Aggy

I don’t think NC knows what racist means.

Which all rather suggests the ‘stopping tactical voting’ argument for PR is a bit of a red herring?

Yes I meant the most votes rather than a majority. The party with the most votes will be the one trying to form a coalition. So if you don’t want a Tory and reform coalition you’re more likely to vote Labour than Green?

If you normally vote Green in the PR system but want to stop the Tories getting a majority, would you vote for (a) the Green Party or (b) the second largest party who is more likely to get a majority? Appreciate you’re less likely to have one party with a majority, but if you risk a right wing coalition that you want to stop then I still think people would vote for Labour to try and avoid it rather than hoping the two largest right wing parties can’t agree and instead four or five smaller left wing parties can. As for the second point, no it’s not another way of saying that at all. People weren’t tactical voting because they didn’t have an alternative. They were tactical voting because they didn’t want the tories in power.

Why would PR stop tactical voting? If you thought the tories were going to get more votes than anyone else, and your main aim was to stop the tories getting in, you would still vote Labour rather than a smaller fringe party. The “broken” element in your example is that certain parties are so corrupt and have made such a mess, that they have driven some people to vote negatively to do anything to get them out.

I would infinitely prefer that the party in government won more votes than any other party.

Not to mention that in order to get a functioning government you’re far more likely to need alliances and coalitions. So you then potentially end up with a party who got a small amount of votes having a disproportionate amount of influence.

See what you mean. Not really linked to the constituencies as such, just - in that example - the Green candidates with the most votes who didn’t win a seat in FPTP.

But in a lot of constituencies, first and second will be Labour and Tory - so if you’re only using the second placed on each constituency to calculate the PR element you still probably end up with a large proportion of third place not getting a look in. Not sure that system would add much but would make it more complicated. Surely would be better to say FPTP is x seats, PR is y seats. The PR seats are an exact proportion of the vote share for everyone - eg; Labour get 30 percent, Tories get 25, Reform 15 etc.

Someone who votes for a party agrees with their views. Your point?

Yes so long as the PR element was allocated to everyone and not just the ‘losers’.

Surely it would need to be proportional to overall vote share including the winner, not just given to the ‘losers’? Otherwise, in theory, second place could end up with more seats than first place even though first place had a higher vote percentage overall?

Knowing NC, he probably meant it in the ‘Tommy Robinson is a bit like a god’ sense…

I quite like it. I still wear the 06-08 Flybe one to five a side occasionally and this looks fairly similar. Quite like the keeper’s kit as well. Always used to get keepers kits with padded long sleeves though - that no longer a thing? (Admittedly the last one of those I bought was the grey proton one …)

I didn’t say the big two - I said most people in the Uk have views that are fairly centrist. So including the ‘big two’, Lib Dems, the SNP, PC, SF you’ve got 73.5 per cent of the vote. Obviously there’s some difference in there (and at any point those parties may lean more right or left than centre but usually not too much)… but generally none of those are drastically far apart. This was probably the best opportunity for people to vote for the more extreme parties I can remember in my adult lifetime. Fairly easy not to vote Tory because it has been clear for ages that Labour were going to win easily. Fairly easy to not vote Labour for the same reason! But despite that, Reform got less than 15 per cent of the vote. The Greens got 6. Can you really see Reform (or similar party or combination of parties) ever getting much more than they did this time round? I don’t see it. My guess is that even with PR you would end up with parties with mainly centrist views making up the majority of the vote share, and whose policies aren’t a million miles apart.

It’s almost as if the majority of people vote relatively centreist and as a result the big two parties aren’t miles apart…. Are you angling at a PR / we need more and wider voices in parliament point? Or just a comment on Labour vs conservatives? If the latter, I think most people acknowledge there is at least some (and possibly quite a large) part of the Labour vote which is really just to get rid of the Tory ‘sleeze’.

So that’s a check and balance then isn’t it?

Yes I think so re wires crossed. And I think we largely agree. Someone else had previously mentioned checks and balances here being ineffective so I was trying to sarcastically show that wasn’t the case - FPTP stopping extreme parties from having a seat at the table being one such example. It does work, which is part of the reason it won’t change. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with a PR-elected top house before there is any major change to the commons.

Yes, the monarch is one of the checks and balances. As is the House of Lords. Our judiciary doesn’t have the ability to overturn primary legislation, yes I agree. You seem to be suggesting we don’t have any checks and balances in the uk while simultaneously listing some.

Reform did get twice as many votes as the Greens though to be fair.

I’d assumed he got to less than 20 by taking into account those who didn’t vote, which seems a little disingenuous.

I’m not sure whether you’re arguing or agreeing with me here. We already have checks and balances in the UK. I don’t disagree that they work fairly well. As above - I’m not sure a change of system would be any “safer” than the current system. If we didn’t have any checks and balances, then how would you vote out a government who had total freedom to enact a law saying no more elections ever?

The Tories were incompetent but do we really think a coalition of three parties who were falling out all the time and had four or five other parties chipping in constantly frustrating things, would have dealt better with covid and the economic issues the whole world has been seeing? Do we really think we’d be safer from extremism if we had a larger share of seats for the fringe parties? Would far left and far right parties find it easier to get around our ‘non-existent’ checks and balances if they actually had a decent sized seat at the table compared to having, for instance, three seats? I would certainly support a more PR voting system depending on what it looked like, but that’s more from a principle of everyone having their voices heard and being equal, which is something I feel strongly about. I’m not sure it will necessarily lead to a “better” system of government, or any less “risky” one.

Vote them out at the next one if so. Isn’t that how it’s always worked and why the Tories just lost?

Suspect a lot thinking there’s little point - Labour going to win easily anyway. Likely to help the minority parties’ vote share percentage you’d think - I suspect reform and Greens voters were more determined to vote than swing voters who usually vote Labour or Tory.