A letter to my Tory friends about PR
Dear Tory friends,
you might not normally listen to what I’ve got to say, given that I’m a liberal and so on, but I have something to say to you about proportional representation.
You want to keep first-past-the-post, because you think it’s the best chance for you to form a government once in a while.
You might have heard about Blair’s idea that PR would lead to a “progressive century”. This is based on the idea that Labour and the LibDems normally get a majority of the votes together, so logically they should always get a majority together under PR.
It’s nonsense, though.
If that was the case, most European countries would have a permanent government, but that doesn’t happen anywhere. In all democratic countries, power sometimes changes hands.
Perhaps that will require another right-of-centre party to emerge that can attract voters from the left-of-centre parties. Perhaps the the left-of-centre government will just screw up so badly that a majority of the population will start supporting the Conservatives.
The main thing is that PR will not keep either side out of power permanently.
Of course the frequency of Tory governments might change, but which party is it that FPTP actually is favouring?
Labour.
At the moment, Labour can get a majority in parliament with about 30% of the votes, while the Tories need close to 40%.
As an aside, let me point out that most observers would say that sociologically Britain is not less conservative than Denmark, which had right-of-centre governments from 1982 to 1993, and again from 2001. Surely that’s better than what the Tories achieved here under FPTP?
Also, remember that there are different versions of PR. Some of them would favour Labour slightly, others the LibDems, and still others the Tories. You are in a strong position to choose which one.
I hope this will make you reconsider your opposition to PR.
All the best,
your friend
Why are the Tories so keen on FPTP?
In the UK, the LibDems want to introduce STV (which they argue is the best form of proportional representation – I’d prefer the Danish system), and Labour have recently decided to support AV; however, the Tories remain committed to FPTP (although they want to reduce the number of constituencies by 10%, which they probably think will help them).
I’m a bit puzzled, though.
The current system is helping Labour at the expense of both the Tories and the LibDems (although it hurts the latter much more, of course).
In other words, the current system is making it almost impossible for the Tories to get a decent majority.
Is it just because they remember the 1980s so fondly that they can’t imagine never getting a decade of unrestricted power again?
Realistically, the rise of the three-party system means that’s very unlikely.
If they really think single-party majority government is so superior, shouldn’t they aim to introduce an electoral system that gives 350 seats to the largest party, 250 to the second-largest one, 50 to the third one, and none to any other parties, even if their share of the vote were 33%, 32% and 31%, respectively? 
Back to reality: If the Tories agreed to proper proportional representation, it’s likely that a coalition of centre-right parties would get a majority in parliament quite often, probably more often than the number of times they can expect to get a workable majority under FPTP.
So it really won’t be that painful, and wouldn’t it be nice never to see a Labour majority in Westminster again?
Vote Match
Filed under: Denmark, Europe, Lib, SNP, Scotland, election, independence, referendum
In Denmark, websites that calculate which parties you agree the most with have been a regular feature of election campaigns for a decade.
However, they have been missing in the UK (to some extent because they make less sense under first-past-the-post), but now there’s finally one on The Telegraph’s site: Vote Match.
I tried it out, and it gave me roughly the results I expected (see the graph on the right).
The UKIP are much further up than I expected, and I had expected the LibDems and the SNP to be neck-and-neck, but then I do disagree with certain LibDem policies (such as Scottish independence and a referendum on EU membership).
Do try it out, and if you’re brave enough, publish your results in the comments section!
30 days to blog
I’ve been blogging for almost four years now, so I’ve had the chance to write about Scottish, Danish, European and local elections.
However, the previous general election happened æons ago, back in 2005, so today’s announcement that the next one will be on 6 May is a welcome opportunity to influence the composition of Westminster through blogging, too.
All the speeches made today were fairly predictable, so let’s kick off the election campaign with an old political broadcast starring John Cleese:
The Republican Waterloo
Ever since the Democrats managed to enact the big American health reform, I’ve been wondering why the Republicans have been so vociferous in their opposition.
