Democratic Audit this week published its latest analysis, its depressing conclusions summed up by The Guardian’s headline British democracy in terminal decline.
A fascinating aspect of the Audit, even for those of us still scarred by the rejection of electoral reform in the 2011 referendum, is its detailed dissection of how the First-Past-The-Post system is failing democracy. And in particular the pinpointing of the year when FPTP started to go bad: 1974, and the Liberal insurgence under Jeremy Thorpe, when the party increased its support from 7.5% in 1970 to 19.3%.
This, say the Audit’s authors, marked a turning point in the UK’s electoral history, a moment when ended the dominance of the ‘Golden Age’ of FPTP (1950-70) and introduced instead its ‘Dysfunctional Age’ (1979-2005):
What the table shows is the decline of a two-party system from its post-war peak of 97% share of the vote (1951) for Labour and Conservatives to around 75% after the 1974 election up to 2005. And then came the 2010 election and a second potential game-changer, with the decline in the Labour/Conservative share of the vote to just two-thirds. You can see the individual breakdown by party of this trend in this graph:
Democratic Audit identify four characteristics of this dysfunctional age:
-
1) Recent elections have tended to produce excessively large majorities: “on four occasions since 1979 the winning party has secured majorities of 100, despite securing no more than 43 per cent of the vote – a scenario which would have been unthinkable in the 1950s.”
2) The electoral system has blocked the emergence of a multi-party system at Westminster: “by 2010, the electorate’s desire for a multi-party system had become undeniable, yet the allocation of seats maintained the semblance of a two-party system.”
3) The results of UK general elections have become highly disproportional: “Following a brief period in the 1950s when FPTP produced broadly proportional outcomes in which votes and seats were closely matched, … elections from 1983 onwards have consistently produced outcomes which are far more disproportional than those in the immediate post-war decades.”
4) Rather than votes counting equally, FPTP has rendered voter power highly uneven. “As party support becomes more geographically concentrated, and the number of marginal seats falls, meaningful electoral competition has tended to diminish in the great majority of seats. … In 2007, following the ‘General Election that never was’, the Electoral Reform Society (2008) estimated that the difference between a Labour and a Conservative victory could have depended on how as few as 8,000 voters across 30-35 key marginals cast their votes.”
Will it be back to two-party business as usual in 2015?
While the trend is clear enough to say that 1974 was a watershed year in UK electoral politics, it’s naturally too early to say if 2010 will be seen likewise. Labour and the Conservatives will be hoping that the Lib Dems’ current opinion poll ratings point to a reversion to the norm, that the simpler and more comfortable two-party politics will re-assert itself.
Regardless of the Lib Dem vote recovery I naturally hope to see, there seems scant chance of that happening. Even today, with the Lib Dem vote hovering at a low c.10%, the two-party share of the vote has climbed back only to its ‘dysfunctional age’ average of 75%. All three main parties are looking nervously ahead to the 2014 European elections, when there is surely a good chance that Ukip will top the national poll just 12 months before a general election. If they do expect panic at Westminster, especially among Conservatives.
In short, two-party politics is dead. Unfortunately, we have a democratic system based on the assumption it isn’t. That’s not a good or healthy combination.
* Stephen was Editor (and Co-Editor) of Liberal Democrat Voice from 2007 to 2015, and writes at The Collected Stephen Tall.
Follow @LibDemVoice on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Call for Southwell's importance to Byron to be recognised
John Stoa Original Art exhibition #dundeewestend
The Muesli Assassins
Katharine Pindar
David Raw
David Allen
Anthony Acton
41 Comments
When you write FTPT do you mean First-Past-The-Post i.e. FPTP or is FTPT a new system that I’ve never heard of?
I too hope that the two-party system is dead and that 2010 was another transitional year but with the current strategy that Clegg is pursuing, I fail to see how that will happen unless everyone jumps ship to UKIP, Greens etc. which I don’t hope seeing as I’m a Liberal
The problem is that Democratic Audit seem to be defining what “democratic” means in terms that the voters have democratically rejected.
DA seem to assume that democracy requires proportionality, but voters seem to have democratically disagreed. So it is DA who has lost the plot, not the system!
I suggest that a less agendizable measure of how democratic a system is might start with particpation rates – what proportion of voters take an interest, what proportion feel their vote counts?
