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The government is right to junk Supplementary Vote – it’s the worst of all worlds – politicalbetting

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  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,456
    kinabalu said:

    Floater said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Breaking news:

    Welsh supermarket shoppers can now buy Barbara Cartland novels.

    A nation rejoices .... or not
    Heard Drakeford speaking the other day. Very impressed with his nuanced and intelligent use of language.
    Drakeford is universally disliked. He closed the pubs (as a teetotaller himself) whilst Johnson (and the Conservatives) invented, procured and vaccinated the population. Very much the view on the ground. May is going to see Tories with most seats.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,739
    Endillion said:

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    This is the difference between political philosophy and how people actually think in a nutshell, and why the former rarely survives contact with reality: most people don't actually derive any satisfaction from having voted for a party to spend five years in pointless opposition. All they know is they lost, and it'll be years before they have another chance to vote for a party that will have a chance of enacting an agenda they care about.
    That's a separate point to the one I'm making - that the voting public should be thought of as being represented not divided into winners and losers. But in any case I don't agree with you that people think as you describe. The real partisans, yes, but most people are not 100% pro one platform and 100% anti the others. So if the party they voted for loses, they don't get too down about it. They shrug and get on with their life.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071
    Endillion said:

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    No, democracy is about winners and losers. The winners become the representatives, the losers don't.

    You can have other means of picking representatives. Like party apparatchiks picking people who are sound and putting them into the legislature, like China does, but that's not democracy.
    I really dislike how you approach this subject. You completely disregard any valid criticism of FPTP and instead revert to ridiculous comparisons with China and other totalitarian regimes.

    Your interpretation of what democracy is not necessary the same as other people's. That doesn't mean they are wrong.
    I wasn't responding to "any valid criticism" though, I was responding to the absurd and ridiculous notion that it is "not about winners and losers".

    Every single voting system in the world is about winners and losers. The concept of winners and losers is a fundamental part of democracy. How you determine who the winner is varies depending upon the system, but the concept of winners and losers is not unique to FPTP it is a fundamental part of democracy itself.

    If the critics of FPTP actually used any "valid criticism" and didn't leap to absurd arguments then it wouldn't be necessary to show why the absurd is absurd.
    But you always miss the point, deliberately might I add.

    Let's take Israel.

    In Israel my vote directly influences the amount of seats a party gets in their parliament regardless of whether my party "wins" or "loses".

    It's not about "winners" and "losers". It's about the amount of representation.

    You view a General Election as being about one thing only - who the government is. If you view a GE like that, then FPTP is a pretty good system and the degree of representation is immaterial.

    However if you view a General Election about being representation in a legislature, it is hard to justify that a 30% vote share can result in a majority. It's hard to justify how a party who receives a 30% vote share can be seen as a "winner".

    Like I said, there's plenty of factors in favour of FPTP but there are obvious downsides that must be acknowledged.
    I don't think you can fairly say that sentence I've bolded above, and then argue for PR, which will typically, almost at random, create "winners" and "losers" among parties with much smaller vote shares than 30%, based solely on which numbers happen to add up to 50.1%+.
    British people are obsessed with there having to be a "winner" and a "loser".

    You can elect a legislature without thinking about "winners" and "losers". The formation of a government can be separated from that action.

    If a coalition government represents the votes of more than 50% of people, those parties are not "winners", they are simply in government.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    No, democracy is about winners and losers. The winners become the representatives, the losers don't.

    You can have other means of picking representatives. Like party apparatchiks picking people who are sound and putting them into the legislature, like China does, but that's not democracy.
    I really dislike how you approach this subject. You completely disregard any valid criticism of FPTP and instead revert to ridiculous comparisons with China and other totalitarian regimes.

    Your interpretation of what democracy is not necessary the same as other people's. That doesn't mean they are wrong.
    I wasn't responding to "any valid criticism" though, I was responding to the absurd and ridiculous notion that it is "not about winners and losers".

    Every single voting system in the world is about winners and losers. The concept of winners and losers is a fundamental part of democracy. How you determine who the winner is varies depending upon the system, but the concept of winners and losers is not unique to FPTP it is a fundamental part of democracy itself.

    If the critics of FPTP actually used any "valid criticism" and didn't leap to absurd arguments then it wouldn't be necessary to show why the absurd is absurd.
    But you always miss the point, deliberately might I add.

    Let's take Israel.

