Wretched news on the UK election front, of course. The Tories got an actual god damn majority. All my UK friends are saying goodbye NHS. Miliband, Clegg and Farage have all resigned as party leaders.
The one silver lining is that George Galloway LOST to Naz Shah. The horrible Islamist bully from the “Respect” party lost to a Muslim woman from Labour.
Goodbye George. Become obscure.
Snaps from yesterday via Furqan Naeem:
The trouble with Galloway is that he just won’t go away. Just when you think it’s all over, he finds a way to make a comeback. 🙁
If this election shock-a-tron tells us one thing – it’s that we’re long overdue for Single Tranferable Vote or some other suitable form of proportional representation. We, the British electorate, simply can’t be trusted with ‘first past the post’.
@Claire: True, this is definitely not the last we’ve heard from the awful George Galloway. The only two highlights of this election are seeing George Galloway and Nigel Farage lose their campaigns. What I find absolutely unbelievable is that people who epitomise the very worst of British politics (for example, Nadine Dorries, Grant Shapps) even managed to improve their shares of the vote.
@2 EigenSprocketUK
Yes, I was amazed to learn recently that the UK still uses the crude and unrepresentative FPTP voting.
“Single Tranferable Vote or some other suitable form of proportional representation.”
The preferential or single transferable vote system is not necessarily proportional, although it usually prevents the election of candidates with a simple majority i.e. candidates that majority of the voters in the seat probably reject. Multiple-member proportional systems are more democratic.
It will be interesting to see the difference between % party votes and seats won.
[meta]
rjw1, whence your amazement?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote_referendum,_2011
@4 John Morales,
I was even more amazed to discover that the U.S. And Canada use FPTP systems, we’re so advanced in Oz.
The vote on a specific form of change was in every sense a con – a sop to Nick Clegg as one of his conditions for entering the coalition. To have tested what public opinion actually was it would have been necessary to (attempt to) bring most of the population up to speed on what we were actually talking about, including giving facts about the various ways both tested and set out in theory of achieving a result more representative than the one we just saw.
This might have taken some time, perhaps a year, some government spending – oh! noes! – and a press which was either interested or balanced in its approach. No, we went straight to the vote with a minimum of information and media whose only message I recall at this date was, “Ooooh! This is scary!”
So technically we have had a referendum on changing the voting system, in theory we know the people’s will and it will be very difficult to raise the issue again. As a local I can look at the breakdown by constituency – thanks for the link, John – and see immediately that those places which voted Yes have a population diverse both culturally and in levels of wealth and one or more universities. Other places with a relatively low No vote have some of those attributes and/or other features which might mean that the people have spotted the deficiencies of the FPTP system. In particular, they’ve been better placed to grasp how FPTP in C21 Britain tends to reinforce the status quo.
Keep watching for the pushing through of boundary changes in this parliament to achieve a political objective. We’ve had a perfectly good independent Boundary Commission for as long as I can remember but Cameron, like a dictionary atheist, does not believe in statistics or any of the social sciences. As I say, watch this space.
Sorry – para 1, “a more representative outcome.”
@6 Maureen Brian,
Unfortunately confusing the issue is a very effective conservative tactic worldwide, the result is that, as in the UK, voters sometimes vote “No” to democratic innovations.
He’s the kind of political bad egg that hangs around like a bad smell; he’ll only go away when he’s dead.
The focus of the commentators is on seats won rather than percentage of the vote. FPTP is well established as the most hopelessly unfair election system on the planet. But while it suits the politicians to keep it, they will.
Meanwhile, a self-important opportunist blowfly like Galloway will not have to cruise far before he has found another sinecure: perhaps one even more to his liking than a seat in Parliament.
Omar Puhleez,
Voters are only a voluntary subset of the population under the UK system — another feature of the system being that voting is not compulsory.
</pedant>
I realise it’s drifting off topic (the execrable Galloway), but with a slight but clear majority of 12 seats, the new government will not have too much opposition to worry about. Bye bye European Union, bye bye Human Rights Act. We’re not going to try to fix them, we’ll ditch them.
Uhhh… no thanks. If the seats were proportional to the vote, the Tories would have got 242 seats, Labour 199, and the third biggest party would have been UKIP, with EIGHTY TWO seats. Presumably you’re wishing that we’d got a Tory/UKIP coalition instead of what we have? Really? FPTP is rubbish, but the inconvenient fact is that under ANY system, the votes cast last Thursday were a massive rejection of the progressive agenda and a whopping endorsement of right-wing Little England policies (apart from in Scotland, obvs, but they’ll be a separate nation pretty soon with a mandate like that).
Nobody can claim for a moment that it wasn’t made abundantly clear over the course of the election campaign that a vote for the Tories was a vote against the NHS.
The Tories got the most seats. The Tories got the most VOTES. The third biggest party in terms of votes was UKIP, a party most people accept is composed mostly of “swivel-eyed loons” (to borrow a phrase Lord Feldman of the Tories used to describe activists for his own party…). Those of us of a progressive bent may not like it, but whichever way you slice it, the Left lost the argument, not just a bit, but completely. It’s time to stop whining about it and work out what went wrong and put it right. They could do worse than listen to Tony Blair. His place in history may well be defined by the single word “Iraq”, but he occupied the centre, won over Tory voters, and achieved peace in Northern Ireland, the Human Rights Act, the minimum wage, and a whole bunch of other great stuff in between propping up US foreign wars. Labour loudly rejected his legacy, and now here we are. Well done everyone. Thanks. /rant.