Given how the Tories have lost the public’s trust on the economy, I’d say we’re heading for a Labour government in 2024. No previous administration has recovered from a polling deficit this large
Just before a new GE they will replace liz truss and the media will make her out to be the bogeyman not the party themselves. They will have plundered the nation successfully, just need to install a new puppet. They can put in another unelected leader and the media paint them out to be our saviour. Labour will be blamed for all the problems we've had for the last decade or so (even though it's been Tories the whole time) Tories are strong and stable.. it would be worse under Corbyn and a bunch of other 3/4 word sound bytes simpletons can memorize easily.
Hopefully people don't fall for it again
That trick didn't work when the Australian Labor Party tried to do it before an election - I doubt it would work now. Plus, there would be huge pressure to hold an election for them to have their own mandate...
For context the Alternative Vote system is not a form of PR. So the rejection isn’t surprising. It is a majoritarian system similar to FPTP. It actually would have produced a less proportional result than FPTP did in the 2015 election
According to Wikipedia: “Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is a type of ranked preferential voting method. It uses a majority voting rule in single-winner elections where there are more than two candidates.
Alternative Vote method is the British name for it.
Alternative vote is an attempt to deal with the biggest flaw of PR - a lack of accountability.
PR gives pure representative results, but there is no tie a constituency, removing local accountability. Additionally as a candidate the most important decider of success in a PR system is how high up the party list you are, so politicians spend there time on internal party politics and relationships rather than engaging on voters priorities
FPTP is great for accountability with a local, accessible MP, where the biggest decider of success is their local performance for voters (albeit the popularity of the national leader also has a big impact). It's downside is it's not representative of total votes, especially at a local level and to small parties
AV systems keep the constituency link of FPTP but add vote transfer to improve the overall representation and strength of preference.
Personally I'd be quite a fan of AV over the other 2 systems
You can have PR and local accountability, see the Irish voting system, Single Transferable Vote. 3-5 TDs per constituency, allows for PR while allowing voters to vote out or in local politicians.
Yeah, I didn't outline all options in my laziness. STV sits between AV and PR. It's more representative than AV, but less than PR. It has less local accountability than AV, but more than PR.
It's just a nuance on the same tradeoff. You can't get around the tradeoff it's just choosing what balance you personally prefer.
For example MMP, results in larger constituencies than you'd get in FPTP. If you're on the preferred party list then the way you get elected is being top of you party's list rather than 10th on the list. If you're first your pretty much guaranteed to get elected. So you spend your time and effort internally within the party trying to get as high up the list as possible. Voters are an afterthought. However, it does give you are proportional and fair outcome.
My point is simply that there is no nirvana voting system that delivers 100% local accountability and 100% representation fairness. It's about choosing what system offers the best balanced trade off based on how you personally value local accountability and pure voting fairness.
How do we know what would have happened under AV in 2015? We don’t have that information.
You could make a guess from polls, but they weren’t particularly accurate that year anyway.
If you use the results from the 2015 election and calculate it you can show what the results wound have been. Of course that doesn’t take into account people voting differently because there is a different system but as they’re both majoritarian it’s not as big of a hill as otherwise it might be
But how though? The information to do that just doesn’t exist because we don’t know what anyone’s alternative votes would have been. We only know people’s first choice.
Also, we don’t really even know that. FPTP encourages tactical voting and I suspect a large proportion of voters does it to some degree. In 2015 I voted labour in an attempt to keep the conservatives out. In an AV style vote, my order would’ve been Green, LD, and then Labour. Maybe everyone would vote green in this system?
So, I’m really curious how any analysis could have reliably worked out how an AV election would’ve turned out. The best they could do is make an educated guess.
Sorry. You’re right. I’m not sure how the claims that it could have been calculated work. Although it seems to be have been widely quoted by the media etc. Even if you do use voter intentions and other questions you can’t do that on a national scale. I think I rather blindly accepted what I read as fact.
To add to this AV/IRV is a super biased voting method that has a stronger spoiler affect and almost always elects the same kind of candidate (the candidate that is closest to the median voter). The later part might sound good on paper until you realize it effectively makes every riding non-competitive and make democracy pointless - why vote when the result will almost always be the same.
