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Well, people have been out in the streets over the last couple of weeks over a variety of issues. The difficulty is that there was just a general election where

Well, people have been out in the streets over the last couple of weeks over a variety of issues. The difficulty is that there was just a general election where the Tories won a majority of seats and got the largest share of the popular vote. The vast majority of things the new government has proposed doing are things that they were quite open about before the election (or which any politically aware person could have predicted that they would do). So the media narrative is basically just 'sore losers on the left', and there is some justification for that - a lot of people in the country clearly support these kinds of policies.

Silhouette 11y ago
The difficulty is that there was just a general election where the Tories won a majority of seats and got the largest share of the popular vote. I would suggest that part of the difficulty here is that while the Conservatives won a majority of seats and the largest single share of the popular vote, they did not win anywhere near a majority of the popular vote. However you choose to look at our electoral system, the fact is that roughly 3/4 of those entitled to vote did not choose to vote for the Conservatives (or roughly 2/3 if you prefer to look at only those who chose to vote at all). So even if you believe that voting for a party gives a mandate to every policy in their manifesto -- which clearly not everyone does -- in this case, a heavy majority of the electorate did not vote for a party that has these controversial policies. It is therefore not surprising that when the new government have picked a series of big fights within a week of taking office, they are already encountering widespread concern about or outright opposition to their actions. Given their narrow majority, I don't expect the new Cameron administration to get much of a honeymoon period or any sort of free ride over controversial policies like this.
- evgen 11y ago
  Are you joking, or just unaware of how the voting actually ended up in various ridings? With any sort of proportional vote system it would have been a Tory/UKIP coalition running the country. Roughly 37% voted for the tories and 13% voted UKIP. If anyone has a reason to complain it is UKIP, and frankly I am quite happy to accept the downsides of FPTP if it keeps UKIP out of government.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    > With any sort of proportional vote system it would have been a Tory/UKIP coalition running the country. That's not how proportional systems work. The parties choose themselves what alternative they want to negotiate. You will often find "natural" coalition partners shying away from each other to look towards the centre because the risk of indulging fringe parties in a coalition is that you get eaten alive at the next election as your more centrist voters decide "anything but" next time to prevent the same next time. While Tory/UKIP might have happened, first of all we don't know how proportional systems would have altered who people would have voted for, secondly a Tory/UKIP coalition would require the right wing of the Tory party to be firmly in control, and little indicates they are, and secondly would require the Tory party to be willing to risk exactly that kind of implosion. A Tory/Labour coalition would also be very much possible, as would a minority government with a supply agreement with one or more parties (e.g. you'd find Labour and SNP and pretty much everyone else would be willing to stretch far to appease a Tory minority government to avoid a coalition that included UKIP) > and frankly I am quite happy to accept the downsides of FPTP if it keeps UKIP out of government. I'm tempted to say the same, but as horrendous as such a government might be, it would still be more representative of the will of the people. It would also have the bonus of tearing the Tory party to shreds next election.
  - Silhouette 11y ago
    With any sort of proportional vote system it would have been a Tory/UKIP coalition running the country. That seems unlikely. For one thing, as a matter of fact the Conservatives and UKIP did not achieve a majority of the popular vote between them at the general election. Under a fully proportional system, the result on the day would not have given them a working majority to form a government alone. Some sort of minority Conservative government would have been a more likely outcome. For another thing, you're assuming that people would have voted the same way under another system, which is far from a safe assumption. This was probably the most negative campaign we've had in generations, and a lot of the arguments in the final weeks were about how to vote tactically to block one outcome or another. Knowing that every vote counted could easily have significantly changed voting patterns. frankly I am quite happy to accept the downsides of FPTP if it keeps UKIP out of government. That is a very dangerous, short-termist position. Whether you like it or not, millions of people did vote for UKIP at the election, as is their right in a party-based representative democratic system. Those people have effectively been disenfranchised. For that matter, so have millions who supported the Lib Dems or the Greens. Along with UKIP, these three parties between them attracted popular support on a similar scale to Labour and the Conservatives (roughly 24%, against 30% for Labour and 37% for the Conservatives) yet have only 10 seats between them in Parliament compared to Labour's 232 and the Conservatives' 331. National parties are also heavily over-represented now. The DUP (0.6% of the popular vote) has the same 8 MPs as the Lib Dems (7.9%). The SNP (4.7%) has 56 MPs, while UKIP (12.6%) has only a single MP. There are pros and cons to having a "clear winner" and first past the post does provide that, but the idea that the system has generated a government that is anything close to representing what the people as a whole want this time is even less credible than it was five years ago.
noir_lord 11y ago
<37% of the total vote though and they get a majority in parliament. Our system is hopelessly broken and getting the politicians to fix it would be like getting the turkeys to vote for Christmas.
- gsnedders 11y ago
  Eh, the last time any single party got the majority of the popular vote was the 1931 general election — and then a coalition National Government was formed regardless. The last time the Government got the majority of the popular vote was 2010, and before that Churchill's wartime coalition. The Tories got a larger proportion of the total vote than Labour did in 2005 (35.2%), and I don't remember hearing much uproar about that.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    The degree of uproar is independent of how hopelessly broken our (meaning the UK) system is though. FPTP is demonstrably unfair but as I said turkeys voting for Christmas.
- nationcrafting 11y ago
  I'm not sure why so many people still keep advocating elections in an age when it ought to be clear to any objective observer that the average voter is sleepwalking into a new dark age. Perhaps it's intellectual laziness, or perhaps it's a trait inherited from a time when a single person's voice still made a difference because communities were only a few hundred or thousand people. Buckminster Fuller said something that I'm sure will resonate with many HNers, and that seems more likely to bring about positive change: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, design a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Silhouette 11y ago

