and Hounslow/Feltham from Labour, so a country wide vote of 30% for LibDems would likely not be enough to change either of those two areas.

A truely representative parliament would have more BNP MPs in it, because with 500 MPs, you only need to get 1/5 of 1% of the vote to get an MP. The current system requires an MP to gain over 1/3rd of the votes in a consituency, not the party getting 1% in every constituency to elect 5 MPs.

Yes, there would probably be BNP MPs. I believe that this is the right thing to do. To deliberately disenfranchise people because I find their views despicable would make me as bad as them.

No (in my opinion!), to disenfranchise someone who has dispicable views would be bad, but not as bad as them.

And we already disenfranchise based on whether you're mad, a criminal, a member of the House of Lords, or have the wrong passport (whether you live and pay tax here or not ... taxation without representation).

As an ""amusing thought exercise, given what democracy claims to be, why shouldn't people be able to say "no hate speech, no advocation of racial hatred, no holocaust denial ... and if you, as a potential candidate, do do any of those things, you're barred from standing" ... or a pre-election "losing your deposit" thing, where if you don't get a minimum number of people willing to vote for you, you don't make the cutoff and you don't get on the ballot.

And apply that to the next step up too ... if your party can't win more than a percentage of constituencies across the country, then you've shown that you don't have sufficient general support to be part of national government ... it would prevent "one interest" MPs from potentially being the casting vote in a hung parliament or a tight vote ...

... obviously that's a thought exercise and shouldn't be done in reality .. but it's worth thinking about I think!

I think it would be as bad as, or worse, than them. Two reasons.
Ideological: To take away someone's voice in society is to treat them as a lesser member of society and not fully human. Freedom of thought and speech are the bedrock of any decent society.
Practical: If you take away people's representation then you force them underground. Instead, bring them to the surface and shine a bright light on them. Things fester in the dark.

I believe that the criminalisation of holocaust denial is an abomination. Likewise with the criminalisation of hate speech.

I want everyone's voice to be heard, so that we can talk to one another. If we're not engaged in that dialogue then we've failed.

I'm not saying that can't say it ... I'm saying that just because 1% of the country says that UFOs have abducted then does not mean they should get 5 MPs.

That if you promulgate racial hatred, that yes, you are a lesser person in society. If you can't abide by society's rules, you don't get to play the game.

There are certain basic truths and certain basic tenets that we, as society, have determined are the foundation for a just and equitable society, and if you don't want to be part of that society, then that's your choice, but you don't accept that there is a level of decency required, we will continue to treat you decently, but we don't have to listen to you.

It doesn't stop freedom of thought or speech.

Practical: If you take away people's representation then you force them underground. Instead, bring them to the surface and shine a bright light on them. Things fester in the dark.
Very poetical, but it applies just as much to things like the French Resistance. And if you are going to quote one set of views how about "take away the oxygen of publicity".

I believe that the criminalisation of holocaust denial is an abomination.
Good.
Likewise with the criminalisation of hate speech.
We all have our opinions.

If we're not engaged in that dialogue then we've failed.
Failed at what? I don't want to take away anyone's right to speak or believe what they want ... however I do want a society where I don't *have* to listen to hate speech, nor to fund them in any way to promote it. I certainly don't want to live in a society where hate speech and radicalisation leads to bombs in the streets of my town.

And there is a spectrum, and it may be hard to find the correct point in the middle between "allow everything and live with the consequences" and "allow nothing and live with the consequences" but life is full of consequences, and saying it's hard to find the middle way so we must be extreme seems like a lazy answer to me. (woot, political flame war ftw!)

Denying people their representation is denying them their speech. They have as much of a right to representation as you do. The second you start saying "We don't have to let people who think bad thoughts have a representative" then you open a door that I really don't want opened. Because sometimes I'm on the wacky frigne. And for a vast percentage of history my ideals were on the extreme of the wacky fringe. Votes for women? Never happen!

I'm not denying anyone representation.

My MP represents me. He doesn't agree with my views, and he votes in opposition to what I want, but he still represents me. It's not an ideal system.

I never said people should not be represented. But there's a difference between people and ideas.

And when enough people thought votes for women were a good idea, it happened.

I've just been told that in Germany it's a 7% minimum to get your views represented in parliament, to stop the large numbers of smaller parties clogging up the business of passing law and governing. So if 7% of people voted for the "bring sharia law to the UK" party, then they could have 35 seats in the House (or whatever the number, I think it's currently out of 650 but there are proposals to reduce it ... so 45 representatives for 7%)

Edited 2010-04-19 15:17 (UTC)

A follow on question ...

