The Proportional Representation Lobby
In my last article for the Daily Sceptic I wrote about a tactical voting coalition titled The Movement Forward (MVMFWD). Its members include Carol Vorderman, Femi Oluwole and just about every ghastly social media activist you can think of.
There are three things to emphasise about their movement. First is that they aren’t party political; they are happy to vote for candidates – especially Greens and Lib Dems – if they ‘Stop the Tories’ or now ‘Stop Reform’. The second is that they have a set of issues they are trying to promote, such as putting water into public ownership (and thus will also promote candidates who promise to do that). Third is that they are fierce advocates of Proportional Representation (PR), as you can see from MVMFWD’s X page below:
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Note that there are already variations in systems, especially outside of England: https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/elections-and-voting/voting-systems/ E.g. in Wales it’s a hybrid, with some being FPTP, and others not.
PR is a great way of voting for a particular policy with the probability that it will be negotiated away with back room deals.
You can make a reasonable argument that with the two main established parties now struggling to remain relevant Proportional Representation is their last hope of hanging on to power, even if somewhat diluted. Plus if there is a bunch of leftist wanabees in Parliament they could form a temporary coalition and freeze a majority party (i.e. one considered to be rightist) out of power.
We live in interesting times.
Agreed, if you look at Germany and France, although different systems the existing establishment parties are clinging onto power by forming coalitions, even if it means parties with diametrically opposed views stay in power. They are even using lawfare to prevent progress. It’s a bit like the Tories and Labour (Commies) forming a coalition. The same problem exists in Czechia and probably other countries. The sole intention being to maintain the uni parties in power. Fortunately in the UK parliamentary elections we still have a system that will expose the winner of an election for what they are The present government being a good example, their true colours are showing and the electorate don’t like it. So we now have Labour postponing local elections in an attempt to cover up their failings by preventing themselves being exposed. Any new party has an uphill struggle and fortunately for us the system has exposed the socialists for what they are… Communists. So this bunch are simply trying to change the system to a European style system to prevent the will of the majority prevailing so that they can more or less do as they please. Hence the mess Europe is in at… Read more »
The local elections are being postponed at the request of the Tories. They are already working together to silence the working class majority.
In Surrey it is the Tories running scared of being hammered by Reform in May and I think this is true for all the SE county councils.
Agreed
What the heck is John Cleese doing in there? Next you’ll tell me Rowan Atkinson has joined!
Yes. It surprised me too.
Career re-launch?
Maybe he lost his marbles. Or an attractive female convinced him.
This article seems to be conflating two different subjects – PR and tactical voting.
The reference to GE 2024 obviously refers to encouraging tactical voting during the last general election.
Sure they also promote PR over first past the post, presumably having seen the ‘Firewall’ shenanigans going on in Germany in the last few years, to prevent the AfD having any effective power.
Obviously the German scenario is an example of the downside of PR, but it also has an upside. Presumably that’s why John Cleese is on the list, not because he’s advocating Leftist tactical voting.
It does seem contradictory, but the whole system of PR and its various forms lend themselves to the status quo and perhaps backroom dealings, which is the way the EU works. See my other comment, but it is a subject that needs to be discussed. Personally I prefer our system, but I would make one change so that any party not gaining a majority of a certain number of seats would face a shortened term in office. But I’ve not thought it through yet, comments welcome….
A Party without a working majority usually doesn’t last long because it cannot get its legislation through, and is susceptible to votes of no confidence.
So your change would address and issue which is already dealt with.
What’s the upside? Destruction of the European economy with Green policies; destroying cultures and societies by flooding the Continent with immigrants?
Fact: Proportional Representation was the system in the Weimar Republic which allowed the National Socialists into Parliament and Government even though the majority did not vote for them.
Once in control in 1933, Hitler abolished PR – the system that had allowed him in.
Warning Will Robinson – look to history.
Vorderman has never had a humble opinion in her life.
Did anyone point out to this dim woman that Labour got a landslide from less than 20% of the electorate. Maybe all the botox jabs have killed the braincells she used to have when totting up the numbers on Countdown.
Yes Carol. just think what PR would have done for Reform in the last election.
The issue is not so much what they say they want (PR) but the policies they seek to prevent (Reform).
