UK General Election (Poll Results in OP)

[TheCracker]

edit: Nigel Farage's resignation as leader of UKIP has been rejected by the party's executive committee, and so he is officially still the leader.

Well. He clearly shouldn't be made to do something he clearly doesn't want to do any more. That's just cruel.

 

[DK]

To be honest, I don't know why people are so surprised at the results. Maybe it was just me but I sensed a Conservative majority a few weeks ago. The exit polls were right and even understated.

It's not just that people vote Conservative and don't admit to it. It's that people know others will vote Conservatives but don't want to accept the reality.

Dammit, why didn't you say so! I could have put some money on a Tory majority!

 

[Famine]

Maybe you can tell us how you think it can be made to happen then?

In the short term by as many people as possible spoiling their ballots. In the longer term, by creating a party with this platform of electoral reform.

In what way is my local council more important than the House of Commons? It hardly even raises any of its revenue.

Unless you're regularly interacting with the police and courts, just about everything you encounter on a daily basis around your home is a result of a decision by your local councils. It starts at basic things like speed limits and road layouts, street lighting and state of repair, litter picking and general presentability of your town up through the binmen and the fire service (and even local policing) and up to libraries, leisure centres and home-building.

Every shop on your high street is there because the council okayed it. Your house is there because the council okayed it. Your day to day life is far more affected by your local council than it is by the Commons (or Lords). This is as it should be - the smaller the area over which power is exercised, the smaller the limits on power should be, ending with vast limitations on national government and very small ones in your bedroom.

There is certainly an argument for rebalancing that but I just don't see your point here. We have PR in one form or another for all elections in Scotland apart from Westminster so we have already addressed part of the problem.

I agree, we should have some form of PR for all elections.

Except PR isn't the answer alone, as my original post pointed out. PR cannot work in a representative democracy because there may be more of a proportion of votes than there are candidates to fill seats - or fewer than the required threshold...

Take our council elections. Three seats available to the ten candidates means that to get a seat a candidate needs 33% of the vote - which makes it fundamentally impossible to fill the third seat. How about the General Election? If everyone in Scotland voted for the SNP they'd have polled 13.4% of the votes and won 87 seats - but they were only fielding 59 candidates, so where do the other 28 MPs come from? Who's not going to be represented in England, Wales & Northern Ireland because we need 28 more Scottish MPs?

This is why my solution keeps a modified FPTP for the lower house in national elections and AV for council elections. For the upper house - the one which changes to an elected body to ensure the constitutionality of any legislation - PR is entirely apt as it represents the breakdown of the population en masse.

But you still haven't addressed the issue of disproportionate representation in our main legislative body.

I have, by its irrelevance. By restricting its powers constitutionally (which is my very first bullet point) and by creating a PR-elected body above it to provide a check to its laws, the lower house becomes far less relevant - only making laws that are constitutional and looking after the country's interests and dealings overseas.

That's great in theory like much of your proposals but not in any way practical.[/QUOTE}Why?

My point is the electorate will lose interest. Like yourself, I couldn't give a fig what Rupert Murdoch thinks.

Do you think enough people follow “local news?”

Yes.

I can barely move in my porch for all the free local papers that get pushed through the letterbox (apologies if yours are now soaked in my urine), covering everything from my ward, my village and my parish up through my town and indeed my entire region. Small communities thrive on gossip and chit-chat - the local pub, the hairdressers etc. etc.

People might not be interested in politics, but they'd certainly cotton on quickly to the fact that they've elected precisely no-one to be their MP. Again.

Actually, to be honest, I think that implementing this modification to FPTP would be one of the greatest motivators to vote in the history of UK elections - we'd see the days of 55-65% turnout vapourise within a couple of election cycles.

I think the main point behind what you are saying is that we should take more decisions locally & there is definitely much in favour of that.

Not even that. We already do, but how important they are is under-stressed in favour of the pomp and circumstance of 650 shirt-tailed lawyers dicking about in a palace when they can be arsed half the year.

But it needs much more than a reform to the voting system.

Yes, that's why I started with a constitutional limitation on the remit of government...

It needs a massive overhaul to the way revenue is raised & distributed.

Once we have a government structure and a system of voting for these people that is fit for purpose, we can address the decisions it makes.

 

[DG_Silva]

I'm not going to quote a mahoosive post just for the hell of it and hog everyone's phone memory and data bandwidth, so @Famine, while you speak very eloquently, and indeed put you point across is a very mathematically, scientifically and logically sound way, there are a few important points in your idea;

One, how is a local council going to work together when they could be made up of a potentially broad-spectrum coalition who can't even decide what biscuits are going to be on the plate, let alone important decisions such as when your bins are going to be collected, when a street is going to get white LED street lights, potholes in the road, replacing the glass in bus shelters, etc., besides more important issues like the NHS or education.

Two, the discussion about PR means that someone up north is always going to vote Labour in the misguided vision that they are actually interested in them, how do we ensure that the right person is voted into the Upper House?