……………………..In 2007, following the ‘General Election that never was’, the Electoral Reform Society (2008) estimated that the difference between a Labour and a Conservative victory could have depended on how as few as 8,000 voters across 30-35 key marginals cast their votes.” ……………..
Had that election taken place and been won by the Conservatives they would have been the ‘party in power’ and deemed responsible for the financial meltdown.
Had they failed to secure a majority, and formed a coalition with us, they/us would have been deemed responsible.
The coalition would probably fallen apart in 2008/9.
Either way, Labour would be in power (under Brown) with a massive majority.
fLabour would
@Richard dean
“DA seem to assume that democracy requires proportionality, but voters seem to have democratically disagreed. So it is DA who has lost the plot, not the system!”
I’m not sure that is true. AV is not proportional (some say it is ‘more’ proportional than FPTP) so us voters never really had a choice. Living in a Tory stronghold as I currently do, the 40% of us who vote for someone else would still have had our votes lost.
The effect of the change in the deposit laws in 1985, when the threshold for retaining a deposit was reduced from 12.5% to 5%, was likely to have made it easier for third and lower parties to field candidates.
It is also note worthy that the Liberal (and successor) vote from 1974 on stayed above 12.5%, which meant that many more constituencies could have Liberal candidates without risking deposits.
The low point in 1951 was probably the the general election with the lowest number of Liberal candidates.
Whether or not Democracy requires proportionality, it cerainly requires a voter to be able to understand the effect of his/her vote. That is the advantage of a preferential system, such as AV. It’s also what tactical voters are seeking to gain, but with less certainty.
AV is not PR, though the dishonest people in the No campaign pretended it is. There are other good reasons for PR, but the case for preferential voting does not depend on them.
An important observation is the point when LDs got better at translating electoral scores around 20% into bigger numbers of MPs – 1997 (a bit of a breakthrough in numbers of seats and our lowest GE score in 20 years). Very few people actually know about vote share because it has so little connection to seats won. What proportion of the public knows that our 2010 vote was only one-fifth lower than Labour’s? Why aren’t we working harder with the Greens, UKIP and the regional parties to make this point?
@ Nicola Prigg – thx for the typo-spotting, now corrected!
1950-1970 a “Golden Age”, when FPTP was working well? Surely the most notorious election result in British history was 1951 (the only election Churhcill “won”), when Labour got a quarter of a million more votes than the Tories – and lost.
Ian Sanderson: “AV is not PR, though the dishonest people in the No campaign pretended it is.”
I think you mean the dishonest people in the Yes campaign. As I recall, the No campaign understood perfectly that AV was not proportional. The Yes campaign, with their vague talk of “fairer votes”, were the real confusers.
@Ian Sanderson
Further to the post from Stuart Mitchell, you may wish to recall that one of the strands of the No Campaign was actually “No to AV, Yes to PR”. I would hardly call that pretending that AV was PR.
Richard Dean
“DA seem to assume that democracy requires proportionality, but voters seem to have democratically disagreed. So it is DA who has lost the plot, not the system! “
How have voters disagreed with the assumption that democracy requires proportionality? If you are referring to the AV referendum, AV is not proportional. It just allows voters to express other preferences as well as their top preference.
“I suggest that a less agendizable [sic] measure of how democratic a system is might start with participation rates – what proportion of voters take an interest, what proportion feel their vote counts? “
It is the knowledge that with X voting and First Past The Post that so many votes are wasted because second and lower preferences do not count that stops very many voters from voting. If preferential voting were introduced, whether with AV in Single Member Constituencies or STV in Multi-member Constituencies, then participation rates would go up. You suggest that this would make the system more democratic. I agree. So, by your lights, no doubt you are in favour of Preferential 1,2,3,Voting, whether with AV or STV. If not, why not?
Ian Sanderson and Stuart Mitchell
Another reason, of course, why the AV Referendum was lost was because voters believed the Conservative and No2AV lies that it would be necessary to have voting machines at a cost of £250 million. That might perhaps have been relevant to some extent with STV in Multi-member Constituencies but surely not with of AV in existing Single Member Constituencies.
The one positive feature of FPTP for the Lib Dems is that it gives them substantial power to decide who wins, or even if there’s no winner. However, this does require thinking along the lines of Tim Farron’s 57 by-elections strategy and not pretending that the current electoral system is PR. There is often little reward for getting more votes, eg 24% cf 23%, and in particular in 2010 getting 2,000 Lib Dems to vote Labour in 10 Con-Lab marginals would have produced a ‘double-hung’ parliament and would have greatly increased Lib Dem post-election leverage.
