Are you joking, or just unaware of how the voting actually ended up in various ridings? With any sort of proportional vote system it would have been a Tory/UKIP coalition running the country. Roughly 37% voted for the tories and 13% voted UKIP. If anyone has a reason to complain it is UKIP, and frankly I am quite happy to accept the downsides of FPTP if it keeps UKIP out of government.
> With any sort of proportional vote system it would have been a Tory/UKIP coalition running the country.
That's not how proportional systems work. The parties choose themselves what alternative they want to negotiate. You will often find "natural" coalition partners shying away from each other to look towards the centre because the risk of indulging fringe parties in a coalition is that you get eaten alive at the next election as your more centrist voters decide "anything but" next time to prevent the same next time.
While Tory/UKIP might have happened, first of all we don't know how proportional systems would have altered who people would have voted for, secondly a Tory/UKIP coalition would require the right wing of the Tory party to be firmly in control, and little indicates they are, and secondly would require the Tory party to be willing to risk exactly that kind of implosion. A Tory/Labour coalition would also be very much possible, as would a minority government with a supply agreement with one or more parties (e.g. you'd find Labour and SNP and pretty much everyone else would be willing to stretch far to appease a Tory minority government to avoid a coalition that included UKIP)
> and frankly I am quite happy to accept the downsides of FPTP if it keeps UKIP out of government.
I'm tempted to say the same, but as horrendous as such a government might be, it would still be more representative of the will of the people. It would also have the bonus of tearing the Tory party to shreds next election.
1. You assume that people's vote would remain the same. I rather think people would be better able to vote for what they believe in, and would be more likely to vote in general.
Following your assumption, though:
2. The Tories would have to choose coalition with UKIP (and vice versa).
3. Even if they managed to do that, they would not strictly have a majority at 49.5%. Tories currently have 50.9% of MPs alone.
So a much less stable government that would threaten to split off and destroy the Tory left. It's not even likely that Cameron or Johnson could agree to those terms.
But, if they were able to agree, I'd far rather have that government than the one we have now.
I am concerned by this attitude in general. Although I don't agree a lick with UKIP, they should have fair representation.
>Even if they managed to do that, they would not strictly have a majority at 49.5%
They would have also almost certainly got the DUP, who had 0.6%, taking them to 50.1%, and the opposition would need to take off Sinn Fein's 0.6% as they don't take their seats.
With any sort of proportional vote system it would have been a Tory/UKIP coalition running the country.
That seems unlikely.
For one thing, as a matter of fact the Conservatives and UKIP did not achieve a majority of the popular vote between them at the general election. Under a fully proportional system, the result on the day would not have given them a working majority to form a government alone. Some sort of minority Conservative government would have been a more likely outcome.
For another thing, you're assuming that people would have voted the same way under another system, which is far from a safe assumption. This was probably the most negative campaign we've had in generations, and a lot of the arguments in the final weeks were about how to vote tactically to block one outcome or another. Knowing that every vote counted could easily have significantly changed voting patterns.
frankly I am quite happy to accept the downsides of FPTP if it keeps UKIP out of government.
That is a very dangerous, short-termist position.
Whether you like it or not, millions of people did vote for UKIP at the election, as is their right in a party-based representative democratic system. Those people have effectively been disenfranchised.
For that matter, so have millions who supported the Lib Dems or the Greens. Along with UKIP, these three parties between them attracted popular support on a similar scale to Labour and the Conservatives (roughly 24%, against 30% for Labour and 37% for the Conservatives) yet have only 10 seats between them in Parliament compared to Labour's 232 and the Conservatives' 331.
National parties are also heavily over-represented now. The DUP (0.6% of the popular vote) has the same 8 MPs as the Lib Dems (7.9%). The SNP (4.7%) has 56 MPs, while UKIP (12.6%) has only a single MP.
There are pros and cons to having a "clear winner" and first past the post does provide that, but the idea that the system has generated a government that is anything close to representing what the people as a whole want this time is even less credible than it was five years ago.
The problem with extrapolating how the result of a proportional vote would have gone from the results of a first past the post election is that people would vote differently. e.g. someone might vote tactically for lib-dem to get a conservative out under first past the post whereas they might vote labour under proportional representation.
Edit: I'm in favour of proportional representation.