    In Israel my vote directly influences the amount of seats a party gets in their parliament regardless of whether my party "wins" or "loses".

    It's not about "winners" and "losers". It's about the amount of representation.

    You view a General Election as being about one thing only - who the government is. If you view a GE like that, then FPTP is a pretty good system and the degree of representation is immaterial.

    However if you view a General Election about being representation in a legislature, it is hard to justify that a 30% vote share can result in a majority. It's hard to justify how a party who receives a 30% vote share can be seen as a "winner".

    Like I said, there's plenty of factors in favour of FPTP but there are obvious downsides that must be acknowledged.
    No, there's no difference. In Israel there are still winners and losers.

    Voters in Israel who voted for the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, or the Pirate Party, or Liberal-Economic Power party, or the Women's Voice party and many other parties ended up without any representatives at all. Even with their extreme form of PR.

    There must always in any form of representative democracy be a point where people win, and people people lose. That's the whole point of voting.

    FPTP is not only about simply forming the government. If you think that you have misunderstood the point of FPTP entirely.

    Most importantly with FPTP you also ensure every single locale, every single constituency in the country, every single person in the country has a single MP representing that area. You don't get that in Israel. Can you pick a postcode in Israel and say "this MK represents this area"?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 45,700

    kinabalu said:

    Floater said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Breaking news:

    Welsh supermarket shoppers can now buy Barbara Cartland novels.

    A nation rejoices .... or not
    Heard Drakeford speaking the other day. Very impressed with his nuanced and intelligent use of language.
    Drakeford is universally disliked. He closed the pubs (as a teetotaller himself) whilst Johnson (and the Conservatives) invented, procured and vaccinated the population. Very much the view on the ground. May is going to see Tories with most seats.
    He's a teetotaller? Never knew that. Makes a lot of sense

    There is a puritan edge to governance in Wales. Puritanism, as in: "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy"
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071
    edited March 2021
    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?
  • kinabalu said:

    Floater said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Breaking news:

    Welsh supermarket shoppers can now buy Barbara Cartland novels.

    A nation rejoices .... or not
    Heard Drakeford speaking the other day. Very impressed with his nuanced and intelligent use of language.
    Drakeford is universally disliked. He closed the pubs (as a teetotaller himself) whilst Johnson (and the Conservatives) invented, procured and vaccinated the population. Very much the view on the ground. May is going to see Tories with most seats.
    And he wants to continue restrictions into 2022
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071

    Most importantly with FPTP you also ensure every single locale, every single constituency in the country, every single person in the country has a single MP representing that area. You don't get that in Israel. Can you pick a postcode in Israel and say "this MK represents this area"?

    No you can't. I've already acknowledged that that is a key strength of First Past the Post.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,259

    kinabalu said:

    Floater said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Breaking news:

    Welsh supermarket shoppers can now buy Barbara Cartland novels.

    A nation rejoices .... or not
    Heard Drakeford speaking the other day. Very impressed with his nuanced and intelligent use of language.
    Drakeford is universally disliked. He closed the pubs (as a teetotaller himself) whilst Johnson (and the Conservatives) invented, procured and vaccinated the population. Very much the view on the ground. May is going to see Tories with most seats.
    Why am I not surprised that Drakeford is a teetotaller.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    All 650 of those MPs.

    In a General Election there are 650 winners, not one winner. Jeremy Corbyn was a winner in 2019, he won his seat. Every single constituency is represented by its winner.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited March 2021
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Andy_JS said:
    Meyer has said nothing pro-Orban. he's pointing out the EU has reduced itself to Orban's level. Rachman showing a touch of Strasbourg Syndrome there
    Mary Riddell has a worse case.
    https://twitter.com/maryriddell/status/1373914075692929025?s=21
    There is a real danger here for hardcore Remoaners - ie the 5-10% who are still "backing" the EU over Britain, blaming us not Brussels, hoping our grannies die to save the career of President Macron, and so forth.

    At some point the outraged public will turn on THEM, if they keep this up. Someone like Riddell should just STFU
    I love the description by the BBC as this being a UK / EU row...its like saying the victim of an unprovoked street attack was involved in an altercation.
  • Time_to_LeaveTime_to_Leave Posts: 2,547
    HYUFD said:

    Basically, if you support a large standing army in 2021, you’re more interested in parades than military effectiveness. This review looks eminently sensible to me.

    Will we be able to hold and contest ground against insurgents as in Iraq or Afghanistan? No. Do we want to? Also no.

