Labour are the ones to convince. LD doesn't have the power to bring it to fruition.
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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There's a solid chance Labour won't get a majority and will rely on either confidence and supply, or a full coalition. There are very few precedents for a party going from as low as 202 seats at one election to a majority government at the next (it happened in 1945, but only because the last election in that case was 1935 and rather a lot had happened in between).
Labour have been very clear where they stand on electoral reform. If we're going to get a change to the voting system, it will only be because Labour were forced into it by the Lib Dems in a hung parliament.
Labour is not going to fall into hung territory at the next GE. Sunak keeps making things worse on each week he is around. It keeps looking more and more like those double digit tory fears will come to fruition. I could easily see the Tory party collapse after the GE, which in turn could push LD to being the second main party in the UK. That would be interesting to watch the donors bail on the Tories. Cummings attempt to make a new party could exacerbate the Tory demise even more.
There’s ~~a solid~~ no chance Labour won’t get a majority
Fixed that for you.
Labour have a massive lead and are on track for a crushing landslide victory just by keeping their mouths shut. It's a pity but such a win means they have no incentive to change the system. It'll likely be a couple of elections down the road until the numbers get tight.
Didn't they play this game when Nick Clegg ran the party? After which they gave up on it as soon as they entered into a coalition with the Tories?
LD have been asking for PR voting at least since the 70's. They have never took it away from their manifesto AFAIK. ~~They could not get Cameron to accept it. There is a huge difference between negotiation and removal.~~ @theinspectorst@feddit.uk answered this properly https://feddit.uk/comment/2961968
Labour and Conservative are happy with FPTP because it is easy to bribe the small amount of people in the swing vote areas. The rest of the country gets ignored. Smaller parties cannot compete in the funds to do this.
Got a source for that? Here's one that contradicts you: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/24/keir-starmer-defies-call-for-changes-to-first-past-the-post-voting-system
Sorry everything I have heard is the to contrary of that. Do you have any source to indicate that?
Sorry but that's bullshit.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/23486672.labour-mimic-tories-keir-starmer-rejects-election-reform/
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No, they actually got a vote through for a referendum for the UK to adopt the AV+ alternative vote system system. It's flawed, but I thought it was an improvement on first past the post and voted for it. Not enough other people agreed
Unfortunately the Tories pushed hard against it "being too complicated" and "would result in more hung parliaments" and people bought that bullshit, and we ended up with another Tory government nobody wanted at the next election, which almost certainly wouldn't have happened under AV.
The Coalition agreed on a referendum on AV as a compromise. The Lib Dems' (and most electoral reform campaigners') preferred voting system is Single Transferrable Vote, which is effectively AV but with multi-member constituencies instead of single-member. STV is used in the Republic of Ireland and delivers proportional results whilst maintaining the existence of geographic constituency links - generally considered two desirable features of a voting system (along with preferentialism, a feature AV and STV both have).
If we could have made the switch to AV then it would have been only a short step from there to STV a few years later. But the Tories campaigned heavily against it, and Labour were highly divided on electoral reform so were officially neutral but in practice a majority of Labour MPs backed the 'no' campaign. So the referendum failed.
@theinspectorst @i_am_not_a_robot @Syldon @jonne I support PR, but I am concerned about keeping a constituncy link so everybody has a named MP. A modified form of STV would seem to be the way, with ATV for by-elections.
Having larger constituencies of five mps keeps the link and also makes the mps compete with each other to provide support. The current system can lead to people who need help due to bad laws being forced to go to their MP, the minister who introduced it and is responsible for that law. They won't get help it'll be too embarrassing.
Also I see elsewhere someone complaining of lists of MPs. We already have that in safe seats! They just put one name of the list in each constituency. Have five MPs in each area is an inporvement.
@PamCrossland @theinspectorst @i_am_not_a_robot @Syldon @jonne
It can't be proportional and the existing level of constitutional representation without going to over 2000 MPs. PR in a Parliamentary system wrecks one person one vote for one candidate in a constituency.
Be careful what you wish for.
STV has one person one vote, in a constituency, with the added benefit of allowing voters to express their vote in a preferential ranking and delivering a proportional outcome. That is what I wish for.
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Randomised voting.
Keep the constituencies exactly as they are, and each election everyone votes the way they do now.
Then instead of counting the votes, we shuffle them and pick a random vote and do what it says.
In aggregate this is proportional across the country, and also means every voter remains important in the constituency, you never know if the person you piss off today might personally vote you out tomorrow.
It also eliminates career politicians. Even in a safe seat you probably won't win three terms.
It'll never get used anywhere but it's fun to think about.
I'm all for random, Lords for a year for random picks over 55 years of age is very attractive.
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@theinspectorst @i_am_not_a_robot @Syldon @jonne
Exactly, which is why I voted for it in 2011. It deserved to succeed, but the degree of apathy was high. People didn't bother to get off their backsides to vote, and it was lost. A great pity in many ways. It was a Lib-Dem red line for joining the coalition, together with the raising of the income tax threshold. The Tories now pretend that was their idea. It wasn't.
@theinspectorst @i_am_not_a_robot @Syldon @jonne
Neither are proportional. If STV was used as multimember then constituencies would have around quarter of a million voters instead of 90k and parties would get list candidates, either regional, national or UK wide and they wouldn't be elected by anyone.
Things not talked about by PR promoters.