This analysis by Dem Audit isn’t new, but it’s correct. A similar argument about this on Next Left two years ago was one of the things that pursuaded me to vote in favour of AV: http://www.nextleft.org/2010/05/it-wasnt-pr-that-got-us-into-this-mess.html
However, I’d question this- “by 2010, the electorate’s desire for a multi-party system had become undeniable”. Yes and no. People want better choice among parties and to break from the Lab-Con-Lab-Con-Lab-Con pattern, but they’re not in practice willing to bring it about, as a true multi-party system would involve letting go of the desire for strong majoritarian government and embracing PR and regular coalitions instead, which they are deeply wary of.
Polls on AV showed early on that when you asked people if they’d vote Yes they’d say yes, but then when a follow-up question described what AV actually was and asked them again, they swung to No- this was the harbinger of the bottom falling out of the Yes campaign’s polls in the final couple of months before the referendum. Insofar as people care at all about electoral reform, British sentiment on the subject is essentially something along the lines of (to paraphrase Churchill) “FPTP is the worst electoral system, except for all the others”. They know it undervalues their votes and constrains their choice, but they won’t swap it for anything that is more unstable, more complicated or that will break the constituency link, and even AV, the tamest and least-threatening type of reform imaginable, was regarded as a bridge too far.
I think the main problem leading to decline in the quality of democracy is not he first past the post system, it’s the reality that those we have to elect to lead us are nowhere near as bright as those who’d run the empire, fought wars and had had the kind of integrative education which was provided by small universities. The fragmentation and disconnection of communities and society is also a driving force.
I’ve been looking at explicit methods by which we can reintegrate our education and become more connected both in our understanding of our own communities and in our ability to perceive what’s happening in other cultures.
PR would help but it’s not the core issue and it’s nowhere near enough.
You guys should get me to help you write a manifesto.
(Rebecca is on the committee of the LDEA and is serious).
I would agree with the post that 1951 was notorious as the election where Labour polled their largest ever votes, more than the conservatives and still lost – hardly a golden age. However, in 1945, Labour won a massive majority yet were only 8% ahead of the Conservatives in terms of vote. The Liberal Party vvote was for many years about 18% where they fielded candidates. While obviosuly they tended not to field candidate in weaker areas, the first past the post system with high deposits contributed to a catch 22 situation. Lack of money and organsational weakness meant the lost out under FPTP and would clearly have done better under a PR system.
Who amongst the public cares that in 2005 when Blair won with a smaller percentage than Churchill lost with in 1945, Heath lost with in twice in 1974 and less than Cameron in 2010 ? Certainly amongst certain leading Lib Dems proportional representation became the policy that dare not speak it’s name. Where was the great campaign ?
Stuart – what a very clever debating point! AV is not truly proportional, and of course the referendum never offered a proportional system, but it does produce a slightly more proportional, and hence fairer, result than FPTP.
The fact remains that DA has one set of ways of measuring how democratic a society. Other ways are possible, and insisting that DA’s is the only correct one reeduces DA to a totalitarian pressure group, not a democratic one at all.
At football matches we generally support one team, not both. In this and many other ways, society teaches us the skills to make a single choice, rather than to rank alternatives. Who is your favorite celeb? An FPTP system could be more democratic, in the sense of that people are more skilled at making that kind of choice, and so will be more likely to accurately express what they want.
Why not constitute the Lords as the collection of candidates who came second in parliamentary elections for the Commons? That way we might get a system that people could easily understand, and one that would not challenge the primacy of the Commons while giving much better representation to everyone!
By 2020, if not 2015, it’s not impossible that we may enter a new golden age of FPTP. It all hinges on whether the issue of EU membership is resolved the way UKIP and backbench Tories are campaigning for. If the threat of UKIP is removed, the Conservatives are free to consolidate the right and will aim for 40% or more of the vote.
Assuming the Lib Dems don’t recover and no one else mounts a successful challenge against Labour on the left, both main parties will be in the low 40s, where a two horse race effect could propel them the rest of the way to 90% of the vote, and firmly back into golden age territory.
“AV is not truly proportional, and of course the referendum never offered a proportional system, but it does produce a slightly more proportional, and hence fairer, result than FPTP.”
