Some people say that PR allows extremist parties in. Firstly - you can limit seats only to parties with 5% of the national vote, but more importantly, SO WHAT? The point of democracy is that you should get who you vote for. If your electorate is a stupid bunch of bigots, you get a bigoted government: unless you make a concerted effort to defeat them electorally and intellectually. If that doesn't work, you can always begin the armed struggle!
Someone clever has calculated the election results as they'd have been under PR and the intermediate system, Alternative Vote. The results are shocking. Blue = Tory scum, Red = Labour class traitors, Yellow = Liberal Democrat splitters, first green = Scottish National Party, second green = Plaid Cymru and the last column is 'others' (Northern Irish parties, Greens etc). Note that under any other system, we'd have a stable Labour-Lib Dem coalition today.
| FPTP: TOTALS | 307 | 258 | 57 | 6 | 3 | 19 |
| AV: TOTALS | 281 | 262 | 79 | 5 | 3 | 20 |
| STV: TOTALS | 246 | 207 | 162 | 13 | 4 | 18 |
1 comment:
Clever, but statistically useless as presumably people would vote differently under PR. You are bang on the money on the rest of this post though.
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