... across the UK, let's say 5% of people vote for BNP. But that they don't get a majority in any constituency.

Do you:
a) introduce additional non-geographical BNP MPs to make up the numbers
b) force an area to have a BNP MP even though they voted for someone else
c) get rid of local representation in Parliament
d) something else?

It's a serious question that follows on from PR.

Darn good question.

Depends on which version of PR we go with. If it's the Scottish model (Additional Member Voting) then you top up from party lists (your option a). If it's the Single Transferrable Vote then you still have regions, and these have multiple MPs. But you'd still need a fair chunk of the vote in each region to be elected.

In the Additional Member system the Greens got 2 MSPs elected based on 5% of the vote - but obviously these have very little power.

Under STV they'd quite possibly have nobody.

I'm actually ok with very fringe parties having nobody - I view it as a drawback, but there's no perfect voting system, and there are advantages to having a tie to a local(ish) MP. If I had the choice of having my local MP being a Tory MP who lived next door, or a Lib-Dem MP who covered a larger area (along with two Labour MPs and a Conversative) then I'd choose the latter state of affairs.

Thanks, excellent answer.

With that final option of having multiple MPs covering the same area (which I think I approve of, as it means that I'm likely to have an MP of *my* party (whatever that is!) as one of my "localish" representatives. And I guess you could have different areas covered by different MPs, so that, say, for London, you'd have one BNP covering all of London, two Green MPs, one covering London East and one London West, 10 Conservative MPs covering groups of boroughs, and 25 Labour MPs covering smaller groups of boroughs ... based roughly on the percentage of votes for each ... ouch, that's getting complex, because you probably don't know which Labour MP you're voting for because the coverage area may change depending on how many votes they get ... and if you just spread them across all of London, then you a small bit of BNP, more Green, far more conservative and most labour coverage, and then who do you write to if you have a problem? Who is *your* MP? Who comes to open the schools and hand out prizes at sports day?

Aieee, my head go splodey! :-)

Well, if you wanted to do things that way you could just get everyone to vote for a party, and then, once they'd been elected, they could assign themselves to different areas in whatever way they saw fit.

Whereas with the STV method you just have bigger areas, with multiple MSPs to return. This has the advantage that you can choose the order in which you support your MPs. You can choose to support a Labour one who is anti war, then two Lib-Dems, then a Green MP and then the Labour one who is pro-war, and then two Conservatives, before the UKIP get anywhere near your vote :->

This means that voters get to shape the party they vote for - if everyone votes for the anti-war Labour MPs then we still have a Labour party, but now they aren't in favour of war! (Not that I see that as likely, but you see my point).

I think it would be as bad as, or worse, than them.

So someone standing up and saying that all gays should locked up and receive treatment until they stop their deviancy, or that all blacks are genetically inferior or that to be a faithful member of your religion requires you to detonate bombs in city centres is not as bad as saying that people who say those things shouldn't be allowed to run for parliament?

I'm afraid I don't agree.

We'll have to agree to disagree. Although I'm differentiating between hate speech and direct advocacy of violence (which I do agree should be illegal).

Fair enough.

FWIW, I agree with you. I also think there is going to be at least one BNP MP in less than a month even without PR.

then the Electoral College system says that if 55% of a state votes one way, then 100% of the Electoral College votes go that way.

Usually but not necessarily. There's no overriding Constitutional principle involved; all the Constitution says is that each state shall appoint electors, and keeps mum about how those electors are chosen. Why so many states have gone with the winner-take-all method is a mystery to me, but they can change the system if they wish; both Maine and Nebraska use different systems, and the other states have the option to set up any laws they like.

Our system is strange, fascinating, and overly complex.

Grin, actually I knew that, as I seem to recall there was an interesting episode of Boston Legal where one of the electoral college had stated they weren't going to follow the winner-take-all and there was a constitutional question about whether the state had the power to compel that person to do so.

There's actually a whole Wikipedia article on what are called "faithless electors"--people who didn't vote for the same person or party that their state did.

That happened en masse once, in 1836, and ,a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector">the whole article is kind of fun reading.

Um, if you're a big ol' geek, anyway. :)

There is in fact an ongoing attempt to have states pass laws that say that they'll give their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote, but only if enough states to make a majority of electoral votes have such a law on their books. (This is to avoid the practically impossibility of doing so by passing a Constitutional amendment.) So far it's been passed by statesrepresenting 23% of the required votes.

Huh; that's interesting. Thanks for the link!