On the contrary, it’s not intrinsically more proportional at all.
Under the current political set-up in this country, by chance it would produce a more proportional result, simply because the third party would attract more second preferences than the others.
But if that wasn’t the case (for example if the third party was on the left or on the right), AV would produce a _less_ proportional results than FPTP.
“Assuming the Lib Dems don’t recover and no one else mounts a successful challenge against Labour on the left, both main parties will be in the low 40s, where a two horse race effect could propel them the rest of the way to 90% of the vote, and firmly back into golden age territory.”
That I doubt. I think there will be a substantial protest vote against the main parties, but it’s likely to be fragmented among a number of minority parties which won’t be able to translate it into seats.
But what matters in practice for the extent of two-party dominance is the number of seats won by the Lib Dems (and to a lesser extent the SNP). On that basis, I think 2015 will see a substantial move back to two-party politics in terms of MPs, even if the two-party vote share remains historically low.
@Richard – Over the years people have suggested the idea that the Lords could be a sort of proportional offset to the FPTP Commons (I remember an article by Bill Rodgers for example). Sadly, the 15-year terms proposed in the current reforms (which I still support as a very minor improvement on the existing system) undermines all this. Wouldn’t it be great if the HoC was split it two – 300 MPs on FPTP normal constituencies and 300 elected proportionally.
@Charles Even with a collapse in LD support the minor parties have increased hugely since 1970 and will probably continue to do so (a Green MP in the house!). The problem is the dissipation of so much of this political support.
One of the basic requirements of an electoral system is surely that voters should be able to understand it. But if you experts are still confused about whether AV is PR, and politicians and broadcasters (and so educators) are also confused about whether AV is PR, what chance has the electorate got?
My impression is that people see this as the LibDems trying to cheat by changing the system to their advantage. That does not seem to me to be something that will increase support for LibDems.
Richard Dean
The Alternative Vote is not necessarily Proportional Representation: it is just Preferential Voting – 1,2,3 instead of X.
It would end many safe seats. For example, in Newbury in 1974 we Liberals got 24,000 votes, the Conservative got 23,000 and Labour 10,000, twice. Afterwards, many Labour voters were sick that they had not voted Liberal. If they had had a second preference, the Liberal (yours truly) would have won on a platform of greater equality of opportunity in health, education and the inheritance of capital, with no more Clause IV nationalisation. Equally, I would quite likely have been booted out at the next election.
With preferential voting more people would take an interest and vote for the candidate they wanted. Surely that is a definition of a good working democracy?
Why are you so hooked on X voting? Does it suit the party you support?
@Dane Clouston – I think you have your numbers round the wrong way there. In February the Tories got 24.6k, the Liberals got 23.4K and Labour got just short of 11k. In October the Tories got 23.5k, the Liberals got 22.5k and Labour got 9.4k.
@Dane Clouston — I think you’re letting your own experience mislead you as to the likely effect of AV. It would not have ended “many safe seats”; in fact, it would undoubtedly have ended some, and created others.
Of course, Newbury in 1974 clearly wasn’t a safe seat, so it belongs to a different argument about AV. Even there, however, I note that you claim that “many Labour voters were sick that they had not voted Liberal” — yet, given a chance to correct their “mistake” just eight months later, they chose not to do so. Were their memories really that short? Were they just too stupid? Or did they perhaps prefer to vote for the party they actually wanted, rather than give an arguably artificial mandate to a sort of compromise* candidate?
*I realise you wouldn’t have regarded yourself as a compromise candidate, but the implication clearly is that those Labour voters would have done.
I am trying to work out how the ‘transitional year (1974) is to be considered any different than the average of the following elections from which it is not statistically significantly different in terms of three party vote shares) at all. And, although one might like to believe 2010 was a watershed, ie another ‘transition’ , the way the polls are going, I would wait and see 2015 before writing screeds like this claiming to have any authority!
A good point, Tony. One could even make a case for 2005 being more significant than 2010 in terms of 2-party vote, since that was the first time that dropped below 70% (and quite substantially). And if you look at the change in the three-party vote (which may be more significant given the likely eclipse of the Lib Dems at the next election), that was when the “Others” vote first went above 10% (as 1974 was when it first went above 5%) and may be a more telling indicator of political fragmentation and disillusion with mainstream politics.
Simon: “[AV] does produce a slightly more proportional, and hence fairer, result than FPTP.”
