British voters have rejected a proposal to change the voting system for parliamentary elections in spectacular fashion. By a margin of 68% to 32%, they chose to keep the ‘first past the post’ system, under which the candidate who gets the most votes on the first count wins, rather than adopt the Alternative Vote (AV) system, under which if no candidate won 50% or the vote on the first count, second-preference votes – and then third-preference votes, and so on – would be redistributed until a candidate passed the 50% threshold.
The main beneficiaries of AV would have been Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, currently the junior partner in Britain’s Conservative-led coalition government. And despite their current marriage of convenience with the Tories, the Lib Dems remain at their grassroots a resolutely left-of-center party. Indeed, senior Lib Dem Vince Cable joined with far-left figures in the Labour party in claiming that under AV the two parties would form a ‘progressive alliance’ that would keep the Conservatives out of power for generation.
Unfortunately for what passes for the British Left, this country, like the United States, remains a fundamentally conservative one; New Labour’s recent spell of 13 years in power followed a tectonic shift to the centre. True, under Cameron the conservatives have also moved towards the centre on some issues, but by any measure of public opinion, be it welfare, immigration or the European Union, Britain remains a small-c conservative nation.
That ‘progressive alliance’ exists only in the fevered imagination of the left, a fact neatly illustrated by the fact that the Yes vote prevailed in just handful or areas, several of them in London, and all of which are hotbeds of what can best be described as elite metropolitan opinion – well-to-do areas populated by BBC journalists, other media types, lawyers, professional activists and the like; in other words a hugely influential but minuscule sub-section of British society that has very little in common with their fellow countrymen.
Also yesterday, the Conservatives did rather better than expected in ‘mid-term’ local council elections, and Labour – after several months of savage attacks on the Tory austerity measures made necessary by the years of Blair/Brown profligacy – rather worse. This has been a good day for British conservatives; it seems their progressive foes will have to wait a little longer for their generation in the sun.
Another Canada?
Canada is still FPTP.. Though leftys want Proportional Representation so that their little fringe wacko parties can get seats and gum up the political process..
PR has already been rejected in Canada though
What is being called AV – Alternate Vote – is called instant runoff voting (IRV) in the US. In either case it is a runoff system, not proportional representation. However, in the US – and probably the UK – IRV is a trojan horse for proportional representation.
I also wonder if the name AV in the UK was not an attempt to generate confusion about approval voting (AV) which is only intended for single member districts. Approval voting is a simple voting system that eliminates the split-vote problem which, as I discuss at my 2002 campaign website (http://www.paulhager.org/sos/), eliminates the split-vote problem and, more to the point, will usually choose the Condorcet winner.
I oppose any sort of proportional representation scheme – youll find a discussion on my blog (http://paulhager.org/wordpress/?p=79) that deals with its more pernicious effects. Approval voting and Condorcet voting ARE NOT PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION, nor do they envision it. Both would make it easier for a third party candidate or an independent to win in a single member district but such candidates would have to EARN it – the winner would have to be the candidate favored by a majority of the voters. Runoff voting doesnt do that.
IRV is NOT a conduit to proportional representation. It takes an amazing amount of either ignorance or deceitfulness to claim such a fallacy.
Approval voting is a wretched way to elect people in leadership positions. The winner in approval voting is frequently the individual who is sufficiently inoffensive to all sides of the political spectrum. This may sound good at first until they actually have to “lead” and as such they don’t have a base to represent.
Both approval voting and proportional representation are huge mistakes.
They may be willing to cut back on the welfare state and immigration but they won’t give up the slightest on the NHS which supports both natives and immigrants. They won’t give up paying tax to support the BBC, which in turn is against welfare reform, immigration quotas and leaving the EU. And the EU really is not that big an issue with the majority, but a die hard minority of UKIP, BNP and further right Tories.
I think if the consequences concerning these and other issues were understood by most who to this day have continued to rely on the BBC, Guardian etc., they would probably be more conservative.
Well, I am far from being a lefty troll, but I don’t see why this is theoretically so bad. Presumably if we had applied it to Ross Perot in the presidential election then it would have prevented Bill Clinton from winning.
The appeal of this approach is that when you have 3 or more viable candidates, the public probably gets closer to getting what they want. In tis case, I don’t see how you can say that the UK is fundamentally a conservative country if a majority of the people would select the lib democrats or labor.
Perhaps the truth is that the lib-dem vote is a safe vote for the kind of trendy lefties who are not necessarily sociality but like you to know they care about the downtrodden, drink fine wine and listen to pubic radio here in the US. I suspect that, given the reality of socialist rule again, people in the UK might turn away from this party if the result was the kind of socialist rule that led the country into the ditch in the first place.
One other thought – this type of system might be helpful to the tea party as it would allow them to express opposition to wishy-washy republicans without risking a split vote. I would argue that this is an enhancement of democracy
Not only is it not theoretically bad but in actual practice it has worked fine: Australia has proved this system works fine (and fairly) by alternating power off and on for nearly 100 years. Within the anglosphere, Australia is more right-of-center than any other nation besides the U.S. – so preference voting (I dislike calling it alternative voting and wonder if the name is part of the problem) isn’t a leftist candy store.
Preference cascades happen faster and more naturally with preference voting because people can express their true first choice without the worry of wasting a vote. I suspect some fear that this means every looney idea or politician now has a chance in this voting system but mathematically that just doesn’t occur. Others may fear that it will allow for a gradual pulling in one direction but I’d agree with gazzer that people will push back the other way once they’ve gotten a fuller taste of poor fruit.
Democracy is only one generation from oblivion.
Teach your children well if you want them to remain free.
It is a vote against Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems more than anything. Hard to convey the contempt that is felt for him and his cronies. It is an indication of the low quality of our politicians that someone like Cameron can be seen as the best option.
In Britain, we don’t even elect our version of the Senate, the upper chamber of the parliament which is very appropriately called ‘The House of Aristocrats’ and the Liberals Democrats tried to introduce a cutting edge electoral system, a form of proportional representation, to elect the already democratic lower chamber of our parliament.
Where do the Liberal Democrats think they are? This is not Europe or America! We are not a democracy, liberal or otherwise, we are the United Kingdom, it’s MADNESS!!!?