Britain’s quandary

The UK’s elections failed to produce a winner, and the country is now in a quandary over it as the main parties talk of deals. It’s all so unnecessary.

The UK uses the “first past the post” election system in which the electorate candidate who has the highest number of votes wins that electorate, even if they have only a minority of the total votes cast. That can easily happen whenever there are at least three strong candidates in an electorate, and the more strong candidates there are, the probability that a minority candidate will win reaches near certainty.

That’s bad enough, but the FPP system means that whoever wins a majority of the electorates forms government—even if every one of their electorate winners won with a minority of the votes cast. Similarly, strong parties that fail to win electorates would be shut out of Parliament altogether; a party could actually receive more popular votes than the eventual winner, but still be totally shut out of government.

The solution is a proportional representation system to ensure that the final make-up of Parliament matches the popular vote: The number of MPs each party gets mirrors their percentage of the popular vote.

TVNZ’s One News did a rough calculation of what the UK results would be if they had the MMP system used by New Zealand, Germany and Israel. According to them, the Conservatives would have 51 fewer seats, Labour 53 fewer. The Liberal Democrats, however, would have 102 more seats.

British and American media commentators, who don’t understand how all this works, have been talking about how the Liberal Democrats didn’t do as well as expected when, in fact, the system was always stacked against them: The LibDems did well—the system didn’t.

The British newsmedia is also wringing its collective hands over the prospect of a coalition government, suggesting that they’re unstable and incapable of governing. Those of us living in countries with proportional representation, whose governments are coalitions more often than not, find that a huge laugh; newsmedia ignorance like that is always funny.

Britain can change all this simply by reforming their system and moving to a more democratic system than FPP. This is nothing new, of course, and it’s been a goal for more than two decades. Maybe this time they’ll be stirred to act.

Update: The BBC has published a story, “Lessons from New Zealand in art of coalition building,” which clearly illustrates both how proportional representation works in practice, as well as how New Zealand specifically has something to teach “Mother England” about how coalition government works. (Tip o’ the hat to SteveINtheUKok for the link).