It is? What proportion of the British public know what STV is, let alone know what it is to the point of having a view on it? Given that most Labour and Conservative politicians are clueless on it, even those invited by national media to express their view on proportional representation, are ignorant of it to the point where if it was anything else it’d be a matter of humiliating embarrassment to expose such ignorance, I hardly suppose the average British citizen to have carefully weighed up the pros and cons and decided against. Or even to have carefully read the rubbish written about it by ignorant Labour and Conservative politicians and ignorant members of the commentariat, and come to an unfounded conclusion against.

Of course, there is a highish proportion of people in these isles who HAVE experienced STV and thus do know something of what it is. But it would be too much to expect those who run our media commentary to think of calling on such people to express a view, when you could could instead pay an ignorant English MP or a star media commentator who thinks innumeracy is something to boast of to comment instead.

Furthermore if we’d had STV in this country we’d have been able to get rid of the conservatives ten years earlier and I doubt that scotland could elect anything but a labour governmant under FPTP.

There may be instanses where a more propotianate system would allow more more anti Fianna Fial coalitions but it would be very narrow and potentialy unstable if it meant Fine Gael and Labour relying on several far left parties. A more proportianate system could also mean that the first two problems meantioned in the article may become an issue.Ther may be a case for tincreasing the maximum seat size to sixand trying to reduce the number of three seat constituensies (or whatever it is you call them) in ireland but otherwise I should think it was proportionate enough.

Almost every voter has somebody in Parliament that they voted for, who they can expect to represent their views

Compare this to the current UK system, which is “roughly one half of the voters did not vote for their MP, and can expect to get brushed off when raising issues that split down party lines”.

The British public’s opposition to STV is staggering, though Ireland’s system is definitely not perfect – the way it’s almost impossible to get rid of Fianna Fail and the way some seats can always reliably be returned just on a party vote. At least we have it in Scotland now, slightly.