    Our interests are served by being able to strike hard and fast against threats, not hold ground in someone else’s country and try to westernise it.

    Afghanistan is a good example actually - in retrospect we’d have been far better off with a simple mission of denying a safe space to terrorists via death from above and SF, but leaving the governance of Afghanistan to the Afghans.

    It was only by invading Afghanistan we were able to force Al Qaeda from the country into Pakistan where US special forces were able to kill Bin Laden, it was not drones that killed him.

    The governance of Afghanistan is now made up of democratically elected Afghans
    Erm, no. The governance of Afghanistan is made up of notionally elected afghans, which will last about 30 seconds after NATO forces pull out. We could have pursued Bin Laden without getting distracted by governance.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    All 650 of those MPs.

    In a General Election there are 650 winners, not one winner. Jeremy Corbyn was a winner in 2019, he won his seat. Every single constituency is represented by its winner.
    Exactly.

    The election was about allocating seats in Parliament and not about who formed the Government.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,602
    Charles said:

    I think there are plenty of reasons to support FPTP but it does it a disservice when its supporters use half-truths to justify it.

    The fact is that the main benefits of FPTP are the singular local MP and the tendency to produce "strong" government.

    It all comes down to whether you believe those benefits outweigh the democratic costs.

    If you do, fair enough.

    But to pretend there's no downsides to FPTP at all? Come on.

    I don’t believe there is a democratic cost. After all this is a community selecting a representative not trying to reflect the percentage score someone got in an opinion poll
    That would be fine if MPs could act as a representative of their community instead of being lobby fodder and rosette-wearing donkeys.

    Given what we've seen of the reality of the strength of the party system, with Johnson's deselection of internal opponents, then we would be best placed to either weaken the party system (if possible) or choose a different voting system better suited to strong centralised parties.

    One advantage of STV is that it gives a better chance to internal party dissidents excised by their leadership, so it not only better represents the party-dominant nature of our democracy, but also acts to weaken it slightly.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 11,144
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Andy_JS said:
    Meyer has said nothing pro-Orban. he's pointing out the EU has reduced itself to Orban's level. Rachman showing a touch of Strasbourg Syndrome there
    Mary Riddell has a worse case.
    https://twitter.com/maryriddell/status/1373914075692929025?s=21
    There is a real danger here for hardcore Remoaners - ie the 5-10% who are still "backing" the EU over Britain, blaming us not Brussels, hoping our grannies die to save the career of President Macron, and so forth.

    At some point the outraged public will turn on THEM, if they keep this up. Someone like Riddell should just STFU
    At work this morning there was an (online, natch) conversation about the census - one of my teammates asked if anyone else did as he did and put 'European' as nationality. There was no response. I'm slightly curious about this - presumably from the fact he has made this comment he is pretty confident the rest of us share his Europhilia, despite the current situation. (It's a public sector organisation). Maybe he is right.
  • SlackbladderSlackbladder Posts: 9,703

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,952
    kinabalu said:

    Endillion said:

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    This is the difference between political philosophy and how people actually think in a nutshell, and why the former rarely survives contact with reality: most people don't actually derive any satisfaction from having voted for a party to spend five years in pointless opposition. All they know is they lost, and it'll be years before they have another chance to vote for a party that will have a chance of enacting an agenda they care about.
    That's a separate point to the one I'm making - that the voting public should be thought of as being represented not divided into winners and losers. But in any case I don't agree with you that people think as you describe. The real partisans, yes, but most people are not 100% pro one platform and 100% anti the others. So if the party they voted for loses, they don't get too down about it. They shrug and get on with their life.
    I'm not sure that's the case - the EU referendum was an interesting example where millions of people who'd previously been moderates suddenly turned into raving partisans for whichever side they'd eventually come down for, simply because it dominated the news cycle for years afterwards. I would rather say that who's in power in Westminster doesn't actually matter to most people on a day-to-day basis, so it drops out of the front of their minds. In the immediate aftermath, I would expect they'd view "their" party as having "won" or "lost". It's just how people perceive things.

    Anyway, all you're saying is that those people don't care about representation, or about who wins. Which raises the question as to why we should restructure our democracy to better represent them, when clearly most people won't care?
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071
    Charles said:

    IanB2 said:

    Charles said:

    Charles said:

    Barnesian said:

    IanB2 said:

    An unusually silly lead from Herdson. Yes, the way SV limits second preferences is flawed, but having a second preference is better than none, and ensures both that fewer votes are wasted and that the winner has the support of at least half of the voters, which FPTnP doesn’t do. His suggestions that votes aren’t wasted under our current system is absurd. Indeed every flaw he seeks to call out under SV is worse when there is no second choice at all.

