General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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A projection of how the election results would look if we used Additional Member System (AMS), like in Scotland and Wales.
| Party | AMS | FPTP | Seat change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Labour | 236 | 411 | +175 |
| LibDems | 77 | 71 | -6 |
| Green | 42 | 4 | -38 |
| SNP | 18 | 9 | -9 |
| Plaid Cymru | 4 | 4 | 0 |
| Reform | 94 | 5 | -89 |
| Conservative | 157 | 121 | -36 |
| Northern Ireland | 18 | 18 | 0 |
| Other | 4 | 6 | +2 |
...but if you give people the opportunity to list preferences, they don't vote the same way. Tactical voting goes out of the window, and people are free to put what they actually want as their first choice.
I favour STV for this reason, but AV would have been an improvement too. AMS retains a single choice IIRC and for that reason I would never support it's use. Also the AMS list means big parties can just put all their top choice people on it and almost guarantee their election.
The Electoral Reform Society also favours STV, they probably chose AMS here as modeling it from FPTP isn't complete guess work.
I actually wrote my thesis on analysing the 2019 election results and extrapolating vote choices for other systems and seeing how that would affect the balance of power in the UK .
Presumably part of that was trying to account for the lack of preference data?
If you spend a long time scrounging through different polls and opinion surveys, you can find quite a bit to patchwork together.
Which is fair in an academic sense, but it scares the willies out of people who don't understand it's one of the least likely systems we'd use and how important the choice is.
I have often wondered why MMP is always done using FPTP for the local component. Why not IRV + proportional top-ups?
I don't really understand AMS as well as MMP, but I think the same question could be applied.
https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/elections-and-voting/voting-systems/
I don't even know how STV would work for electing MPs. That's for electing groups of people?
AV to rank the candidates would make sense, unless I completely misunderstand STV.
You'd merge constituencies together and have multiple representation. For example: 5 neighbours become one region and elect 5 people.
An additional benefit is that people have a choice of representative to go to when wanting to consult "their MP". None of this "I want to talk about the homelessness problem in my area but my MP is a Tory" issue.
So let me understand the proposal. We merge MP regions so each Labour/Tory candidate is running against their respective Labour/Tory candidate in another region in addition to the opposition in their opponent's in their existing constituency?
I assume the purpose of this system is it allows an independent to capture votes from multiple areas, so fringe groups will get minor representation instead of the least popular candidate from the major parties?
[Edit] And if you only have a candidate in your area for your favourite party doesn't tow the line and is marginally racist, you can vote for another candidate for that party that fits your taste?
I think you've got it. Yes.
It's called multi-member constituencies and we used to do it before 1950 but only in some areas. We even did a small number under STV, but it never became the universal norm. We just divided those constituencies down to single member o es to make everything the same.
What I'm saying is that we moved the wrong way. We should have normalised everything by moving everything to multi-member and retained STV (not the other systems on that page).
The biggest argument against is that in rural areas the size of a single constituency could become very large. For example: would Wales large parts of Wales fall entirely into a handful of constituencies, or the north west of Scotland? On the other hand, it would simplify things in urban areas.
Aaaaaand this is why Labour will never countenance this within this parliament.
Despite still being the largest party they'd have to cooperate and form alliances with other parties. Why would they want to do that when they don't have to.
I fear the only way to PR of any sort is to have a situation with a hung parliament where Labour / Conservative parties hold no sway over the eventual coalition that would need to form. Instead a Green / Lib Dem coalition would need to introduce this. And 🤣 that will never happen.
New Zealand switched from FPTP to MMP despite the encumbant parties being like that.
It took years of organising and effort. History here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_Reform_Coalition
The vibe in UK reminds me of NZ in the late 80s. It can be done when people really want it.
I think you give us to much credit 😉. This is the UK. We have an unlimited talent for fucking things up.
Aaaaaand this is why Labour will never countenance this within this parliament.
This is why it's important to hammer home to them that this election is an anomaly. Look at all the elections since 2010. What would all those Parliaments have looked like in proportional elections?
FPTP helped Labour this week. It hurts them far more often.
I get you. I just think the Tories will never vote for PR, in power or in opposition. And Labour will only entertain the idea when out of office. PR is stuffed under those circumstances.
Just yesterday on Any Questions this came up and Charlie Falconer agreed strongly with the Tory representative in saying that FPTP is the best voting system we have. Despite not actually answering any of the criticism and despite being challenged by other members of the panel on his claims. When you have Labour grandees shitting on PR... any form of PR.... you know it's dead in the water.