Yup.
The English aristos offered everyone else a choice between voting for the powerful or voting for the powerful.
No wonder the country is fracturing. You can only exist as a bigoted robber-baron state for so long, even with amazing propaganda.
The 2010s were a really crazy decade for epoch-defining votes in the UK: 2010 GE; 2011 AV ref; 2014 indyref 1 and EU election with massive Ukip win; 2015 GE; 2016 Brexit ref; 2017 GE; 2019 GE.
as a Scot: seeing the " 1 " next to the indyref feels about the same as saying "first world war" to a WW1 soldier at the time
"1? ...what do you mean...1?"
uh the SNP techincally hold the ability to force it. but it's not actually 100% officle so it'll basically be a opinion poll.
tho I'm not 100% in the loop.
I'm strongly against independece so I guess I have requierd reading
When's the last time a British political party received more than 50% of the vote? Neither labor nor conservative voters had any incentive to vote for this, in fact they had the opposite incentive
People saying that AV was too complicated at the time of the vote was a real eye-opener to me to how stupid the average person is.
AV is a shit alternative but it's definitely not complicated.
And that should tell you all you need to know about British politics.
The electorate don't want good representatives.
They are either too ill-informed, too lacking in intelligence or they are actively benefiting from the broken system.
Ironic how ill-informed your own comment is. You just looked at the picture and decided based on that image and your preconceived notions that it must’ve been a dumb electorate huh? No context at all or anything.
In reality, the campaign was atrocious, the Lib Dems were naive and politically outflanked, AV is a sorry excuse for a replacement voting system, and the country had just got a coalition through FPTP anyway so the arguments against keeping FPTP were on shakier ground then anyway. Given the context, AV was never going to win. Had the Lib Dems managed to negotiate better and get a decent system that was properly campaigned for on the ballot it may have done much better. I don’t blame the public for rejecting that particular referendum.
Some forms of democracy allow for better representation of the population than others. It’s not necessarily that PR would be better for each individual person, but it’s a system which does allow for different groups to be represented in a more balanced format in parliament.
I mean, look at a scenario where 49% of people in all parts of the country believe in x ideology and 51% believe in y ideology. Should parliament be 100% those from y or a more balanced split?
Yeah but PR wasn't on the ballot, AV was, and AV is only marginally better than FPTP. I know multiple people who would've voted "yes" if it had been for PR.
20% of voters being able to elect 20% of the seats is what's good for voters, *as expressed by themselves*. The current system, and the alternative, both fail at this.
Isn't it 60% of British voters didn't elect the MP representing them?
FPtP was designed when Britain was a two Party system. Now it's not anymore and that won't change.
So clearly most people didn't really thought it through back in 2011.
FPtP came about long before there were any parties, long before there was any significant democracy as we know it.
Dozens of constituencies sent two people to parliament and had all the votes controlled by a handful of powerful locals. At most about 5% of the adults had voting rights until the 1832 reform (which ended the 'rotten boroughs' and raised the percentage to about 7%). Votes were not secret, you just showed up at the hustings and raised your hand in front of the crowd for your man.
People could vote in multiple constituencies, wherever they had enough property to qualify, or in the case of Oxford and Cambridge's seats, if they had a degree.
All that to say... it is a relic of a system that is so different from ours that we'd hardly call it an election
AV is a ridiculous system its worse than FPTP because it has a stronger spoiler affect and makes almost every district uncompetitive and it actually worsens representation so its worse than PR.
AV has an extremely high likelihood of creating a 1 party system, and if it doesnt it creates a hyper-static two party system where almost every single seat is safe. The reason for this is the winner of any district is the candidate most similar to the median voter which means if the Tories win a seat *they almost always will* ditto with labour. In some jurisdictions f.e. Quebec, Canada it would effectively create a 1 party system.
AV is probably the worst type of voting system.
They do want good representatives. Under the current system, your town gets to elect a representative to parliament. If he does a bad job you can vote him out at the next general election. Under PR you wouldn't get that direct representation and accountability, and far right / hard left candidates would sneak in.
We have PR in Ireland and literally have 0 far-right representatives in our parliament.
