Thanks to the backward First-Past-The-Post voting system, Nigel Farage could obtain an absolute majority in Westminster with only a minority of British votes.
As someone from a country with proportional voting, you should give it a try
But the babies need ventilators!
And our soldiers need helmets!
Y’know none of this would be necessary if we taught media literacy in the first place. You see- Ow!
Alright, alright, fine.
PR all the way for me.
And this, kids, is how they will replicate the Milei experiment in UK. We are going to enjoy homeschooling, healthcare bankruptcy, 3 jobs just to pay rent etc.
I'm definitely all for PR, but hasn't FPTP hurt smaller parties like Reform/UKIP in the past? There was an election where UKIP received millions of votes but only secured a couple of seats. PR could potentially make it easier for parties like Reform to gain power.
Yes. One of the only benefits of FPTP is that for most of its history it has stopped tiny, insane, extreme, populist parties getting a foothold, and instead encouraged relative stability. For all the issues we have, the UK has been a phenomenally stable democracy over the years.
That is no longer a protection against Reform, as they've broken past the "not being popular enough to gain any traction under FPTP barrier".
Tbh I think actually it produces the opposite of stability. In the U.K. we get lurches from left to right every decade or so. In most places with PR that’s just not possible due to the necessity of coalition formation. Often these coalitions are in stalemate: the main criticism of PR is that it produces ineffective government. If anything, FPTP is too effective: it’s almost always fewer people voting for the government than not, yet they get absolute power.
So much for "FPTP keeps out extremists".
Unfortunately (in this case), if a party starts to get 30% of the popular vote or somewhere around that, it's going to start winning seats in FPTP elections.
We should already start forming resistance networks in preparation for a fascist government.
Labour would rather this than have to change the voting system. PR came up in the last party conference and they just said, "Naaaah".
Keep voting red vs blue everyone!
They and the Torys are inveterate gamblers who every couple of decades win a huge number of seats as Labour did at the last election and that hope that they can win big every time rather than playing the odds properly.
This is coupled with wanting to lock out smaller parties like the Lib Dems, but that doesn't really work for Tory adjacent parties like Reform when seat boundaries have been gerrymandered by the Tories to such a degree that a small shift in certain seats can win the election.