The ultra-Right or anyone else can flounce out to their hearts' content.
Whichever organisation retained the Labour (or Conservative) name would retain the votes, and thus the bare minimum of 200 seats in the House of Commons.
Pat McFadden, or any of the rest of them, is hardly Roy Jenkins or David Owen, and look what happened to those two.
The UKIP lot used to claim that the Conservative vote was less tribal, as if that were somehow a moral judgement. But UKIP managed all of one MP last year, and even he is obviously desperate to go home, reduced to having to deny that he attempted to murder Nigel Farage.
Meanwhile, David Cameron's Conservatives won an overall majority after an entire Parliament of heavy UKIP publicity.
This has nothing to do with the electoral system. It would be the same under any electoral system. The parties retaining the Labour and Conservative brands would always win at least 200 seats each, and the Leader of one or the other of them would always be the Prime Minister.
Usually at the head of an overall majority, since the one party, as such, that any system other than First Past The Post really would finish off would be the Lib Dems.
And don't say "Scotland". No one thought of Scotland as much of a Labour area at all until the 1960s, at the earliest; in the 1950s, it was regarded by all concerned as more of a Tory stronghold than the Home Counties. The place is still full of Tories, really. It is just that, for the time being, most of them vote SNP.
It was not until 1997 that anyone thought of Scotland as a Labour heartland. In 2015, Labour won precisely one seat there and still managed 231 elsewhere, which would have been more than one third of the House, and more than four times the total of the third party (guess who?), even if it had won no Scottish seats whatever.
The "Labour Scotland" fantasy of Scottish Labourites, Scottish Nationalists and English Tories was blown out of the water in 2015.
I can tell you it's the electoral system. I was one of the four million British people who voted UKIP at the General Election and were betrayed by our electoral system.
ReplyDeleteUnder Proportional Represention, the SNP would have just 31 seats, the Tories would have 90 less.
And UKIP would have 82 MPs.
But our system doesn't reflect vote share and thus doesn't reflect voters.
http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/heres-how-the-election-results-would-look-under-a-proportional-voting-system--gJenQmaW2gW
Nothing like that many people would have voted for it under PR, because then it might have got in.
DeletePeople will sometimes cast protest votes in order to elect someone at a by-election. But at a General Election, no.
Nonsense--more people would have voted for UKIP if we had PR since, under that system, they would know that their vote wouldn't have been a waste.
ReplyDeleteThat's why on-mainstream parties always do better in countries with PR. Like PR or loathe it, but that's a fact.
However-based on the results already achieved-we can see it was the electoral system that gave the Tories a majority and prevented UKIP having a sizeable Parliamentary representation.
Four million people voted for UKIP at the General Election and just 1.5 million voted SNP.
So UKIP got nearly three times as many votes as a party that got 56 MPs.
Under PR, the Tories would have 90 less seats, the SNP would only have 31 seats and Labour would lose 33 seats.
UKIP would have been the third largest party with 82 seats.
The maths is all worked out below.
http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/heres-how-the-election-results-would-look-under-a-proportional-voting-system--gJenQmaW2gW
That's why on-mainstream parties always do better in countries with PR.
Delete"On-mainstream"?
Those countries are not Britain, and especially they are not England.
Regardless of the electoral system, Labour and the Conservatives would always dominate on tribal loyalty, brand recognition, call it what you will.
If anything, they would do even better than they do now, since people would be far more reluctant to cast protest votes, for fear of thus actually electing someone.
Non-mainstream. It was a typo.
ReplyDeleteThose other countries are the only model we have-and non-mainstream parties always do better in them, because they have PR.
The logic is simple. Many of those who voted Tory and Labour at the election did so purely because they knew the party they wanted to vote for, would be a wasted vote. The Tories openly used the fear of 'vote UKIP, get Labour-the SNP' to try and herd voters back.
Under PR, people would know that voting for a non-mainstream party wouldn't be a wasted vote that would just let someone else in.
Whereas under FPTP, 1.5 million votes produce 56 MPs.
And 4 million votes produce one MP.
non-mainstream parties always do better in them, because they have PR
DeleteNo, they don't have different party cultures because they have PR. They have PR because they have different party cultures.