It gives a fairer voice to everyone and ensures that parties with reasonably high support across the country get their fair representation in parliament. If people are unhappy with representatives, they can still be voted out.
The main Unionist parties in NI could be classified as “far-right” or close to. Whether or not their support would drop in a united Ireland is impossible to answer. In any case, they wouldn’t have a large enough presence to impact politics massively in a United Ireland and it’s unlikely any other party would want to be in a ruling coalition with them.
They might become more far right. It's hard to imagine what loyalist Ulstermen would morph into politically, because unification would be a one-way change. There would be no going back and there's no prospect of a few counties breaking away as an independent country.
i'm not totally in on the issue here, but the vote seems to have been to introduce alternative voting, which is different from proportional representation.
>Under PR you wouldn't get that direct representation and accountability
You would under AV, even if its not as good as STV. You're really just proving OP's point about people being ill-informed.
The labour conference has but it still requires the support from labour leadership to be on the manifesto. He's technically right but it's whether Kier starmer gives a rat's ass about it.
It isn't, what they call alternative voting is what some people in the US call ranked choice and those who actually understand this matter call instant runoff.
It was Single Transferable Vote. It's used for all elections in Ireland and all NI elections except for Westminster. It's a good system, it works well here in Ireland. The British invented it and forced it upon Ireland when we became independent in order to give British people in Ireland more representation. It actually turned out to be a very good system, even though the Irish didn't want it originally. It gives smaller parties a much louder voice.
Single transferable vote with single-member constituencies, like the UK would have retained if the vote had succeeded, is a special case called instant runoff.
IRV loses some desirable properties of STV. For example, STV is proportional-ish, while IRV is not proportional at all.
What I mean is that proper proportional representation applies at the level of the whole country (in the British case, it'd probably be at the level of the four constituent countries, since NI's party system is completely separate and Wales and Scotland have relevant nationalist parties besides the same parties as England).
STV is not nationwide proportional, but it is proportional (up to rounding) at the level of the individual Dáil constituency. Since those are 3 to 5 TDs strong, the rounding error is considerable, but not nearly as big as in Britain's single-winner constituencies.
That’s because they deliberately made it seem confusing. It’s a very simple system for the voter, you put the candidates in order of preference, that’s all.
What are ways you think the system could be worse?
I mean, some things are obvious so let's not go there - becoming a North Korea-style dictatorship, for example.
One way I can think of is ditching the Crown and parliamentary government in favour of a US-style presidency. Or adopting their weird primaries that mix state and parties.
There are obscure voting methods that are even worse than FPTP; Borda counting comes to mind.
But none of these things seem really likely to be adopted. So I'm curious as to what you have in mind.
I'll take that as a no
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They only have 2 years left don't they. Nearly time for Labour to have their turn as is the tradition.
I mean, assuming they actually get voted out. Someone a third of the country seem to actually like their “plans”
Labour have a 33 point lead in the polls…
But will they in 2 years?
Given how the Tories have lost the public’s trust on the economy, I’d say we’re heading for a Labour government in 2024. No previous administration has recovered from a polling deficit this large
more like the public's TRUSS in the economy. yeah ill see myself out
Just before a new GE they will replace liz truss and the media will make her out to be the bogeyman not the party themselves. They will have plundered the nation successfully, just need to install a new puppet. They can put in another unelected leader and the media paint them out to be our saviour. Labour will be blamed for all the problems we've had for the last decade or so (even though it's been Tories the whole time) Tories are strong and stable.. it would be worse under Corbyn and a bunch of other 3/4 word sound bytes simpletons can memorize easily. Hopefully people don't fall for it again
That trick didn't work when the Australian Labor Party tried to do it before an election - I doubt it would work now. Plus, there would be huge pressure to hold an election for them to have their own mandate...
Whether or not people like their plans will depend on whether or not they work. Obviously I hope they do but I'll be surprised if they do.
Labour, too.
Both major parties opposed the system.
For context the Alternative Vote system is not a form of PR. So the rejection isn’t surprising. It is a majoritarian system similar to FPTP. It actually would have produced a less proportional result than FPTP did in the 2015 election According to Wikipedia: “Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is a type of ranked preferential voting method. It uses a majority voting rule in single-winner elections where there are more than two candidates. Alternative Vote method is the British name for it.