The difficulty is that there was just a general election where the Tories won a majority of seats and got the largest share of the popular vote. I would suggest that part of the difficulty here is that while the Conservatives won a majority of seats and the largest single share of the popular vote, they did not win anywhere near a majority of the popular vote. However you choose to look at our electoral system, the fact is that roughly 3/4 of those entitled to vote did not choose to vote for the Conservatives (or roughly 2/3 if you prefer to look at only those who chose to vote at all). So even if you believe that voting for a party gives a mandate to every policy in their manifesto -- which clearly not everyone does -- in this case, a heavy majority of the electorate did not vote for a party that has these controversial policies. It is therefore not surprising that when the new government have picked a series of big fights within a week of taking office, they are already encountering widespread concern about or outright opposition to their actions. Given their narrow majority, I don't expect the new Cameron administration to get much of a honeymoon period or any sort of free ride over controversial policies like this.

evgen 11y ago
Are you joking, or just unaware of how the voting actually ended up in various ridings? With any sort of proportional vote system it would have been a Tory/UKIP coalition running the country. Roughly 37% voted for the tories and 13% voted UKIP. If anyone has a reason to complain it is UKIP, and frankly I am quite happy to accept the downsides of FPTP if it keeps UKIP out of government.
- vidarh 11y ago
  > With any sort of proportional vote system it would have been a Tory/UKIP coalition running the country. That's not how proportional systems work. The parties choose themselves what alternative they want to negotiate. You will often find "natural" coalition partners shying away from each other to look towards the centre because the risk of indulging fringe parties in a coalition is that you get eaten alive at the next election as your more centrist voters decide "anything but" next time to prevent the same next time. While Tory/UKIP might have happened, first of all we don't know how proportional systems would have altered who people would have voted for, secondly a Tory/UKIP coalition would require the right wing of the Tory party to be firmly in control, and little indicates they are, and secondly would require the Tory party to be willing to risk exactly that kind of implosion. A Tory/Labour coalition would also be very much possible, as would a minority government with a supply agreement with one or more parties (e.g. you'd find Labour and SNP and pretty much everyone else would be willing to stretch far to appease a Tory minority government to avoid a coalition that included UKIP) > and frankly I am quite happy to accept the downsides of FPTP if it keeps UKIP out of government. I'm tempted to say the same, but as horrendous as such a government might be, it would still be more representative of the will of the people. It would also have the bonus of tearing the Tory party to shreds next election.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  With any sort of proportional vote system it would have been a Tory/UKIP coalition running the country. That seems unlikely. For one thing, as a matter of fact the Conservatives and UKIP did not achieve a majority of the popular vote between them at the general election. Under a fully proportional system, the result on the day would not have given them a working majority to form a government alone. Some sort of minority Conservative government would have been a more likely outcome. For another thing, you're assuming that people would have voted the same way under another system, which is far from a safe assumption. This was probably the most negative campaign we've had in generations, and a lot of the arguments in the final weeks were about how to vote tactically to block one outcome or another. Knowing that every vote counted could easily have significantly changed voting patterns. frankly I am quite happy to accept the downsides of FPTP if it keeps UKIP out of government. That is a very dangerous, short-termist position. Whether you like it or not, millions of people did vote for UKIP at the election, as is their right in a party-based representative democratic system. Those people have effectively been disenfranchised. For that matter, so have millions who supported the Lib Dems or the Greens. Along with UKIP, these three parties between them attracted popular support on a similar scale to Labour and the Conservatives (roughly 24%, against 30% for Labour and 37% for the Conservatives) yet have only 10 seats between them in Parliament compared to Labour's 232 and the Conservatives' 331. National parties are also heavily over-represented now. The DUP (0.6% of the popular vote) has the same 8 MPs as the Lib Dems (7.9%). The SNP (4.7%) has 56 MPs, while UKIP (12.6%) has only a single MP. There are pros and cons to having a "clear winner" and first past the post does provide that, but the idea that the system has generated a government that is anything close to representing what the people as a whole want this time is even less credible than it was five years ago.

noir_lord 11y ago

<37% of the total vote though and they get a majority in parliament. Our system is hopelessly broken and getting the politicians to fix it would be like getting the turkeys to vote for Christmas.

gsnedders 11y ago
Eh, the last time any single party got the majority of the popular vote was the 1931 general election — and then a coalition National Government was formed regardless. The last time the Government got the majority of the popular vote was 2010, and before that Churchill's wartime coalition. The Tories got a larger proportion of the total vote than Labour did in 2005 (35.2%), and I don't remember hearing much uproar about that.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  The degree of uproar is independent of how hopelessly broken our (meaning the UK) system is though. FPTP is demonstrably unfair but as I said turkeys voting for Christmas.
nationcrafting 11y ago
I'm not sure why so many people still keep advocating elections in an age when it ought to be clear to any objective observer that the average voter is sleepwalking into a new dark age. Perhaps it's intellectual laziness, or perhaps it's a trait inherited from a time when a single person's voice still made a difference because communities were only a few hundred or thousand people. Buckminster Fuller said something that I'm sure will resonate with many HNers, and that seems more likely to bring about positive change: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, design a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."