this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
41 points (100.0% liked)

UK Politics

3097 readers
160 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Actor Steve Coogan and presenter Carol Vorderman have backed Liberal Democrat pledges to reform how the UK's general elections are run.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] teamonkey@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

AV+ was not a PR method and only offered minor benefits above FPTP. It would still lead to a concentration of power between the two main parties, but it would increase the overall number of seats gained by a centrist party.

AV+ suited the Tories (and Labour) only slightly less well than FPTP, but Lib Dems would have been a much bigger spare leg if it had gone through. For the Tories, it was a win-win result.

In other words, the LDs allowed themselves to make another compromise, being tempted with another minor power grab, and in doing so allowed themselves to be outplayed again, and didn’t even gain us the minor democratic benefits AV+ had to offer.

As for AV+ being a short leap to PR, I have doubts, even though I voted in favour of it. PR would be less beneficial than AV+ to the three main parties now, so why would the LDs try to push it through? Also the referendum would have been used as a weapon - “the people voted so we can’t change it” - just as has been done for election reform, the Scottish Referendum and Brexit since.