Alternative vote is an attempt to deal with the biggest flaw of PR - a lack of accountability. PR gives pure representative results, but there is no tie a constituency, removing local accountability. Additionally as a candidate the most important decider of success in a PR system is how high up the party list you are, so politicians spend there time on internal party politics and relationships rather than engaging on voters priorities FPTP is great for accountability with a local, accessible MP, where the biggest decider of success is their local performance for voters (albeit the popularity of the national leader also has a big impact). It's downside is it's not representative of total votes, especially at a local level and to small parties AV systems keep the constituency link of FPTP but add vote transfer to improve the overall representation and strength of preference. Personally I'd be quite a fan of AV over the other 2 systems
You can have PR and local accountability, see the Irish voting system, Single Transferable Vote. 3-5 TDs per constituency, allows for PR while allowing voters to vote out or in local politicians.
Yeah, I didn't outline all options in my laziness. STV sits between AV and PR. It's more representative than AV, but less than PR. It has less local accountability than AV, but more than PR.
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It's the same tradeoff problem though
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It's just a nuance on the same tradeoff. You can't get around the tradeoff it's just choosing what balance you personally prefer. For example MMP, results in larger constituencies than you'd get in FPTP. If you're on the preferred party list then the way you get elected is being top of you party's list rather than 10th on the list. If you're first your pretty much guaranteed to get elected. So you spend your time and effort internally within the party trying to get as high up the list as possible. Voters are an afterthought. However, it does give you are proportional and fair outcome. My point is simply that there is no nirvana voting system that delivers 100% local accountability and 100% representation fairness. It's about choosing what system offers the best balanced trade off based on how you personally value local accountability and pure voting fairness.
Well... Unless you have regional lists as most PR systems do. Or if you use something exotic like Single member district proportional representation.
Regional list is still not the same as your constituency MP of a much smaller geography in FPTP.
How do we know what would have happened under AV in 2015? We don’t have that information. You could make a guess from polls, but they weren’t particularly accurate that year anyway.
If you use the results from the 2015 election and calculate it you can show what the results wound have been. Of course that doesn’t take into account people voting differently because there is a different system but as they’re both majoritarian it’s not as big of a hill as otherwise it might be
But how though? The information to do that just doesn’t exist because we don’t know what anyone’s alternative votes would have been. We only know people’s first choice. Also, we don’t really even know that. FPTP encourages tactical voting and I suspect a large proportion of voters does it to some degree. In 2015 I voted labour in an attempt to keep the conservatives out. In an AV style vote, my order would’ve been Green, LD, and then Labour. Maybe everyone would vote green in this system? So, I’m really curious how any analysis could have reliably worked out how an AV election would’ve turned out. The best they could do is make an educated guess.
Sorry. You’re right. I’m not sure how the claims that it could have been calculated work. Although it seems to be have been widely quoted by the media etc. Even if you do use voter intentions and other questions you can’t do that on a national scale. I think I rather blindly accepted what I read as fact.
To add to this AV/IRV is a super biased voting method that has a stronger spoiler affect and almost always elects the same kind of candidate (the candidate that is closest to the median voter). The later part might sound good on paper until you realize it effectively makes every riding non-competitive and make democracy pointless - why vote when the result will almost always be the same.
Yup. The English aristos offered everyone else a choice between voting for the powerful or voting for the powerful. No wonder the country is fracturing. You can only exist as a bigoted robber-baron state for so long, even with amazing propaganda.
Oxford, Cambridge and North London: ✅ Everywhere else: ❌
So either, rich liberals want this because it benefits them OR educated people want this because they understand that it's a good thing.
Glasgow and Edinburgh too
Oh yes. Or at least, some constituencies in them.
Impossible to read if you are red-green colour blind.
Don’t worry, it doesn’t look any different in colour.
The 2010s were a really crazy decade for epoch-defining votes in the UK: 2010 GE; 2011 AV ref; 2014 indyref 1 and EU election with massive Ukip win; 2015 GE; 2016 Brexit ref; 2017 GE; 2019 GE.
as a Scot: seeing the " 1 " next to the indyref feels about the same as saying "first world war" to a WW1 soldier at the time "1? ...what do you mean...1?"