Not according to the Electoral Reform Society, whose website used to feature a page on AV which confirmed that AV “can be less proportional” than FPTP. Notoriously, the ERS removed this page from their site at about the same time they started heading the “Yes” campaign.
How great that we can still argue about this over a year later!
It is nice to see, at last, a recognition that the turning point was 1974 rather than the foundation of the SDP in 1981.
I am sorry, however, that Democratic Audit has not listed a fifth dysfunctional characteristic which I actually think should be listed first of five. That is, the extreme regional distortion caused by FPTP. So we end up with the whole of the south-east outside London having almost entirely Tory MPs, and large parts of the north and industrial/inner-city areas having nothing but Labour MPs. I believe this has been hugely damaging for many reasons.
Paul Walter.
Thanks for correcting my figures!
Malcolm Todd
Let us agree that AV would have ended somewhere between “many” and “some” safe seats. I am not sure about it creating others very often, if at all.
As for my personal experience, I agree, of course, that Newbury was not a safe seat in October 1974, after we Liberals had very nearly won in February of that year. But it certainly was a safe seat until February 1974. The last time there had been a Liberal MP was in 1923. From 1924 to 1959 the Conservative MP consistently polled more than 50%
When I first helped the Liberals there in 1964 (while at home in Bucklebury on leave from the Royal Navy – I had been enthused by a talk on the Liberal Party at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich by Mark Bonham Carter) the Liberal was third with 11.1% of the vote, as against 45% Con and 18.9% for Labour.
Since then the Conservative vote remained broadly steady between 48.8% and 42.4%. In 1966 the Liberal was third with 16.7% while Labour was second with 38%. I became the candidate that year (while living and working in the City and visiting the constituency at weekends).
In 1970 we were still third with 21.3% as against 29.9% for Labour and 48.8% Conservative – still a very safe seat, with Labour still second..
The big jump was in February 1974 to Liberals in second place with 40.3% for us against 42.4% Conservative and 17.3% for Labour
On a personal note, Ted Heath called the election unexpectedly. I heard about it – and swore very loudly! – while reading in the Bodleian Library for my finals for a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics as a mature student since 1971 at New College, Oxford! My youthfully ambitious plan was to become Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, once I had been elected!!! I used to campaign vigorously in Council elections in the constituency and when it came to the General Election I used to go round the pubs in the cold evenings and ask the landlord if I could talk to people and give them posters, which then would appear all over the place, as if we had been canvassing the streets!.
If I had had the summer to squeeze the Labour vote, instead of taking my degree finals, things would have been different in October 1974. The voters did not wake up in time to the change in circumstances. The story is that the Liberals, not Labour, became the way to get the Tory out, but there was not sufficient time to change loyalties with the message across that it was Labour which was the wasted vote under First Past the Post X voting in Newbury, not Liberal.
Things would also have been different earlier, in February 1974, with AV, under which we would have undoubtedly won what had until then been a safe Conservative seat by any standard. I just don’t see how you can deny the effect that AV would have in ending safe seats. Presumably the present vastly un-proportional, un-preferential system suits your politics. But it is not properly democratic in expressing in the make-up of the Commons the individual and collective will of voters in the country.
Tony Dawson
As you can see, 1974 – with our vote in Newbury going from 20.3% in 1970 to 40.3% in February 1974 – felt very different at the time.
In those days, the Liberals were popularly on the side of a fairer country without Clause IV nationalisation (a big issue at the time), clearly differentiated from both Conservative and Labour. Now, the Liberal Democrats are unpopularly on the wrong side of the debate on the big issue of the EU, and not all of them, in coalition with the Conservatives, appear significantly on the side of a fairer country either. Who do you vote for now if you want a fairer country, with less involvement with the EU – apart from the currently modest sized EU-sceptic Liberal Party? Ideas are powerful. Maybe the Liberal Party will grow rapidly again.
Stuart Mitchell
AV can be less proportional, but only, I think, if voters’ lower preferences jump towards the extremes rather than towards the centre.
Matthew Huntbach
The Social Democrats are/were the problem – right of centre pro-EU refugees from the then EU-sceptic Labour Party. For a fairer country, the EU-sceptic Liberal Party has adopted UK Universal Inheritance in line with “liberty, property and security” for all. I hope all liberals will, but Social Democrats may take a little longer!
