With a hung parliament looming and the most likely out come being a coalition government with the Lib Dems being the king makers, what will the Lib Dems expect for their support?
Gordon Brown has already offered the Alternative Vote System, which isn’t a proportional representation form of voting system and is unlikely to be enough to secure the Liberal Democrats support if they find themselves in a position of power (maybe a once in a lifetime opportunity for the Lib Dems).
What the Liberal Democrats really want is true proportional representation in the form of the single transferable vote system.
What is the Single Transferable Vote?
The single transferable vote system is quite complicated, so I’ll try to simplify the description!
The current parliamentary constituencies would be changed to allow for multiple candidates to run an area, similar to what we see in local elections and the EU elections where we might see a mix of candidates running a constituency rather than just 1 MP.
Each voter ranks the list of candidates on their ballot paper in order of preference. For example if there are 5 candidates in an area:
Candidate A – 2
Candidate B – 1
Candidate C – 4
Candidate D – 3
Candidate E – 5
In the above example the voter wants Candidate B as their preferred candidate.
A formula is used to determine how many votes is needed for each candidate that will be elected for an area. The most commonly used formula is the Droop quota:
Valid Votes Cast (divided by) Seats to Fill + 1 = Votes Needed To Win 1 Seat
Example for a constituency with 80,000 votes cast and 3 seats available.
80,000 votes cast / 4 = 20,000 votes to gain 1 seat.
Candidates with the required 20,000 votes (in the example above) are immediately elected.
An elected candidate with more than the 20,000 votes has their extra votes transferred to their second choice on the ballot paper.
If no candidate has 20,000 votes, the candidate with the least votes is removed and their votes are redistributed to the other candidates (to the 2nd choice on the ballot paper)
This continues until 3 candidates have their 20,000 votes or there are only three candidates left in the count.
There are variations on the single transferable vote system, but the above is the basic idea.
What Would STV do to British Politics?
The single transferable vote system would transform parliament, we’d be highly unlikely to ever see another majority government.
With current polls showing the popular vote almost split 3 way we might expect to see the share of seats shared almost equally between the three main parties with the smaller parties gaining the odd seat.
My only real concern about this voting system is it would almost certainly result in BNP MPs, how many I don’t know. On the face of it having one BNP MP is bad, but 1 MP has no power in parliament and with the BNP only gaining 0.7% of the popular vote in 2005, I find it highly unlikely to see the BNP number of MPs being significant.
Have a few extremist MPs would be worth having a new system that resulted in a truly representative parliament. I don’t like the Green party or UKIP, but they hold views many in our society hold and it’s wrong not to have someone representing them in politics.
At the moment al the big “mioan” parties are widely despised, aren’t they?
They all showed up shamefully in the expenses scandal. They took massive amounts of illegal fuinding from non-doms, criminals and tax exiles to fund their election campaigns. They are all lying about the financial mess they have got us into, weighed down with debt and with the EU bleeding our economy dry.
It’s time to let some of those unorthodox non-conformist parties in to power and provide some meaningful choice for the electorate. Without it, the whole election is a sham.
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The only reason why UKIP and the BNP and other smaller parties didn’t get caught out in the expenses scandal is they don’t have any MPs to be caught out. UKIP and BNP MEPs and councillors have been caught out on similar things though, so they are no less selfish as the other parties.
The whole expenses system was bound to fail in this way since the whole premise was MPs can claim for anything they want as the expenses are a replacement for MPs wage increases because the British people already think MPs are paid too much.
Rather than giving MPs a wage like £80K plus a year they gave them £64K a year plus £20K+ expenses which the vast majority of MPs took in full (or very close to full).
It really makes me laugh that multimillionaires like David Cameron complained at the expenses scandal when if you asked a person in the street if you were a multi-millionaire MP (like David Cameron) would you take a £64K (£120K if a minister) wage packet and claim £20K expenses on your mansion of a home and then argue for changes to the expenses system that you didn’t really need in the first place, but took full advantage of because you could, would that be the actions of a fair/honest person?
I think most people who have lived modest lives wouldn’t act that way. I certainly wouldn’t claim expenses as an MP if I was a multi-millionaire, it sends the wrong message.
David
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PR is NOT the way forward. I have been reading up about it and it seems to be so complicated “God Knows Where my vote will go”. At least with first past the post I know where my vote went and If the candidate that I voted for Won or Lost.
LEAVE WELL ALONE!
First past the post is easy to understand.Also I understand that with PR there is more likelyhood of a Hung Parliament. Look at this Fiasco. Do we really want this every election?. I Think Not!
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