P.R. No Thanks (PR vs 'first past the post')

Member Name: Mick-Gray

Product:	PR vs 'first past the post'
Date:	08/06/01 (184 review reads)
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Advantages: See oppinion

Disadvantages: see oppinion

I have been prompted to rewrite this opinion as it was pointed out to me that I had not taken all forms of Proportional Representation into account in my original opinion. So I have listed below the various forms of the electoral system that may be considered and my opinions of how they may affect our political system.

First let us examine the system in use at the moment which is the first passed the post system. We are all familiar with how this works, the country is split up into constituencies and each party puts its candidate forward for each and also anybody else who wishes to stand for parliament can on payment of a deposit put themselves forward for election in a particular constituency. The result of this is the person with the largest number of votes in that constituency is elected as the member for the said area. If he is a member of a particular party he will join other members in the House of commons and if the largest party has an overall majority they will form the government Each member which ever party they support or if they are independent are responsible to all of the electorate in their constituency and are there to represent them should they have either personal or constituency problems. They can also take up a cause, which may be a problem particular to their constituency but not necessarily a problem to the rest of the country.

The first passed the post system has more times than not resulted in an overall majority and in the main strong government It has the advantage of being strongly based around the constituency and although an MP may feel an allegiance to his party he still has to answer for his actions to the members of his constituency. It also has the advantage of producing a government that(although perhaps only elected by 42%-52% of the electorate)that percentage at least get exactly the government that they voted for. It has the disadvantage of not producing representation in the correct proportions for the minori
ty parties and in many cases any representation at all. It is because of this that many people advocate reform to a P.R.System.

The first of these is the List System

This is the system used in Israel and is operated using either very large constituencies or even the whole Country. Each party nominates a list of candidates in order of priority, the votes are counted and a proportion of MPs are allocated to each party depending on their percentage in the poll, If party A get allocated 200 M.Ps they will take the first 200 starting at the top of their list. Party B will then take their allocation and so on, so that each party will get a number of MPs relevant to their percentage of the vote.

The only advantage that I can see in this system is that it is entirely representative of the way that the electorate have voted.
The disadvantages are in my opinion that this system almost always leads to a hung parliament and the largest party will need to get support from either a third large party or a mish mash of smaller parties who will all want their pound of flesh before agreeing to form a coalition, This nearly always results in a government who cannot push through legislation that perhaps it has been elected to do and the smaller parties usually weald un-proportionate power and are sometimes able to insist that some of their members are given ministerial posts and can sometimes insist that some of their minority views are taken into account by the government. At the first sign of disagreement in the coalition the government is usually forced to call another election and the whole process would start all over again. Had this system been in use during the last two elections it would have produced a hung parliament on both occasions and almost certainly have produced a Labour/Lib Dem coalition whereby the liberals would have tried to insist that a non proportional amount of their policies be adopted before they gave the government their suppo
rt. Any issues that the Labour party wished to follow would have to be abandoned if they proved to be contentious to the liberals or the government would risk being brought down and another election would have to be called.

The Alternative Vote System

This is another form of P.R that is under consideration and is the System used in the Australian House of Representatives. Under this system we would retain the constituency system but instead of voting for one candidate you would list them in order of preference e.g. Labour 1 Liberal 2 Conservative 3 Greens 4 etc.etc. Under this system if a candidate gets more than 50% of the votes cast he is elected if he gets less than 50% then the votes of the bottom candidate are reallocated taking the 2nd preference into consideration and so on until a candidate has over 50% and then he is elected.

I can see even less advantage in this system than the first as although it retains the constituencies it would have ended up in the last two elections with an even larger majority for Labour and less proportionate representation for the remainder of the parties. Also the constituency MP could be elected by the 2nd choice votes cast by the minority. In this case you would have a constituency MP that was nobody’s first choice. Although this system could still retain majority support at local level instead of Nationally it would not produce P.R and would produce even higher majorities in parliament than we have now.

AV plus
This works in much the same way as the above system with the exception that after all the constituencies have been settled the second preference votes are counted and top up MPs are allocated to each party to enable them to be more representative of the electorate in the country as a whole. This has the advantages of retaining the constituency system whilst giving more representation to the smaller parties. The disadvantages are that although this system would have produced
a Majority government in 1997 it would have been a small one and would probably end in coalition in the majority of governments. It would also give representation in parliament to extreme right or left wing parties such as the BNP or NF or Communists who would otherwise not be elected into parliament this could give them a certain amount of respectability in the eyes of some and could increase their votes next time giving them an even bigger representation in the house. It would also lead to weak government in a majority of cases, as the largest party would need to gain support from the smaller parties to be able to form a government. This could lead to the extreme parties wielding even more power than they ever could under the present system.

The additional Member system
This system of PR is the one that has been adopted for use in the Scottish parliament and the Welsh assembly and is therefore one of the systems that would get great consideration should the government decide to adopt a PR system. It is also in use in Germany and New Zealand. Under this system each person has two votes one to elect a constituency MP and one, which is cast for a political Party under a list system. The votes are then counted and each party is allocated top up MPs from their list depending on the percentage of votes cast for their party.
The advantage of this system is that it still retains the constituencies whilst at the same time gives proportional representation to parliament as a whole.
The disadvantages are that this always ends in a coalition and allows the third party to weald such power that they could play 1 major party against the other and form a government with whoever offered them the most. This could result in the second largest party forming a coalition government with the third largest party and therefore ending up with a government that nobody had voted for as a preference. It would also have the disadvantages of the AV plus system that would e
lect minority extreme party members and give them some sort of respectability.

The remaining system that is under consideration is the system used in the Northern Ireland Assembly and in the Republic Of Ireland and is called the single transferable vote system or STV. This still works on a constituency system although each one is much larger and would have several MPs elected from each. This system is the most complicated of them all as you would have several votes and cast them in order of preference for each candidate. The total number of votes are then counted and divided by the number of seats in a constituency plus one. This gives the number of votes a candidate needs to be elected and each candidate would be selected if he exceeded this quota. If there were not enough candidates elected to a constituency due to the fact that they had not reached their quota of votes then the other preference votes would be distributed until all the seats had been filled. The advantages of this system are that it would to a certain extent be proportional representation but only in the constituency and not necessarily in the country as a whole. You would not have minority parties getting seats so often as the other systems and you would probably get at least one MP of your choice elected to serve in your constituency.

The disadvantages as far as I can see are that this would not be proportional Representation throughout the country as a whole only in the constituency.
Although this system would have produced a majority government over the last two elections this would only have happened due to the collapse in support for the conservatives, if you take the results of most other elections in the last 30 or 40 years most of these would have been coalitions under this system. Had this system been applied to the last two elections this would of produced a Labour majority of about 40-45 seats but in both these elections the leading party has had an almost unprece
dented lead of 12 –14%. Under more normal voting patterns a coalition with the LIB Dems would have been almost a certainty thereby producing all the problems highlighted in the other PR Systems.

In Conclusion I would agree that the present system has its faults and does leave certain groups of the electorate feeling disenfranchised but the alternatives are weak government, un-proportional power wielded by a third party or minor parties, Parliaments not lasting their full course due to disagreements between coalition partners, constant elections and governments that could not get a mandate to carry out the legislation in their manifesto. At least under the present system we usually end up with a strong government able to govern for a full term and at least 42-50% of the electorate get what they want. The present system has worked for many years and why alter something if it works especially as the alternatives will cause even more problems.



Mick Gray

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