PR has many flavours which are as different in their effect as they differ from FPTP.
Yes, but PR may have caused different voting tactics.
Organisations such as this are political campaign organisations and ought to have to register as such. They are promoting party contentious issues and intend to influence the laws we live under.
There are many such organisations and they almost always get money from “charities” and overseas. They are given saintly status in the MSM and their claims are rarely challenged.
To allow them to operate without full disclosure and challenge is an abuse of democracy. Just as the BBC abused its Charter and Stare enforced funding do fo these bodies.
Thank you for bringing so much to our attention.
I knew this was going to happen. It’s the only way that the old two parties can save their skins. With Labour, the Liberals and the Greens running neck and neck they could cancel each other out and allow Reform through the middle. This working class revolt is scaring Labour to death, and they will do absolutely anything to stop it, even yet another major policy that was not in their manifesto.
As I recall PR, alternative vote, was put to the electorate in a referendum by the Tory/Liberal coalition and rejected. Such a monumental change to our democracy will surely have to be put to another referendum, especially when it was not in Labour’s manifesto.
Political parties love proportational representation because it means that the parties rule supreme because voters aren’t even allowed to decide who shall represent them in parliament anymore. They may just authorize a certain political party to send a certain number of MPs into parliament. This means that voters are party retainers for all practical purposes, similar to how retainership worked in the feudal system.
The truth of the matter is that certain political organisations hate elections. This country has never voted en masse for green policies, except when scurrilous people hide them behind other issues (Johnson), and continuously reject LibDems at a national level. But still their people stand up as though they have a majority mandate. They push for politics at lower and local levels, where turnout is so much lower and for the ridiculous concept of people’s assemblies, knowing that as with trade union votes for leadership, only hardcore activists will engage and their unsupported minority views will get enacted. The electorate as a whole terrifies them and that is why they are all so desperate to reject the current level of support for Reform.
The problem with democracy is the people.
Proportional Representation serves two functions: to prevent any change to the status quo and rule by elites; to give minority Party “king-makers” a disproportionate say in policy and government.
This is made quite clear when observing the political landscape of Europe – and its inability to carry out the structural changes in government needed to halt its terminal decline.
Prof Thomas Sowell: there are no solutions, just trade-offs.
First Past the Post is not perfect but it is the best trade-off if we want the majority sentiment in society to decide its affairs, not bureaucrat committees, activist groups and lunatics.
One major reform necessary is to abolish the welfare-state (including the ghastly NHS) to get rid of the parasitic notion that everyone cqn live off each other funded out of the public treasury.
This would prevent government spending – divvying up the public pot of money – being used as bribes for votes. It would vastly reduce those on the public payroll whose vote surely will go to whoever guarantees their job security and higher wages.
First Past the Post is not perfect but it is the best trade-off if we want the majority sentiment in society to decide its affairs, not bureaucrat committees, activist groups and lunatics.
That’s actually not the case which is exactly the argument of the people favouring PR: Parties can, as the current Labour government demonstrates, perfectly well acquire a majority in parliament without support of a majority of voters. FPTP is based on an entirely different idea, namely, that the country is divided into constituencies and that the inhabitants of each constituency elect a parliamentary representative for it by simple majority vote. That’s a sound idea because it means individual MPs have a democratic mandate while parties don’t and that MPs have reason to care for their constituents because they need their approval to remain MPs.
“… each constituency elect a parliamentary representative for it by simple majority vote.”
“… perfectly well acquire a majority in parliament without support of a majority of voters.”
Nope. That’s not the system. Our elections, and Government, are decided by a plurality not simple majority.
That’s why a referendum better as matters are decided by simple majority.
Labour govern with 33% of votes cast because the majority of voters didn’t vote. How would PR resolve that – how can votes not cast be used in PR? Wouldn’t we still end up with a “Government” with 33% of the votes cast, cobbled together from an assortment of convenient bed-fellows?
“… and that MPs have reason to care for their constituents…”
Where is this? MPs have a reason to care for their own careers and movement up the greasy pole to junior ministers or whatever, so take great care to follow the Party whip and do what best serves the Party and their job.
