A little while back I blogged about the inherent unfairness in the UK's electoral system, based on the way in which the country's constituencies are laid out. Back then I declared that I would present my own alternative "tomorrow"...
Apologies for the wait; as I've said before, the election campaign has been taking up vast amounts of my time. Strange then, that I should find a good, uninterrupted hour or so on the eve of Polling Day!
As a Conservative, many people would be forgiven for believing that I do not support any form of proportional representation and will back First Past the Post to the hilt. In a way, I disagree with Mr. Cameron on his assertions regarding electoral reform.
I believe that the system can be reformed in two steps:
A complete re-drawing of the boundaries
Mr. Cameron has pledged to cut the number of MPs by 50 should he become Prime Minister. This would leave us with 600 MPs in a country of approximately 60,000,000 people. This would be the perfect time to re-draw the boundaries to create much fairer constituencies whereby the share of the vote needed in order to return an MP is roughly the same.
Let's say, for argument's sake, 600 constituencies of 100,000 people each.
A re-vamp of the system
I agree that FPTP is massively unfair and can lead to stupid results. You only have to take a look at one of my local constituencies (Norwich South), where a four-way fight is taking place to see this. A party could be returned with as little as 25.1% of the popular vote; that is, just one in four people voting for them. As well as this (as I mentioned in my previous post), we have the crazy situation whereby Labour can be the largest party with under 20% of the vote...
What I propose is keeping the First Past the Post system, but instead defining where "the post" lies; at 50.1% to be exact. This could be achieved by using the Single Transferable Vote system. This would mean that you would mark all of the candidates in preference order. If no one candidate achieves 50.1% of the vote from first-preference votes, the votes of the last-placed candidate are re-distributed based on the second choice... and so on until someone achieves 50.1%.
So there you have it, my proposals for creating a fairer electoral system whilst retaining the key elements of first past the post.
Posts
14 hours ago
I agree with your suggestions for STV and for boundary change. I actually campaigned in Norwich South (I'm not going to say for which party) and it did seem like we were fighting for a small fraction of the seat's votes rather than the approval of 50% of the constituents.
ReplyDeleteI watched the coverage of the '76 elections and one of the very interesting things was to see that each seat often only had Labour and Tory candidates, the odd Liberal or Socialist dropped in for good measure here and there . No BNP, Greens, UKIP &c &c. Our electoral system hasn't changed at all to move in step with this big change in elections. I don't know how it could be accommodated but it certainly feels like it hasn't been.
I think severing the constituency link is a very bad idea but something needs to be done. It's a real pickle of a situation and although your idea doesn't solve it, it does iron out some other issues without causing huge upset.
It's good to hear another Conservative who doesn't just swallow FPTP as gospel.
ps. Thanks for the comment on my blog. :)
Adam
ReplyDeleteI'm going to guess (from your mention of an interest in "Libertarian Politics" on your own blog) that you were campaigning either for the Lib Dems (in which case, congratulations), the Greens (in which case, jolly good show) or Workers' Rev (in which case, why?!). Anyway...
You make a very interesting comment regarding the change in the electoral landscape since the late 70s.
Given the way you describe it (and in all honesty I'd never looked at it in that light before) it appears even more so that the Liberal Democrats have just marched on to the playing field and demanded that the players change the rules so that they can win. One really does have to wonder if they'd be calling for PR if they would actually win more seats under a less fair system...