A move to PR won’t fix our system, I’m afraid.
The boundary changes will adjust the system in a more even direction, despite wild claims of gerrymandering from the leftists who are afraid that Labour will lose its current inbuilt advantage. But a change to the voting system will merely mean changing one flawed arrangement for another. With the current one, we elect a local MP. Under PR, we don’t. The party list system will mean party hacks will get the best pickings. I saw this happen back in the nineties when the party list system was brought in for MEPs. At that time, I was actively involved in the Labour Party (yes, I know, I know), and we had a very good local MEP. We expected him to remain, but he was ousted – by someone none of us had voted for. Great!
Mr Howlett said the UK Parliament should look at adopting the Additional Member System (AMS) used in the London Assembly and Scottish Parliament. Under this system constituencies have a single local MP – with additional MPs elected to regions to make the overall result proportional to votes cast.
So you still end up with someone you didn’t vote for. Ask yourself who is your MEP? I have three – or is it four? And, no, I cannot name them. I can name my parliamentary MP, though. And at the end of it, there’s the aftermath of elections. 2010 showed us the type of horse-trading we can expect, following a hung parliament and there will be more of those to be had. LibDem voters who felt let down by the failure to enact their promise on tuition fees failed to grasp a fairly simple premise; the LibDems were junior partners in a coalition government. They did not have a parliamentary majority, so they did what they could and compromised where they had to. PR will bring in much more of this. Think you didn’t get what you voted for under FPTP? Well, expect more of the same under PR. PR is not a magic bullet that will fix democracy. It will solve the make-up of parliament, but it will leave us even more distant from the people who are supposed to represent us and manifestos will mean even less than they do now.
Democracy at this level simply does not work. But then, democracy should not be our aim. That should be personal liberty – democracy merely being one method of assuring it. Unfortunately, it seems to be doing precisely the opposite.
It doesn’t matter which system is used for electing representatives, there will be disadvantages.
First Past The Post in a single member constituency gives you the candidate whom most people prefer, but that candidate may well be unacceptable to a significant number, perhaps even more than the number who voted for that candidate. It works best when there are only two major candidates in an election. Where you have three or more, it can result in a large number of people feeling disenfranchised because one or more parties receives a very large number of votes nationally but has very few if any candidates elected, as was the case with UKIP in the 2015 general election.
Single transferable vote in single member constituencies will end with the least disliked candidate, the one most would find acceptable, but not necessarily the favourite candidate of many. The ballot papers are more complicated and even student, generally considered to be fairly bright, get it wrong with STV..
Proportional representation is a problem because, as mentioned in the article there is no candidate who is recognisably “your representative”.
Perhaps Churchill was right when he described the British electoral system (or was it democracy) as the worst means of choosing a government ever invented, except for all the others.