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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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.
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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
There was never a need for a referendum, Parliament has the absolute authority to change how its elections are run.
They should have insisted it was part of the coalition agreement, but didn't.
Like student loans, it was ultimately less important than being in power.
So the minority party, should have forced through a major constitutional change, which voters hadn’t voted for - in the name of democracy? And the idea of the referendum was bad.
Interesting take.
Well when you put it that way....
The reality though is that both Labour and the LibDems had electoral reform in their manifestos - see Labour's 2010 manifesto here, page 92 - and as their votes combined were more than the Tories (approx 15 million, versus 10) you could argue that clearly that was the will of the people, and it should have at least been subject to a vote in the Commons.
Now that obviously didn't happen, and I'm not even saying it would be a successful option in negotiation, but what did happen was that the LibDems thought - and Clegg has said this himself - that having governmental stability was more important. Even if that meant passing a lot of pretty nasty shit.
you could argue that clearly that was the will of the people, and it should have at least been subject to a vote in the Commons.
In my opinion The LD clearly thought it was the will of the people and persuaded the Tories to run the referendum to prove this and give the change political legitimacy
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.
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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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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.
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. 🥹
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