    Agreed. More votes are wasted in FPTP. So a nonsensical argument.
    But I also agree with David that this is a distraction from more important issues.
    People who aren’t the first choice prefer a system that gives them another chance
    Of course in FPTP the “winner” is usually the first choice of only a minority.
    Sure. The chosen representative of the local community. Not the lowest common denominator
    Tactical voting says hello
    Which is, in my view, a betrayal of your neighbours rights to select the representative that the community wants. I think it is disgraceful and have said so multiple tones before (usually when OGH gloats about how he is going to help elect lots of LibDem MPs by trading his sacred duty).
    Everybody votes tactically in a UK general election. The nature of the beast is that we all have to vote for parties we least hate rather who we actually want.

    To deny that is just dishonest.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 45,700
    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Andy_JS said:
    Meyer has said nothing pro-Orban. he's pointing out the EU has reduced itself to Orban's level. Rachman showing a touch of Strasbourg Syndrome there
    Mary Riddell has a worse case.
    https://twitter.com/maryriddell/status/1373914075692929025?s=21
    There is a real danger here for hardcore Remoaners - ie the 5-10% who are still "backing" the EU over Britain, blaming us not Brussels, hoping our grannies die to save the career of President Macron, and so forth.

    At some point the outraged public will turn on THEM, if they keep this up. Someone like Riddell should just STFU
    At work this morning there was an (online, natch) conversation about the census - one of my teammates asked if anyone else did as he did and put 'European' as nationality. There was no response. I'm slightly curious about this - presumably from the fact he has made this comment he is pretty confident the rest of us share his Europhilia, despite the current situation. (It's a public sector organisation). Maybe he is right.
    I doubt it greatly. But who knows? Need polling.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,600
    edited March 2021
    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    Basically, if you support a large standing army in 2021, you’re more interested in parades than military effectiveness. This review looks eminently sensible to me.

    Will we be able to hold and contest ground against insurgents as in Iraq or Afghanistan? No. Do we want to? Also no.

    Our interests are served by being able to strike hard and fast against threats, not hold ground in someone else’s country and try to westernise it.

    Afghanistan is a good example actually - in retrospect we’d have been far better off with a simple mission of denying a safe space to terrorists via death from above and SF, but leaving the governance of Afghanistan to the Afghans.

    It was only by invading Afghanistan we were able to force Al Qaeda from the country into Pakistan where US special forces were able to kill Bin Laden, it was not drones that killed him.

    The governance of Afghanistan is now made up of democratically elected Afghans
    Yes but now - or very soon, in five or ten years - we will be able to send in robots and drones to do a BETTER job than soldiers on the ground. A soldier is absurdly vulnerable, to capture, torture, injury, death - and weariness, sadness, anomie, human error - and if you lose too many men the public at home want the war to end

    The public won't care if you lose 10,000 weaponised digidogs a day (which you won't). That means a war can be fought relentlessly and endlessly, the only limit is money and industrial capacity
    Soldiers need to know the area, get to know the people on the ground and win hearts and minds too.

    Drones alone just means you blow up a target, often at risk of hitting civilians as well and lead to more resentment, you also cannot build a peacekeeping force purely through drones, contain Putin or protect the Falklands
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    All 650 of those MPs.

    In a General Election there are 650 winners, not one winner. Jeremy Corbyn was a winner in 2019, he won his seat. Every single constituency is represented by its winner.
    Exactly.

    The election was about allocating seats in Parliament and not about who formed the Government.
    I never said otherwise, did I?

    Though its a bit about both, as people vote to allocate the seats depending upon who they want to form the Government, but how people choose to vote is up to them.
  • alednamalednam Posts: 185
    Suppose you're confident that only 2 of the candidates has any chance of winning (might be Con and Lab). Your own top preference is for someone other than one of these 2 (might be Green), although between these 2 you have a definite preference. You can show your support for your top candidate by putting them first (affecting the % vote they get), meanwhile putting as your 2nd preference the one of the 2 that has a chance of winning that you prefer. This is what SV enables you to do.
    If we're talking London Mayoralty, then we know (a) that it's always effectively been that the winner will be one of just two, (b) that most of the electorate have no views about most of the candidates. AV is of no use to them.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    DavidL said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Blimey just noticed that the Army is likely to be reduced by 10,000 from the current 70,000. I note we're already between Ethiopia and Bangladesh in size of active forces.