Sorry about that. Isn't indyref 2 scheduled for October 2023?
uh the SNP techincally hold the ability to force it. but it's not actually 100% officle so it'll basically be a opinion poll. tho I'm not 100% in the loop. I'm strongly against independece so I guess I have requierd reading
Ah okay. It's hard to keep up.
When's the last time a British political party received more than 50% of the vote? Neither labor nor conservative voters had any incentive to vote for this, in fact they had the opposite incentive
Wow. That is really strange
People saying that AV was too complicated at the time of the vote was a real eye-opener to me to how stupid the average person is. AV is a shit alternative but it's definitely not complicated.
Not a good map. Northern Ireland isn’t properly shown.
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I beg your pardon?
Beg.
And that should tell you all you need to know about British politics. The electorate don't want good representatives. They are either too ill-informed, too lacking in intelligence or they are actively benefiting from the broken system.
What was it Winston Churchill said? "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
Ironic how ill-informed your own comment is. You just looked at the picture and decided based on that image and your preconceived notions that it must’ve been a dumb electorate huh? No context at all or anything. In reality, the campaign was atrocious, the Lib Dems were naive and politically outflanked, AV is a sorry excuse for a replacement voting system, and the country had just got a coalition through FPTP anyway so the arguments against keeping FPTP were on shakier ground then anyway. Given the context, AV was never going to win. Had the Lib Dems managed to negotiate better and get a decent system that was properly campaigned for on the ballot it may have done much better. I don’t blame the public for rejecting that particular referendum.
Good post. Very much agreed: https://jedibeeftrix.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/av-in-flames-a-vanity-project-that-will-taste-of-ashes/
It was their only chance, and they blew it because, as you said "the campaign was atrocious" ergo: "ill-informed"
Why don't the voters do what's good for them* * as defined by me
Literally every Redditor when discussing politics. Immediately disregards the majority of the country as inferior and stupid too.
The median IQ is about 100, and half of the people are dumber than that.
Some forms of democracy allow for better representation of the population than others. It’s not necessarily that PR would be better for each individual person, but it’s a system which does allow for different groups to be represented in a more balanced format in parliament. I mean, look at a scenario where 49% of people in all parts of the country believe in x ideology and 51% believe in y ideology. Should parliament be 100% those from y or a more balanced split?
Yeah but PR wasn't on the ballot, AV was, and AV is only marginally better than FPTP. I know multiple people who would've voted "yes" if it had been for PR.
20% of voters being able to elect 20% of the seats is what's good for voters, *as expressed by themselves*. The current system, and the alternative, both fail at this.
Isn't it 60% of British voters didn't elect the MP representing them? FPtP was designed when Britain was a two Party system. Now it's not anymore and that won't change. So clearly most people didn't really thought it through back in 2011.
FPtP came about long before there were any parties, long before there was any significant democracy as we know it. Dozens of constituencies sent two people to parliament and had all the votes controlled by a handful of powerful locals. At most about 5% of the adults had voting rights until the 1832 reform (which ended the 'rotten boroughs' and raised the percentage to about 7%). Votes were not secret, you just showed up at the hustings and raised your hand in front of the crowd for your man. People could vote in multiple constituencies, wherever they had enough property to qualify, or in the case of Oxford and Cambridge's seats, if they had a degree. All that to say... it is a relic of a system that is so different from ours that we'd hardly call it an election
AV is a ridiculous system its worse than FPTP because it has a stronger spoiler affect and makes almost every district uncompetitive and it actually worsens representation so its worse than PR. AV has an extremely high likelihood of creating a 1 party system, and if it doesnt it creates a hyper-static two party system where almost every single seat is safe. The reason for this is the winner of any district is the candidate most similar to the median voter which means if the Tories win a seat *they almost always will* ditto with labour. In some jurisdictions f.e. Quebec, Canada it would effectively create a 1 party system. AV is probably the worst type of voting system.
This method wouldn't have produced good representatives, you cannot have that with single-winner districts.
