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UK Election Arcana, Explained By Software
An anonymous reader writes "For the first time in 35 years the UK government is looking to be at risk of getting a hung or coalition government. (The most recent previous hung parliaments were in 1974 and 1929.) The voting rules are somewhat arcane and the votes this time are such that there are many strange possible outcomes and a surprisingly large number of permutations of coalitions that could be formed and political strategies that may go into their forming. There are at least 60 permutations, some more politically plausible than others. Adam Back wrote some software to work out the permutations, and lists some of the arcane factors affecting the outcome. If Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown chose to, it would appear even that he could simply refuse to resign, ostensibly trying to form a coalition indefinitely, maybe even forcing the Queen to dismiss the current government, which last happened in 1834 under King William IV."
Because everyone in this country is still hung up on class. The working class would never vote for tories, and the middle/upper class would never vote labour. And only crazy hippies vote libdem. our parents did it, as did our parents parents... Maybe we'll realise we're being left behind before its too late.
How is this arcane? The article plainly describes how a British-style parliamentary system works, as practiced in many countries throughout the world (including Canada), and with a special emphasis on the outcome of the most recent election. This is only confusing to foreigners and people unfamiliar with basic civics.
Just be glad your broken system is a lot less broken than the US system. At least you guys -have- minority parties. Good luck finding a single person in the US congress that isn't a republican or democrat (or an 'independent' who votes 99.999% with one of the 2 parties).
While the UK system may be broken, its a lot better than the system from across the ocean....
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Because everyone in this country is still hung up on class. The working class would never vote for tories, and the middle/upper class would never vote labour. And only crazy hippies vote libdem. our parents did it, as did our parents parents... Maybe we'll realise we're being left behind before its too late.
The people who voted for the Lib Dems are not "crazy hippes", they are people who want a change in the system and/or are sick of Labour. They certainly didn't vote for the Lib Dems so that they could cement conservative power though. If they opt for a coalition with the conservatives I suspect that most of their support will vanish.
The UK system is crap -- it's not as bad as the US system, but it's still pretty awful.
In many areas it's more-or-less irrelevant who you vote for -- the same party wins every year.
In other areas it's a contest between two of the biggest three parties, and not voting for one of those two is essentially wasting your vote; many people in these situations vote for the "less bad" of the two parties. (e.g. they might like party B, but 'know' that either A or C will win. A isn't as bad, so they vote A to try and stop C winning.)
The Liberal Democrats get a decent number of votes all across the country (23% this year) but don't get a fair number of seats in Parliament (9%). Labour got 29% of the vote and 40% of the seats, the Conservatives got 36% of the vote and 47% of the seats in Parliament. The smallest parties are even worse-off than the Lib Dems: the Greens got 1% of the vote this year, and for the first time got a single seat -- 0.15% of the seats! (results.)
Looks like what we really need then is a hanged Murdoch rather than a hanged Parliament. If you guys could take care of that, we in the US would be ever so grateful.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
No, we need STV.
Don't worry about the BNP: they lost all their council seats in Barking & Dagenham, and were thrashed by Labour in Barking.
In any case, if a fair proportion of a constituency wants a particular representative then they should have that representative, no matter how much I disagree with their policies. They can argue about it in Parliament, and if their views are unpopular they won't make any difference (it's likely that almost all the other MPs will disagree).
Better than the US though, a party could easily have 25% of the popular votes and no representation.
That's also possible in the UK. Each seat is contested on a first-past-the-post basis, and the winner typically has 30-40% of the vote. The remaining 60-70% are then discarded. If you get 25% in every constituency but another party gets 26% then you get no seats. It's even more fun than this, because it doesn't have to be the same other party; one other party could get 26% in 326 seats and 0% in the other 364. They would then have a majority of seats and control of Parliament, with only 13% of the popular vote, while the party with 25% of the popular vote had no representation at all.