Devil's advocate: this argument is surely only convincing to people who already believe that percentage of the popular vote ought to match percentage of Parliament? In other words, this table shows that PR would be an obviously good thing if you already believe that the goal of PR is what you want.

So it might convince somebody who previously considered the goal of PR to be desirable but also thought the current system was producing results close enough to right that it didn't need mucking about with (though the latter would seem a particularly bizarre belief to me). But it would precisely not convince somebody who opposed PR on grounds of disagreeing with its goal, for instance if they thought some minority actually deserved to have a disproportionate influence.

(For example, it wouldn't surprise me to find there were people who believe that city dwellers shouldn't be able to outvote farmers merely on the basis of outnumbering them, on the grounds that they'd vote in policies that completely screwed farmers and then act all surprised when there didn't seem to be any food left. Such people would doubtless consider your table to be a misleading oversimplification.)

Of course it does rely on people thinking that the government ought to be representative.

I can see arguments that it shouldn't be entirely representative - that the wacky 1% on the fringe ought to be ignored. But a system where the party with the highest percentage of the vote gets the lowest number of seats? If people can't see that that's utterly wrong, then they aren't democratic at all.

"We do not live in a democracy, Bernard. We live in a British democracy. There's all the difference in the world." :-)

Quite. On a personal level, it drives me absolutely crazy (particularly the more tax I pay) that I seem to not be of interest to any political party & am sitting in a fairly safe seat so my vote has little value.

I'm perhaps being somewhat basic, but I had thought one of the ideas behind universal suffrage was that all adults should have an equal say in the election of the government of the day. Clearly the current system doesn't deliver that.

Playing devil's advocate I can see (when things like you tax bill & public services are at stake) why it's quite easy to get behind PR when you think the current lot are a shower; rather more difficult when you're quite happy thankyouverymuch. That said, at the moment one does get the impression that the percentage holding the former view exceeds that holding the latter...but I do wonder how many of them are politically engaged.

I was in favour of PR when Labour got in. Because it was fairer. I was really annoyed that they reneged on their commitment.

I would comment Andy, but I suspect you can guess what I would say - so in the interests of not upsetting a bunch of whining liberal PR loving tree hugging commie weirdy beardy "multi culture is a good thing" crap spouting people, I`ll just leave it. :)

Would you not have liked the Conservatives to have been getting their fair share of the vote for the last 13 years? Or weer you happy with them being horribly underweighted by the current system?

I would prefer them to be underweighted as you put it and keep a basically two party system. I am not in favour of coalitions in the slightest and a stronger libdem/liberal or whatever the fuck they are called now party will just mean more coalitions in the future. We have one now in Germany and its a bloody waste of time.

As I recall, Tony Blair was in favour of doing a deal anyway, but most of the Old Labour lot were of the opinion that they finally had a stonking huge majority and they weren't going to share it with anybody.

Important.

Do not use the BBC swing calulator

Just don't do it. It doesn't work, and hasn't worked since 1983. IT can't take into effect tactical squeeze, nor can it deal with leading party surge or the crystalisation effect.

Use http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/ and put in 5% for to LD tactical voting from both main parties, with none against.

That'd accurately reflect previous voting patterns and current polling behaviour.

I repeat. Do not use the BBC generator, nor anything else that uses unmodified UNS.

Yes, there might be a post on this needed, again, but I need to not swamp the journal with polling geekery. Even though it's kinda what I do best.

That one also shows a massive distortion...

Oh, absolutely; they all do. IT's the least worst of the calculators I've found because it allows you to plug in some factors for local effects through the tactical thing.

But essentially seat calulation under FPTP when there're three parties in contention is a mugs game; look at 1983 when Thatcher got a landslide on a reduced share of the vote, or indeed any election in Scotland.

If you find a calculator that doesn't come up with distortions, I'd love to see it.

Also, the whole "Lib Dems can't win" thing is reinforced by posts about how biased the system is. LDs can win big if they get just a few more points; try using any of them and put LDs on 36%+ and see what begins to happen.

Party	Percentage	Seats
Lib Dems	33%	134
Conservatives	32%	246
Labour	26%	241

Why I'm in favour of Proportional Representation

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for the slow american in the room

Re: for the slow american in the room

Re: for the slow american in the room

Re: for the slow american in the room

Re: for the slow american in the room

Re: for the slow american in the room

Re: for the slow american in the room

Re: for the slow american in the room

Re: for the slow american in the room

Re: for the slow american in the room

Re: for the slow american in the room

Re: for the slow american in the room

Re: for the slow american in the room

Re: for the slow american in the room

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