this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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UK Politics

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General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca -1 points 7 months ago

Under PR the UK would almost always elect a centre left coalition.

And this is why it can't happen. You can't have any change in an electoral system when one side is gleefully rubbing their hands over how under the new system they'd win every election. A bit of a conflict of interest.

The EU is PR and there is a clearly a problem with people feeling like the EU parliament doesn't represent their interests. And that disconnect is real, in a PR the parties own the seats, not community leaders. Having a first past the post system guarantees that everyone has someone from their community representing them. The biggest problem with first past the post is the fact that it was given that name in bad faith by those trying to push other systems.

And you may think it'll be great that conservatives break up into many different parties, but this means a conservative coalition may need to adopt policies to appease some extreme right parties to gain power. Israel is a PR system, and this is exactly what happened there.

Kinda a hard sell to convince people you want UK politics to be more like the politics of the EU or Israel. People that voted for Brexit may be convinced to rejoin the EU someday, but making the UK parliament more like the EU system will be a red line for them. And there would be a lot of Remainers that wouldn't want the UK to be more like Israel.

Stop trying to make proportional representation happen it isn't going to happen. Community representation systems (FPTP) have their flaws but PR systems have many more flaws.