It’s not like it’s a very radical reform – it doesn’t even get close to creating a public health system like the UK’s NHS and Denmark’s similar institution.
I finally found a Republican blog posting that made it all click into place for me.
Do read the whole thing, but here’s a few paragraphs to whet your appetite:
At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994. [...]
This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none. [...]
[W]e do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994. [...]
We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat. There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible.
A better way to elect the UK parliament
Filed under: Cons, Denmark, England, Germany, Lab, Lib, ROI, SNP, Scotland, election, psephology
When people in the UK discuss alternatives to the current electoral system used for Westminster (first-past-the-post), they tend to look towards Ireland, Australia or possibly Germany, but never Scandinavia.
However, the system used there has many advantages, and indeed people there just take it for granted, so it must have got something right!
To make the Danish electoral system tangible, I have therefore made a simulation of the UK General Election 2005 according to the Danish system. (It’s quite long, so feel free to skip down to the results instead of reading all the details.)
Here are some of the advantages of the Danish system:
- Every vote counts. Even if your vote doesn’t get anybody elected where you live, it will count towards your party elsewhere in the country. This combats the way parties under FPTP tend to concentrate all their efforts on swing voters in marginal seats.
- The politicians need to get themselves elected, not just their party. A politician will typically be up against at least ten other candidates from their own party, and it is therefore important to have a personal agenda, not just to toe the party line.
- Need to be positive. When all votes count, if party A claims party B are evil, it might benefit party C or D just as easily as party A. So instead, party A needs to give the voters reasons to vote for them.
- It preserves some sort of constituency link. Given that it’s still the constituencies that put up candidates, and given that MPs are elected in small groups of constituencies, there is still a very strong local link, and it’s easy to understand how to get rid of a bad MP.
- Results are available quickly. Like FPTP, but unlike STV, results come in quickly, thus providing for a good election night experience.
- Opinion polls are right. Under FPTP, there is no simple correlation between share of the vote and number of seats won, so a party can lose votes but gain seats and vice versa. Under the Danish system, more votes leads to more seats, and opinion polls will therefore accurately predict how many MPs each party will get.
- Parties become truly national. Under FPTP, most parties tend to get most of their MPs elected in specific geographical areas (LibDems in the South West, Labour in the cities, the Tories in rural England). The Danish system spreads out the MPs more evenly, so that the LibDems will get fewer seats in the South West but more in the cities and rural England, Labour will get fewer seats in the cities but more elsewhere, etc. (This is not taken to extremes. The SNP only gets seats in Scotland – it’s not artificially extended to England.)
SPD, Labour etc.
Filed under: Cons, Denmark, Europe, Germany, Lab, Lib, election
They story being reported everywhere at the moment is that the CDU/CSU have won the elections together with the FDP and will now be able to govern Germany in a so-called black-yellow coalition.
Slightly more sophisticated reports might point out that the CDU results were mostly static, and that the gains were almost entirely made by the liberal FDP.
However, in my view the big story is the collapse of the SPD. They have lost a third of their support, going from 222 seats to 146 (the results are not final yet).
All other parties have gained: CDU/CSU (13 more seats), the Greens (17), the Left party (22) and FDP (32).
This seems to be very similar to what’s going to happen in the UK soon.
Labour’s support is plummeting, and the Tories seem to be gaining mainly by default, simply by not being Labour, with the LibDems staying where they are.
Something similar could be seen at the recent European elections, which just demonstrates that the collapse of the social-democratic parties is a Europe-wide phenomenon.
The way I see it, these parties in most countries tried to move to the right because they could see their voters were becoming wealthier and thus more right-wing, and this worked like a treat for a while.
Gradually, however, voters became disenchanted with these parties that seem to believe in one thing but to do the opposite, with parties both to the left and the right making gains.
The first-past-the-post system in the UK means that there is no party to the left of Labour to hoover up unhappy Labour voters, so instead turnout is falling, with all other parties profiting because their voters now make up a larger share of a smaller pot of votes.
In most other countries, parties on the left are gaining, such as die Linke in Germany and SF in Denmark.