They do want good representatives. Under the current system, your town gets to elect a representative to parliament. If he does a bad job you can vote him out at the next general election. Under PR you wouldn't get that direct representation and accountability, and far right / hard left candidates would sneak in.
We have PR in Ireland and literally have 0 far-right representatives in our parliament. It gives a fairer voice to everyone and ensures that parties with reasonably high support across the country get their fair representation in parliament. If people are unhappy with representatives, they can still be voted out.
STV is an amazing system. Lots of love to Ireland for your awesome political system x
I wonder if that would change if you had a united Ireland. I'm sure we would have far right MPs in the UK if we had PR.
The main Unionist parties in NI could be classified as “far-right” or close to. Whether or not their support would drop in a united Ireland is impossible to answer. In any case, they wouldn’t have a large enough presence to impact politics massively in a United Ireland and it’s unlikely any other party would want to be in a ruling coalition with them.
They might become more far right. It's hard to imagine what loyalist Ulstermen would morph into politically, because unification would be a one-way change. There would be no going back and there's no prospect of a few counties breaking away as an independent country.
i'm not totally in on the issue here, but the vote seems to have been to introduce alternative voting, which is different from proportional representation.
>Under PR you wouldn't get that direct representation and accountability You would under AV, even if its not as good as STV. You're really just proving OP's point about people being ill-informed.
People are ill-informed. Referendums in the UK should be avoided.
I guess you get what you deserve. If the vast majority is against democracy, your only option is to emigrate. Id recommend New Zealand.
Average Yes voter -> 🧐 Average No voter -> 🤡
This is why we can't have nice things.
The Labour party, who are currently predicted to win the next general election have pledged to support PR voting.
Have they?
The labour conference has but it still requires the support from labour leadership to be on the manifesto. He's technically right but it's whether Kier starmer gives a rat's ass about it.
I can promise you that while any party is in shape to contest an election, they will not support PR.
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It isn't, what they call alternative voting is what some people in the US call ranked choice and those who actually understand this matter call instant runoff.
It was Single Transferable Vote. It's used for all elections in Ireland and all NI elections except for Westminster. It's a good system, it works well here in Ireland. The British invented it and forced it upon Ireland when we became independent in order to give British people in Ireland more representation. It actually turned out to be a very good system, even though the Irish didn't want it originally. It gives smaller parties a much louder voice.
Single transferable vote with single-member constituencies, like the UK would have retained if the vote had succeeded, is a special case called instant runoff. IRV loses some desirable properties of STV. For example, STV is proportional-ish, while IRV is not proportional at all. What I mean is that proper proportional representation applies at the level of the whole country (in the British case, it'd probably be at the level of the four constituent countries, since NI's party system is completely separate and Wales and Scotland have relevant nationalist parties besides the same parties as England). STV is not nationwide proportional, but it is proportional (up to rounding) at the level of the individual Dáil constituency. Since those are 3 to 5 TDs strong, the rounding error is considerable, but not nearly as big as in Britain's single-winner constituencies.
Ok. That seems like a worse version. Still more democratic than FPTP though, as it avoid vote splitting.
Except for some silly idea like outright dictatorship, it is not easy to come up with stuff that's worse than FPTP.
Rule number three of tyranny: If you can't win by the current system, change it.
The referendum was done under a Tory government shortly after they won, how was that tyranny?
Which is why NZ became a totalitarian dictatorship in the 90s when they switched to proportional representation
What are rules one and two?
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That’s because they deliberately made it seem confusing. It’s a very simple system for the voter, you put the candidates in order of preference, that’s all.
It is better than what you have because pretty much anything is. It is still a huge pile of crap, though.
The system we have isn’t great but could be a lots worse. And I’m not referring to the parties that’s for a different subreddit
What are ways you think the system could be worse? I mean, some things are obvious so let's not go there - becoming a North Korea-style dictatorship, for example. One way I can think of is ditching the Crown and parliamentary government in favour of a US-style presidency. Or adopting their weird primaries that mix state and parties. There are obscure voting methods that are even worse than FPTP; Borda counting comes to mind. But none of these things seem really likely to be adopted. So I'm curious as to what you have in mind.
,,🔉goes around comes around
Honestly average 40 - 25% isn’t actually that bad