Three, I couldn't take part in the vote in my local constituency because I was at work all day long, on top of which there is very little point in me voting because the Labour candidate won with 68.4% of the cast vote. Even if you lump all of the uncast votes together (turnout of 54.5%, quite good actually), it's unlikely to have changed (in fact, the whole of Birmingham is a Labour stronghold) because surely some of those 45.5% who didn't vote would still have voted for him.

Lastly, have you approached your local MP/PM/quasi-political 'comedian' or Government debate website to discuss this? It does seem like a workable solution, but it needs a push and a backing. As a published scientist, wouldn't your words have some sway?

 

[Famine]

One, how is a local council going to work together when they could be made up of a potentially broad-spectrum coalition who can't even decide what biscuits are going to be on the plate, let alone important decisions such as when your bins are going to be collected, when a street is going to get white LED street lights, potholes in the road, replacing the glass in bus shelters, etc., besides more important issues like the NHS or education.

That's literally what already happens - a surprising number of local councils in the UK are "NOC" (no overall control)... In fact of the 200-odd councils elected on May 7th, NOC came third Incidentally, our council is also NOC...

I'd just be changing the FPTP voting system which means that we elected three councillors from our ward (all Lib Dems, oddly) with no more than 12% of the vote share each to an AV system. AV might actually reduce the number of NOC councils according to exit polling data.

Two, the discussion about PR means that someone up north is always going to vote Labour in the misguided vision that they are actually interested in them, how do we ensure that the right person is voted into the Upper House?

Actually this again doesn't really matter, since the job of the upper house would become that of ensuring the lower house is passing constitutional bills. It doesn't (or shouldn't) really matter what colour tie you're wearing at that point.

Three, I couldn't take part in the vote in my local constituency because I was at work all day long, on top of which there is very little point in me voting because the Labour candidate won with 68.4% of the cast vote. Even if you lump all of the uncast votes together (turnout of 54.5%, quite good actually), it's unlikely to have changed (in fact, the whole of Birmingham is a Labour stronghold) because surely some of those 45.5% who didn't vote would still have voted for him.

In your case, the first election would have failed.

Here's what the results would have looked like under my modified FPTP:

Valid votes cast - 41,039 (54.5%)
No Candidate: 34,262 (45.5%)
Labour (Liam Byrne): 28,069 (37.3%)
Conservative (Kieran Mullan): 4,707 (6.3%)
UKIP (Albert Duffen): 4,651 (6.2%)
Liberal Democrat (Phil Bennion): 2,624 (3.5%)
Green (Chris Nash): 835 (1.1%)
Communist (Andy Chaffer): 153 (0.2%)
No candidate achieved the required number of votes to be elected as MP for this constituency


I'm sure the Labour MP might be elected the second time round, but the culture shock of not having any such thing as a safe seat or a stronghold unless people are motivated to come out and vote for you. If they aren't, you've not done your job in the first place - so being sent to Westminster to represent them on a £65k salary for the next five years is a ludicrous concept anyway.

It'd take an election cycle or two for the electorate to cotton on, but I suspect that the candidates would twig in the run up to the first one and actually make an effort.

In fact my modified FPTP is actually a sneaky way of making voting compulsory (which is a reasonably good idea in theory) without making not-voting illegal (which is an awful way of implementing it), simply by making not-voting into voting.

Lastly, have you approached your local MP/PM/quasi-political 'comedian' or Government debate website to discuss this? It does seem like a workable solution, but it needs a push and a backing. As a published scientist, wouldn't your words have some sway?

No.

However I might stand for election in 2020...

 

[TRGTspecialist]

However I might stand for election in 2020...

With all due respect you'd have your work cut out - people will be put straight off when they see 'Famine Party' on the ballot paper........

 

[Liquid]

 

[Lizard]

So. As a Labour party member I get to vote on who replaces Ed. Who should I vote for out of the people likely going to be standing?

 

[Liquid]

So. As a Labour party member I get to vote on who replaces Ed. Who should I vote for out of the people likely going to be standing?

The candidate you identify with the most and not the candidate someone else tells you to vote for.

 

[Lizard]

The candidate you identify with the most and not the candidate someone else tells you to vote for.

I know and I will anyway. I was just looking for public opinion.

 

[DG_Silva]

Is there anyone in the Labour party with any charisma, intelligence or respectability to lead the party? Whoever it is, please for the love of manknd, don't vote for Harriet Harperson.

 

[Hun200kmh]

TUKIPWAT

I find this post offensive. Reported!

 

[TenEightyOne]

And UKIP continue to meltdown. On the back of the argument about Carswell refusing to claim the "Short money" (and suggestions that Carswell is furious at Farage reneging on his resignation promise) there are allegations of Farage building "a cult of personality" and that he's become "snarling, thin-skinned (and) aggressive". So that's a net improvement then.

 

[Liquid]

One more. A bus stop in Manchester.