It will be interesting to see over the next decade whether Labour, SPD and their sister parties throughout Europe will find a new raison d’être, or whether they will be reduced to smaller, less significant parties, like the liberal parties (the LibDems, FDP etc.) during the second half of the 20th century.
Married, but not allowed to live together
When the current Danish government got into power in 2002, one of their first actions was to introduce the so-called 24-year rule, which means you can’t bring your lawfully wedded husband or wife to Denmark from outside the EU if you’re younger than 24.
Although theoretically introduced to reduce the number of forced marriages, it has had lots of negative consequences for young married couples that actually are in love.
It seems that the UK has now introduced something similar, only with a limit of 21 years instead, and as the article shows, this is already having disastrous consequences, in this case for a Welsh-Canadian couple.
However, the EU can help such couples to a certain extent:
But Adam and Rochelle do have one chance – they can move to any other European Union country and they will be allowed to live together as man and wife and get work.The only place they cannot is Adam’s home – Britain.
“It’s insane”, he says. “We can go anywhere except my home country, where we got married, and where they gave us permission to get married.”
Danish couples are doing this, too, typically by moving across the Øresund to Sweden.
Will young British couples now start to emigrate to Ireland?
Is the Scandinavian model restricted to Scandinavia?
Charlemagne is quoting Johan Norberg for wondering whether the Swedish model is restricted to Sweden: “If countries don’t already have a tradition of an efficient, non-corrupt bureaucracy with an impressive work ethic a larger government only means more abuse of power and more waste of money. I often try to convince Americans, no, more government in the US would not get you a big version of Sweden, it would get you a big version of the US Postal Service.“
It’s an interesting point, and I think it’s at least partly true.
I do think Sweden in this context can be replaced by a much larger area, at the very least Scandinavia and parts of Germany, but living in Scotland, I can see that many things are just not working because of different attitudes.
For instance, buses are regularly late, but people just shrug their shoulders and use their car the next time. In Denmark, people would be very upset and it would eventually become a priority for the government to sort out.
What to vote on Thursday
Forget Westminster!
The election to the European Parliament on Thursday is a very bad opportunity to teach Gordon Brown and the other national politicians a lesson.
It used to be the case that the European Parliament had very little influence, but that’s not the case any more (even if the British media are notoriously bad at reporting what happens there).
Don’t even think about which parties you like best in the UK. The British political parties are members of bigger EU-wide parties, and the MEPs tend to vote with their European party most of the time, not with their national party.
So which parties are represented in the European Parliament?
The 785 MEPs are members of the following parties/groups:
| Party | MEPs | UK members |
|---|---|---|
| EPP-ED | 284 | (Conservatives) |
| PES | 215 | Labour |
| ALDE | 103 | LibDems |
| UEN | 44 | – |
| Greens/EFA | 42 | SNP + PC + Green Party |
| EUL/NGL | 41 | Sinn Féin |
| ID | 24 | UKIP |
| Others | 32 | Kilroy-Silk et al. |
So on the whole, there is a one-to-one correspondence between European and UK parties.
However, the SNP and Plaid Cymru are in the same group as the Green Party, so if you’re planning to vote SNP, you might as well vote Green and vice versa.
Also, there is no way to vote for UEN (“Union for Europe of the Nations”), a right-wing nationalist group including parties such as Italy’s Lega Nord, Denmark’s Dansk Folkeparti and Poland’s Law and Justice.
More importantly, the Tories have confirmed they’re going to leave the EPP-ED and try to form a new European group. This means there’s no way for British voters to vote for the centre-right European People’s Party, currently the largest (and arguably most important) party in the European Parliament.
I hope the EPP will adopt a minor British party soon to enable British voters to vote EPP if they so wish.
Personally, I’m going to vote for ALDE, which is a rather nice liberal party, although some of its members are liberal parties quite a bit to the right of the LibDems.
The Greens/EFA also tend to have reasonable opinions, so they would have been my second choice, but the d’Hondt method used for the European elections only allows you to vote for one party.