Dane Clouston, you’ve missed my point. I’m not saying whether the Social Democrats were good or bad, a problem or not a problem. What I’m saying is that their role in the decline of the two-party system has been greatly over-played. From 1981 onwards you will find commentators, and people writing books on modern British politics, the sort of textbook a student of politics would be given, writing up the decline of the two-party system as if it started in 1981. The story was – and those who were not around at the time believe it, because that is what they see written down – that the Liberal Party was a sleepy historical remnant and it was the foundation of the SDP that changed things and ended the days when Britain could be realistically written up as just a two-party system.
In fact the February 1974 general election was, I would say, and have been saying since 1981, the more significant event. The reason it was downplayed is because then as now, the Westminster Bubble thinks politics is only about them and only what they do changes anything. The SDP was a Westminster Bubble creation, the Liberal Party of the 1970s was primarily a grassroots activist organisation – and it was those Liberal grassroots activists who were the real driving force in ending the two-party system.
Matthew Huntbach,
I entirely agree with what you say.
I don’t think I missed your point, but was going on to make mine, which is that the Social Democrats have made the Liberal Democrats more out of step with popular opinion – both on the EU and on making ours a fairer country.
People, myself included, thought initially that, coming from the Labour Party, the Social Democrats would make the merged party more keen on a fairer country, whereas in fact many of them were rather comfortably elitist. Also we did not realise the degree of fanatical pro-EU opinion which made them leave the then EU-sceptic Labour Party. So now they are, or their tradition is, responsible for it being difficult for those of us who want a fairer country, with less involvement in the EU, to know who to vote for, a question to which the Liberal Party once again appears to be the answer, at least in theory, if not yet in practice where it is not strong enough.
I would much prefer to keep FPTP for the Commons.
Partly that’s for admittedly rather sentimental reasons, eg so that people in a community can usually still say “our MP” rather than having to say “one of the six MPs we share with neighbouring towns”.
But mainly it’s because FPTP is the system most likely to produce a single party government with a working majority in the Commons.
However I can also see the disadvantages of FPTP, both practical and theoretical, which is why I think it would be a good idea if people in a community could still say “our MP”, but also say “our SMP”, who would be the “Second Member of Parliament” representing that constituency in the second chamber.
And the simple, cost-free, practically effective and theoretically justifiable method to choose that SMP would be for him to be the candidate who had come second in the same parliamentary election that produced the MP.
Denis Cooper
You write:
“I would much prefer to keep FPTP for the Commons. Partly that’s for admittedly rather sentimental reasons, eg so that people in a community can usually still say “our MP” rather than having to say “one of the six MPs we share with neighbouring towns”.”
That is why AV, with Preferential Voting in existing single member constituencies, is better for the Commons than STV. And also why MPs are also more likely to vote for it.
You write:
“But mainly it’s because FPTP is the system most likely to produce a single party government with a working majority in the Commons.”
FPTP with X Voting is indeed most likely to produce a single party government with a working majority, but it is less likely than AV with Preferential Voting in existing single member constituencies to produce a single party government with a working majority that properly represent opinion in the country.
“However I can also see the disadvantages of FPTP, both practical and theoretical, which is why I think it would be a good idea if people in a community could still say “our MP”, but also say “our SMP”, who would be the “Second Member of Parliament” representing that constituency in the second chamber.”
Having come a very close second in two General Elections I would not have taken kindly to being referred to a “Second Member of Parliament” and being in the Senate rather than the Commons, which is what I was hoping to enter.
You write:
“And the simple, cost-free, practically effective and theoretically justifiable method to choose that SMP would be for him to be the candidate who had come second in the same parliamentary election that produced the MP.”
This is a recipe for producing a permanent institutionally guaranteed fundamental conflict between the Commons and the Senate, or second chamber.
Far better to have AV in the Commons and full STV in the Senate.
Not knowing one of your six Senators who represent yours and neighbouring towns would be significantly better than having them inherit the position or be appointed or elected on a party list.
Let the term for Senators be ten years instead of five or fifteen. Half would then be elected every five years. The Commons would still always be more democratically legitimate, because of always being fully elected more recently, every five years.
Denis Cooper
Partly that’s for admittedly rather sentimental reasons, eg so that people in a community can usually still say “our MP” rather than having to say “one of the six MPs we share with neighbouring towns”.
