(For those not used to this style of ‘bug report’, the following is written in the style of a technical problem report that might be submitted to an open issue-tracking system, typically used by software developers.)
Summary: Britain’s parliamentary electoral system is broken
Systems affected: British Democracy
Severity: High
Detail: In 2005, the Labour Party gained 35% of the electoral vote and yet gained 55% of the seats thus enabling them to form a majority government; in contrast, 32% of the vote for the Conservatives gave them a mere 30% of the seats. The Liberal Democrats gained 22% of the vote, giving a paltry 9% of the seats. Many small parties gained no seats, despite gaining 2% of the vote (UKIP received 600,000 votes, the size of a large British city). This disparity between numbers of votes and numbers of seats in Parliament (and thus representation of the voting population) is deeply unfair.
Comment: There are a large number of ‘safe seats’ in the country. Many voters of other parties in those areas feel that their vote is meaningless. Under the current electoral system, they are correct. The electoral system must change to become fairer and more representative.
I’m sure that large numbers of people “don’t care about politics” because their experience with it is bad, because of the failure of the voting system. Some try to solve this with tactical voting (“I really want to vote for PARTY1, but I don’t want PARTY2 to get in, so I’m going to vote for PARTY3”), but that really shouldn’t be necessary. People should be able to vote for their chosen candidate or party and have that reflected in Parliament. If a small party receives 1% of the votes, then they should receive the same proportion of MPs, i.e. about 6.
In 2005, we got these seats: Labour 356, Conservative 198, LibDem 62, no UKIP, no Green, no BNP etc. If ideal proportional representation was employed, we would have got this result, based on the same percentages of votes: Labour 226, Conservative 193, LibDem 142, UKIP 14, Green 6, BNP 4. (As an aside, some would hate to see BNP gain MPs. But 200,000 people voted BNP in 2005: are they not entitled to proper representation, in a democracy?)
Proposed Fix: Change the voting system to a form of proportional representation. The best way to achieve this, at present, is to vote Liberal Democrat.
Opinion: As the largest party which suffers from the injustice of the existing electoral system, the Liberal Democrats are keen to bring about electoral reform. Labour, on the other hand, have no incentive to change the electoral system – whatever they might actually say about the issue – because they gain most from it. The Conservatives (and Labour) retain their strongest position by attempting to keep the “two party system”. A strong showing from the Liberal Democrats in the forthcoming election may well lead to no party gaining an overall majority: a hung parliament. I think this would actually be a very refreshing and healthy outcome: co-operation between parties would be required.
Final Comment: Make sure that you are registered to vote. And then Vote Liberal Democrat on 6 May 2010.
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