Posted on 07/07/2024 5:32:54 AM PDT by RandFan
@TiceRichard
Reform would have won 94 seats under PR; not 5
We could have stopped Labour’s majority
Tory’s foolish obsession with First Past Post is to blame
(Excerpt) Read more at x.com ...
Sorry, but this is ridiculous. You do not change voting system based on the outcome of one election. Also, most Freepers are not British, so I assume you mean the FPTP system in the US. Good to know that you'd like to be governed by the East and the West Coasts.
In Britain most of the complaints regarding the FPTP system has traditionally come from the LibDems. I guess they will not be as voluble in that discussion after the recent election.
Here are comments from one British blogger. Read and try to understand....
As to Reform, I was grudgingly predicting 2-3 seats, so they've exceeded my expectations by two. I expected Lee Anderson would lose but he's popular with the locals, it seems. Usually ex-Tories standing on a different ticket don't win. There were some notable second places for Reform, but in this game there are no prizes for second place.
The note of caution for Reform is that they are the main beneficiary of the low turnout. They are the only party with an enthused base. Should Tory momentum improve even marginally, then Reform's vote share is way down next time. They've secured their party big beasts, save for Habib, and won where they've had a strong local presence. Building effective local machines is now a make or break issue for the part. Given the lack of preparation, Farage must be breathing a sigh of relief this morning that he doesn't have to share the green benches with any of their unvetted weirdos.
I haven't yet seen the final tally but Muslim independents have at least matched Refrom's performance, and will have cost Labour several seats.
[SNIP]
As anticipated, today we get the ritual complaints about FPTP. The Lib Dems score 3,499,969 votes, returning 71 [72] seats, while Reform scores 4,092,209 votes, returning just 4 [5] seats. Reform becomes the third largest polling party. The lesson, though, is pretty obvious. Reform scored where they had an established name and a decent ground campaign. Pretty much everywhere else, they had paper candidates.
That's what you have to build up in order to win. No party is entitled to seats on the back of national polling. Our politics is built on local representation, and if you want power, you have to earn it. You have to put the work in. PR is a cop out.
As such, if Refrom wants to capitalise on its gains, it will have to build local associations, with credible, vetted candidates, and will concentrate resources in places where they came a close second. If they do this, they can win a dozen seats in 2029. There's no point whining about FPTP. No government is going to switch to a system that enables challengers.
One of the reasons the USA fought a revolutionary war was to break away from the fake "laws" of england.
If you have a king, you cannot be a free people.
The USA is moving into a communist style of gummint where the right to speak freely has been eroded to the point of almost non-existence.
1984 has arrived.
If I understand things correctly, the approach proposed in Britain would be to look at nation-wide vote totals, and allocate seats in Parliament on that basis. That would not work in these United States - the large States (California, New York, etc.) would essentially control Congress. But perhaps an individual State might choose to operate in a similar fashion (allocate that State’s representatives on the basis of State-wide vote totals), although rural districts might lose local representation, if the politicians all lived in metro areas.
The “Tories” could have won 400 seats if they had not allowed massive 3rd world migration and pushed every woke agenda on the people for 14 years.
It’s very complicated to address the situation.
Last time they came up with a formula people couldn’t understand it and it was dismissed in a rare referendum.
Farage though is insistent on this. He thinks they’d win a referendum on it today.
There does seem to be a lot of people concerned about it...
U.S. house Congressional seats are voted the same way. I would’d change it.
The problem the reform party has is its numbers are spread thin across many districts as opposed to concentrated in more districts. It gets a very healthy “national” vote, but it’s too spread out an equivalent showing for parliamentary district seat wins.
Yes you’re right .Thank you for correcting me (plurality)
If they governed like Conservatives yes.
The economy barely grown since then and people had enough.
There are lessons there....
I think in a parliamentary system it makes sense to look at other voting systems
It wont be happening in the US the concept doesn’t work as others have stated and there is no history of it
Israel uses proportionate allocation of seats by national percentage of votes. And Israel does not assign representation by district, leaving legislators as mere tools of party leaders, unresponsive to what US Congress calls constituent services.
Israel is about the geographic area and population of New Jersey.
UK needs change—and she will get it. Reform is on the right track. Maybe after the peace at the end of WW III? Maybe a victorious Putin/Xi can help establish a democracy in England?
“No government is going to switch to a system that enables challengers.”
This is the real point in the end. There’s no incentive for Labour or the Tories to permit such a radical change of a system that essentially gives them a monopoly on power. Likely the only way it could change is if Reform or maybe another third-party gets power, but if that happens, it wouldn’t be as necessary since the 2 party monopoly would already have been broken.
The UK’s situation is very different from the US, though, so there’s no reason to think any change is needed to the US system. The US is a two-party system. The UK now has four viable parties (and more than that in the Celtic lands). The UK is also much smaller and more centralized than the US. You can’t have proportional representation over an area and populace as large and diverse as the US. Each state is almost like its own country. At most you could do proportional representation for each of the 50 states. Proportional, run-offs if no candidate got over 50%, or ranked choice voting are more reasonable and more democratic in a centralized, multiparty system and a small area like the UK.
But in the end, it’s unlikely they will change anything and the system will continue to be anti-third party, and Reform will just have to work around that or eventually try to integrate with the Tories and transform that party like Trump is doing with the GOP.
While Elizabeth was alive, I believed the monarchy was a goodly thing; however, today I’m not so certain. UK is a deplorable train wreck with voters as clueless as many Americans.
The Labor party has gummed up the gears of the economy and life.
Both parties must be scuttled.
It’s correct to say that the Conservatives did this to themselves by abandoning their supporters on key issues. The new Labor government got only one-third of the vote and will steadily lose support as they try to push through a radical agenda for which they have no mandate. If the Conservatives have learned their lesson, they could rebuild and win again in 2029. Otherwise, conservative voters may coalesce around Farage.
Neat trick of the Deep State to get Henry Bolingbroke, King of England, Lord of Ireland, to institute First Past the Post voting to help Starmer win the 2024 election. Not everyone can plan 700 years in advance.
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