Sorry, when I was growing up on a council estate in a supposedly true-blue safe Tory part of the world, how was I supposed to think of the Tory who was the MP as “our MP”? He did not know or care about people like us, he never spoke for people like us, he was part of a party whose whole aim was to oppress people like us, then as now, make us more miserable so the people they REALLY represented could grow richer. If there were several local MPs, I would regard the one of them who represented the minority poor people in the area, gathering together the scattered votes form the small council estates hidden away over the large “true blue” district as OUR MP.
Dennis Cooper
But mainly it’s because FPTP is the system most likely to produce a single party government with a working majority in the Commons
Well, fine. I hope you are not one of those people moaning about the LibDems “propping up the Tories”. The logical consequence of your argument is that whichever party wins the most votes should have unrestricted government power regardless of how short it fell of actually getting 50% of the vote. So to follow what you want, the LibDems should simply let through everything the Tories want, not argue about it and try to change it. I hear Tories saying this sort of thing, but anyone who is Labour and opposes electoral reform for the reason you do should, if they have any decency take the same line. So why don’t I hear Labour opponents of no-one who opposes electoral reform of electoral reform saying “dirty rotten Liberal Democrats – they are stopping the election winners getting all their own way instead of just agreeing to let the Tories govern as they want”? So far as I am concerned, that is the only morally defensible position Labour oppponents of electoral reform should be taking to the Liberal Democrats.
Or perhaps you should consider introducing a system, as was introduced in Italy in 1922, which guarantees full power to the biggest party. Seems to me the mindset of the party which introduced it is similar to the mindset of those who support FPTP on the grounds that it leads to “decisive government”.
Matthew Huntbach –
Perhaps you missed the point that under FPTP-SPTP if your MP was Tory then your SMP would not be a Tory.
Except perhaps in very rare cases where the Tories had such overwhelming support in a constituency that they dared to split their vote by putting up two candidates, bearing in mind that each elector would still have only one vote to cast as now.
Matthew Huntbach –
If I really wanted any single party to have unrestricted power, would I be proposing a system deliberately designed to ensure that whichever single party had a Commons majority would not also have a majority in the second chamber?
Dane Clousten –
“Having come a very close second in two General Elections I would not have taken kindly to being referred to a “Second Member of Parliament” and being in the Senate rather than the Commons, which is what I was hoping to enter.”
If you came second in a general election and entered the second chamber then the description “Second Member of Parliament” would be entirely appropriate, and if instead Senators were elected by a separate PR election then that title would not change the fact that many of them would not have won if the election had been held under FPTP.
In any case I would have thought that the opportunity to serve your community in Parliament would have been more important than your title.
“This is a recipe for producing a permanent institutionally guaranteed fundamental conflict between the Commons and the Senate, or second chamber.”
It’s a recipe for institutionally guaranteed and hopefully effective opposition to the government in the second chamber, to compensate for what is usually a lack of effective opposition in a first chamber elected by FPTP.
But as the second chamber would clearly have less democratic legitimacy than the first, with the average SMP having received maybe 65% of the votes received by the average MP, there could be no question about which chamber should have primacy.
Dane Clouston
“Let us agree that AV would have ended somewhere between “many” and “some” safe seats. I am not sure about it creating others very often, if at all.”
I don’t know about often, but it certainly would create some — mostly to the benefit of the Lib Dems, who are in several places neck-and-neck with the Tories (or occasionally Labour) and would become much harder to dislodge if the remaining Labour (or Tory) voters had the opportunity to choose between the devil and the merely (to them) undesirable. I don’t think LibDems are genetically incapable of the sort of behaviour that we have seen from Tory and Labour MPs with safe seats, so I don’t regard creating safe Lib Dem seats as intrinsically better than the other sort.
“Presumably the present vastly un-proportional, un-preferential system suits your politics. ”
Well, that just shows how silly presumption can be. I voted for AV because, as I said at the time, I thought it was very slightly less bad than the awful system we have now. Don’t assume that the world is divided into people who think everything’s great the way it is and people who agree with Dane Clouston. :-/
Malcolm Todd,
Safe seats of any kind are a bad thing, but AVwould not create many, if any, which could not easily revert to being unsafe again with changing political support.
I am delighted my presumption was wrong and that you voted for AV! Apologies! And I do not make the assumption you suggest. I just believe that AV it is the best system for the Commons, with preferential voting and one MP per constituency.