There's a reason why electoral reform is the key issue for all of the smaller parties. One or other of the two major parties needs to get them on board to be able to form a government, but the price of doing so is likely to be a form of proportional representation for the next election (which, if we go by 1974's precedent, will be in a few months) and then neither Labour nor the Conservatives will be able to get a majority ever again. Even the 36% or so that the Conservatives got is probably a lot more than they'd get under PR - a lot of people voted Conservative because it meant not-Labour (just as a lot of people voted not-Conservative in the past), and would likely vote for a smaller party if their vote would actually be likely to affect the outcome.
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No, that's the wrong way to see it.
"Well, at least it's better than in bumfuckistan" is a justification for complacency. Don't wait for it to get worse, do some work and help make it better.
So are you trying to do something about it, or just complain about it online?
The grandparent is setting an excellent example here.
Mod parent up. As much as it seems silly that the two losing parties still remain in power, it isn't when you think of it. If combined they still represent more votes (and thus a higher percentage of people's views), shouldn't they be the ones in power rather than a party that a majority of people didn't want?
This is pretty much what happened when Nader "spoiled" the vote for Gore in Florida back in 2000. Even if you discount the whole recount issue, if Nader hadn't been running most of his votes would have likely gone to Gore (both being liberals), and Gore would have easily won the state and the election. Similarly, if the UK were a 2-party system, the Labour and Lib Dems (which if I recall are both more similar to each other than the Conservatives) would be a single party and easily have won.
The benefits of having multiple parties is that no matter who "wins", without a clear majority the ruling coalition needs to be built on compromise. Whether it's Conservatives + Lib Dems, or Labour + Lib Dems, or one of the other permutations, the government can't go too far to one extreme. More importantly, minor parties are still needed to form a coalition, giving them a chance to make some of their views heard.
This can give new ideas—ideas that may be popular with the electorate but too risky/unknown to make traction with the main parties—a chance to be tested while still having a sort of buffer preventing them from being taken too far to quickly. Think, for example, the Pirate Party; major parties are too beholden to big corporate donations to advocate sensible copyright reform, yet that doesn't mean there shouldn't be advocates for it in the legislature.. Compare this to the US, where the two parties have been pretty stagnant for as long as anyone can remember, and new ideas are quickly shot down as "radical" from both sides
"Hung parliament" makes it sound so negative. Germany hasn't had a single party having the majority of parliament seats since 1957, and things seem to be working out quite nicely. I'd say the system is very successful, 1957 was the last time that one party had uncontrolled rule, since then there was always a coalition in power.
At the very least it prevents one of the worst stupidities that can be found in British governments: The tendency to leave "poison pills" to their successor. Like the Tories did when they pressed through privatisation of the railway system at the last second with disastrous consequences for the quality of the railway system, or what Labour has recently done signing billion dollar IT contracts for useless projects that they knew the next government would want to cancel, intentionally negotiating contracts with huge penalties for cancellation.
"but I would look at the electoral college and various senate problems as bigger problems than our current 2 party system."
Of course, most of those problems are directly related to the two-party system. In the case of the electoral college, it is the primary means by which the system is enforced, and most of our Senate shenanigans are a direct result. Serious reform of any one will result in changing all three.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
The vast majority of britons looked at what the lib dems offered, said 'he looks nice but no thanks' and actually reduced their vote share - yet they could get cabinet seats.
Wrong. The Lib Dems got 23% of the vote, an INCREASE of 1%. Citation - BBC Full election results.
They had a reduction in the number of seats. - more votes, less power.
It has to be a broken system that gives them less than 10% of the seats for almost a quarter of the vote. Especially when you consider that they increased their vote, yet decreased their number of MPs and that Labour got 29% (only 6 per cent more) of the vote somehow giving them 4 times as many seats. In fact both Labour and the Tories (Conservatives) got over 10% more power (seats) than their share of the vote.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Labour have not been on the left since the 1980s. You are almost as bad as the guy who wrote the analysis calling them 'socialist'. In everywhere except ultra-rightwing america, that assertion would be laughable. But to you guys, I guess anybody whose primary policy is not giving tax breaks to millionaires is a commie...
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Stop reading the Murdoch press then. They think anything other than a strong Conservative government is a bad thing. Most other people think it's a good thing. 34% of the population voted for parties that did not have a chance of winning an overall majority, so they're probably not too opposed to the idea of a coalition government.
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