Why I'm in favour of Proportional Representation

[andrewducker]

According to the BBC, the current polls show Lib Dems on 33%, Conservatives on 32%, Labour on 26%.
Which would give a seat allocation of Conservatives: 246, Labour 241, Lib Dems: 134.
Or, in a more easily digestible table format:

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

It should be pretty fucking obvious that this is an electoral system that is fucked in the head.

Comments

[marrog.livejournal.com]

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

[usmu.livejournal.com]

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

[andrewducker]

There was a 3% error margin.

(Fixed, thanks)

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

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?

for the slow american in the room

[autodidactic.livejournal.com]

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

Re: for the slow american in the room

[andrewducker]

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.

[andrewducker]

No, really not.

Re: for the slow american in the room

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: for the slow american in the room

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

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

Yup.

Though... UKIP? :p

Re: for the slow american in the room

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

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!)

Re: for the slow american in the room

[andrewducker]

Or BNP.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

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.

[andrewducker]

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

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

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

[andrewducker]

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

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

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

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

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.

[andrewducker]

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.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

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.

[andrewducker]

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.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

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!

[andrewducker]

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.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

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!)

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

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.

[simont]

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.)