The Republic of Ireland has 39 multi-member constituencies electing 160 members in total (so an average of four per constituency). That achieves almost perfectly proportional results. They have no party lists - each party nominates multiple candidates and you can (for example) choose to rank the individual candidates in whatever order you prefer.
If you translate this into UK terms, it would be the equivalent of merging four neighbouring constituencies into one and then having that elect four MPs. There might be a handful of unusual cases where you choose to take a different approach for reasons of geographic common sense (for example, Orkney and Shetlands or the Isle of Wight would probably remain as they are) but for most parts of the country that hardly seems particularly egregious.
@theinspectorst @i_am_not_a_robot @Syldon @jonne
You can't translate it into UK terms, there's around 4M voters in Ireland, 41M in the UK across 4 countries with greater disparity in density of populations and geographical size.
The average size of constituencies is 73k, so you agree with me that the future size would be around 250k. How is that local representation to a National Parliament?
There would have to be party lists to fudge it into a general proportional result across the Union.
AV+ was not a PR method and only offered minor benefits above FPTP. It would still lead to a concentration of power between the two main parties, but it would increase the overall number of seats gained by a centrist party.
AV+ suited the Tories (and Labour) only slightly less well than FPTP, but Lib Dems would have been a much bigger spare leg if it had gone through. For the Tories, it was a win-win result.
In other words, the LDs allowed themselves to make another compromise, being tempted with another minor power grab, and in doing so allowed themselves to be outplayed again, and didn’t even gain us the minor democratic benefits AV+ had to offer.
As for AV+ being a short leap to PR, I have doubts, even though I voted in favour of it. PR would be less beneficial than AV+ to the three main parties now, so why would the LDs try to push it through? Also the referendum would have been used as a weapon - “the people voted so we can’t change it” - just as has been done for election reform, the Scottish Referendum and Brexit since.
You must be young.
The tactics that were played out with Brexit, all the false adverts and claims were first played out with the Voting Reform.
There were things like
This child needs a ventilator, not a different form of voting
And
This soldier needs a bullet proof vest, not a different form of voting
They were literally claiming that if you voted for AV, then you are killing babies and our military.
I'm not, but I don't live in the UK.
Then it seems odd that you would make those claims. We had a referendum, and the No2AV group did some awful billboards. It's no surprise that the group went on to repeat the same crap about the EU.
Here is a link to complaints at the time about the distasteful adverts.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/feb/25/no-to-alternative-vote-baby-ad
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Jfc, the fact that anyone still believes we can vote our problems away is beyond depressing...
Voting for the third and smaller of the puppets is still voting for a puppet. They all still serve capitalism, not people, they all still want to maintain the status quo, not bring actual change. The illusion of choice is just another distraction by those in power to keep themselves there.
Continuing to play within the rules written by and in defence of the system will only ever result in us staying under the boot that is said system, that's a fact that is never going to change, the sooner people realise this, the sooner we can move towards actual change (where society is designed by and for all of its members, not by and for the rich).
You do realise that PR works and produce a much wider parliament in other countries? Look at Scandinavian countries? Would you call them capitalist hell-holes with their free healthcare, free schooling, generous pensions and social care?
So - what exactly are you proposing? Don't be shy
Yeah I know but I'm still going to vote for them. Greens stand no chance and Starmer is a prick whose Labour stance is barely even diet Tory any more he's sucked so much conservative dick. At least the LibDems aren't transphobic and want to rejoin the EU.
And yes, I am a millenial who was sorely disappointed by voting for them back in the day, but I've been far, far more disappointed by Labour in recent years since they fucked over Corbyn.
I don't expect anything to change by voting, the world is still irreparably fucked and climate collapse is imminent, but it's nice to have the illusion of choice.
I didn't think I'd love long enough to see the UK leave the EU but it happened..... I'll be long dead before the king maker here (Labour) supports PR. They're the issue here, Tories were never going to agree Labour might have had a chance to push it through with support from Greens and LD but they choose to support the Tory policy instead. 🥹
I don't think there's many millennials that would vote LD now
I would. I live in the south west, where the Lib Dems have traditionally been strong and Labour typically won't even acknowledge that we exist. There's a perception here that Labour only care about the cities and the Red Wall. The Lib Dems, for all their faults, have an active presence and a much deeper awareness of the issues that affect the south west, and are therefore a much more viable option to vote for if we want to oust a Tory.
Same here, although I grew up in Cheshire & now live in London... Even within the cities, Labours local policies seem very copy paste when what people want in (eg.) Westminster is going to be different to what they want in Hounslow, which will be different to what people want in Dagenham.
Lib Dems seem to have a far better understanding of their constituencies/local areas than either of the major two parties (there are some good Labour MPs and slightly fewer good Tory MPs, but as a percentage they're way lower), eg what Tim Farron is up to now in parliament, every speech is standing up for his constituency rather than hiding away in a large party letting the frontbenchers do the talking.
I think this is why the Lib Dems do so well in by-elections but struggle at general elections. When they're only fighting one election, they can put all that local knowledge to good use and make a really tailored campaign that resonates with the electorate in that constituency. But in a general election, it's much harder to put across a broad, national-level campaign, but that's what general election campaigning has to be, because you have to speak to the whole country not just a small subset of it.
It's a shame, because I actually think they're a very under-appreciated option. They've struggled with their branding after the coalition, and I think to an extent it was unfair given that they were very much the junior partner in the coalition and didn't have as much power as people think they did.
Why not? Labour are the party that introduced tuition fees in the first place.
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