Yeah, I don't think that coalition situation is likely to happen. Under FPTP, it's too risky for the voters to try manufacture.
That said, if their popularity massively tanks and polls show they'd lose big, I could see Labour introducing it just before the next election. It would be a huge boost to their popularity.
I think it's only Labour than can introduce it given the size and history of their party with this country's electorate. I also think they never will, which is why it won't ever happen. Call me cynical but I just can't see Labour (or the Tories) abandoning their all or nothing election strategy that has served them since 1830 something.
LibDems were able to get the AV ref from the Tories. Was worthless. But minority partners in a Labour coalition could get better
To be fair, the PR result is far, far worse than what we have - only 4 Reform seats. It's not a great time to be selling PR.
That's so short-sighted. FPTP is hugely majoritarian. The risk we all should be worried about is that Reform either now supplant the Tories as the main party of the right, or the Tories effectively become Reform to head off the threat, or the two merge or fight elections in an alliance where they don't stand against each other (as Boris and Farage did in 2019) - which means that next time Labour loses power, it's going to be to a majority Reform/Reform-like government. Labour's current majority is illusory - they benefited from the Tory/Reform vote splitting in many of their seats - and so this reality could come to pass as quickly as five years from now if the political right get their act together and reunite.
Electoral reform today is the only way to truly vaccinate our political system against the threat of Farage or a Farage-alike in Number Ten in the future.
The far right are part of several coalitions in countries with PR, though. It doesn't vaccinate your political system against that. The main thing you can do to reduce the march of the far right is to make people feel like their lives are getting better and better.
There is an enormous difference between the far-right being part of a coalition under a fair electoral system (for completeness, this rarely happens anyway) - in which the far-right lack a parliamentary majority and can't do all the awful things they desire - and the far-right having a parliamentary majority on a minority of the vote under a FPTP system.
We have seen that, under FPTP, it's possible to win a large majority on a 35% vote share - as Labour have done twice this century (2005 and 2024). The Tories + Reform just won a 38% vote share between them, so what do you think happens under FPTP if a Suella Braverman or Priti Patel led Tory party decides to fight the next election in an electoral pact with Reform?
This is the inoculation I am talking about. If the far right get 38% of the votes, I damn well don't want them getting >50% of the seats as tends to happen in FPTP.
Yes Reform would have far more seats under PR, but I don't believe that changes the overarching principle of the matter: fair and representative representation based on votes cast.
Singling out a bogeyman doesn't answer the principle. Do you want people to feel like their vote counts? That's the important part for me.
The party list system would mean that Nigel Farage was never out of parliament in the last ages. He would win every time.
He would win as long as people want him to win, surely? The question is do you think that's more democratic or not?
No, with the party list system, any one party which gets north of something like 60,000 votes gets an MP and the party chooses who gets the seat, so the leader cannot lose their seat. They are immune from becoming unelected, no matter how unpopular.
In our current system, if you can't find a locality that wants you, you lose. Reform might have got a lot of votes, but its candidates are very unpopular, for good reason, and they don't win elections much. It's only because the Conservatives have been a total shit show that they got any MPs at all.
If the Tories completely collapse, then next time the FPTP nonsense might favour Reform. If they get in, they'll do everything they can to undermine democracy, and ensure they never get voted out.
Look at Hungary, and Poland. It took an almighty effort to get the fascists out in Poland, and it will take a lot of work to undo all the damage they did.
Labour didn't win this election. The lib dems didn't do particularly well and the tories didn't even perform that badly.
Labour and the lib dems are congratulating themselves on their wins but the reality is reform handed them most of the seats by splitting the right wing vote.
We need electoral reform so badly. Without it we're just going to go back to Conservative majorities as soon as they sort their shit out.
Of course tactical voting patterns would change under a different electoral system, so don't treat this as exact.
Yeah everyone moaning about FPTP is conveniently forgetting how large tactical voting played apart of this. The vote share for Lib Dems, Greens and many parties smaller than them would have dramatically increased otherwise.
I just had a brief look at AMS on Wikipedia but I'm struggling to understand it. They say it's less proportional than MMP as used in New Zealand and Germany, but the brief description of how AMS works sounded very much like how MMP works. What's the difference?
From Wikipedia:
Modified version of MMP referred to as the additional-member system, with the number of constituency seats a party won being taken into account when calculating proportional seat
But MMP does that. I don't understand how that description differs from regular MMP.
The less intuitive the system is, the less empowered the voters feel, and the more the system will be gamed. And all voting systems can be gamed.
If we assume most of Reforms votes would have gone to the Tories then they would have been the largest party and we'd be looking at another ConDem Nation. 😱