From the Wikipedia article on plurality voting:
In international institutional law, a simple majority (also a plurality) is the largest number of votes cast (disregarding abstentions) among alternatives
You also seem to disagree with my statement that the present UK government acquired a majority of parliamentary seats without support of a majority of voters but then state that its vote share was only 33% which is certainly not a majority. So, which is it?
Back on my engineering course we had a unit on something like the engineer in society and the lecturer raised the question of what was the point of an election. Is our General Election to elect a government or to allow people a vote? In this country our system focuses on the former and over the years has delivered on that. Under PR as we see around us, it is the latter since the governments that evolve post-election are NOT ones the people voted in. The Dutch will provide another shining example of this. In the aftermath of the last French election GB News had on an RN candidate who stated that with first past the post he would have been elected and not subject to the second round where the top 3 have a vote off if nobody has reached 50%. There does seem to be merit in a system like this as a second round but France has highlighted a flaw when in order to keep out RN one of the two other candidates dropped out making it unlikely RN would win. Ban this from happening and there might be a good system there to root out the… Read more »
PR = last past the post.
I’m glad you mentioned the Dutch Travesty, in which the Indigenous Dutch people voted for Geert Wilders, who was supposed to be Prime Minister as a result and save their country from the Islamic Horde, but his treacherous “coalition partners” all refused to let him take his rightful place as Prime Minister, and chose some Totally Irrelevant Leftist Spymaster, a Globalist Joke Choice, and blocked all of Geert’s reforms. I despair of the Dutch people now, watching them sink back beneath the Satanic Globalist yoke, shrieking wildly as their smirking sodomite candidate is set to overturn all the long, lonely years of struggle and danger and death threats endured by True Dutch Patriot Geert Wilders, the True Prime Minister of the Netherlands. Even the Dutch Farmers we were all so proud of meekly submitted to their party and their movement being taken over by a Bossy Cow, the Leftist Woman Journalist (because no actual Dutch Farmer could be found?), and meekly allowed her to block Geert Wilders from his rightful post as Prime Minister. The Dutch Farmers should have booted her out long ago. As for all the Dutch who voted for the party led by a Muslim Turk in… Read more »
I posted this reply somewhere else already:
The results are a bit more nuanced. I fought hard with Chat GPT to get the total number of seats centre right and right. It kept forgetting parties.
So eventually we settled on:
Centre-right (VVD 22, CDA 18, BBB 4, CU 3) → 47 seats
Right / far-right (PVV 26, JA21 9, FvD 7, SGP 3) → 45 seats
Combined centre-right + right → 92 seats.
Of 150 seats it does not appear that left, so there is hope. I would personally classify VVD and CDA are more centrist, however they have historically been right and centre right respectively.
It will be interesting.
Yours is an important quote to remember:
“The governments that evolve post-election are NOT ones the people voted in.
The Dutch will provide another shining example of this.”
There are many flavours of PR, and they all have flaws, some of which are identified in these comments. The system introduced in the Scottish parliament was, of course, designed largely by the parties which shared power at that time, and it is a system which empowers political parties as opposed to independent candidates. One of my concerns with this system is the “list”, where a party has a lost of candidates who can be elected without ever being explicitly voted for.
It’s a crap system designed to favour the incumbents, and any UK-wide system would similarly be designed by, and voted on, by the incumbents (even if it went to a referendum, the options would be pre-selected).
I prefer PR to the U.K. system, apart from one issue and that is that the urban vote would be far more powerful than the rural vote.
I personally think we need to come up with a better system and start thinking outside the box.
Should we do away with party politics and have participatory democracy with MPs having to vote according to the wishes of their constituents? Should we have PR within constituencies, each constituency for instance having 5 MPs (with larger constituencies).
Referenda?
Who can vote?
The UK is not the world’s oldest democracy for no little reason. People say, ‘we should be more like Europe and get rid of FPTP!’. But Europe is mired in stagnation and fruitless coalitions who compromise everything they were initially advocating. UK’s FPTP may not be perfect, but it occasionally allows for strong government to implement profound change when the nation needs it most.
In a democracy profound change would be put to a referendum. The converse of PR is disproportional representation i.e. misrepresentation. The Greeks invented democracy but perhaps had good reasons for abandoning it.