    Now, more than ever, we need those on PB who have yearnings in that direction, indeed have displayed strategic aptitude in terms of likely campaigns, to sign up. We simply can't allow the country to be at such risk.

    You know who you are.

    I thought it was to 70,000?
    Ah yes. Soz. To 70,000. Still low.
    When I was a lad in Fallingbostel in the early 1970s we had over 50k troops in Germany alone and more than 20k in NI.

    As you will appreciate better than most our army is now too small to carry out any meaningful task for any extended period of time. We simply could not do what we did in Afghanistan for such an extended period for example. No doubt tech, specifically drones, will make absolute numbers less critical but there comes a point when what you have is a home defence force, not an army. I think that's where we are.
    Didn't the recent Armenian-Azeri war show that troops and tanks are virtually defenceless against well organised drones and missiles? That is the future. Large armies are finished. Analogue military in a world of digital wars.

    The same will soon be true of large aircraft carriers. Ooops
    We still need troops for UN peacekeeping and NATO operations and special forces in particular for counter terrorism operations.

    We need submarines to launch missiles and drones and aircraft carriers to launch airstrikes and also in the event, however unlikely, we needed to recapture the Falklands again. We also need to ensure we continue to have a larger army than Argentina on that basis too
    We're not far from the moment when all the fighting will be done by robots and drones, remotely operated or self drive tanks, everything. It makes obvious sense, why risk a human life when a computer in a robot can do the job, and do it better?

    Unless civilisation collapses and the technology disappears it is likely there will never again be a large army sent to conquer a foreign land, by a major power. Except maybe China retaking Taiwan, but even there I wonder if they would bother with troops and landing ships and all that antiquated malarkey. A few hypersonic missiles, jam Taiwan's internet, retake the place without a boot on the ground. Sorted
    Yet, I'm sceptical how effective any of that would be against insurgents who are willing to take any level of casualties in order to win. A belief that superior equipment can - on its own - win wars, has not proved well-founded.
    Normalcy bias

    Warfare is like science, it doesn't change for ages, and then, suddenly, there is a massive paradigm shift and everything changes very quickly

    https://twitter.com/eha_news/status/1372298354760224771?s=20

    https://twitter.com/mrtrsyns/status/1371579158556516355?s=20
    It's worth remembering that this kind of thing has actually been around for quite a while

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBU-97_Sensor_Fuzed_Weapon

    IIRC they were used to wipe out the vehicles of most of am Iraqi division in a a minute or 2.
    Here's some classified footage from Afghan on the latest technology and its applications.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mymTX-psg5c
    Not a great believer in the technology can win wars on its own viewpoint. Yes, when there is huge asymmetrical access to the technology AND there is limited will to fight on the other side, it can do the job. But Special Forces still train in hand-to-hand combat and knife skills for good reason, despite gunpowder and shot having been around for centuries.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,692
    RobD said:

    The froth coming off No, it always looked fleeting and was born of The Sturge being on the telly interrogated day after day about an issue nobody understands.
    There are no changes since this pollster apparently hasn't asked this question previously, so the direction is unclear.
    The pollster has asked the question four times previously, all of them showing a lead for no.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,259
    The majority of German pollsters now have the CDU/CSU below 30%.

    https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,739

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    No, democracy is about winners and losers. The winners become the representatives, the losers don't.
    The parties can win or lose but not the voters. The voters get representation. If you vote for a party that gets the most votes, you have not "won". And if the party you vote for doesn't get the most votes, you have not "lost". This is key.
    Every single person in this country has a representative. Give me a postcode and you can lookup that person's representative.

    In each constituency the winner is the candidate with the most votes. The loser is every other candidate. The winner is elected, the losers are not, but the representative represents all constituents not just those who voted for them.
    They have a local MP. Good - because, as I say, democracy is not about members of the voting public losing or winning, it's about them being represented. But a problem with FPTP, if that's what you're talking about, is you can have a party attracting a big national vote but getting zero representation in seats. In which case, yes, everyone who voted for it is sort of represented, by the local MP, so are people who didn't vote at all, but aggregated up it can be a bit of a nonsense.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 11,144

    Charles said:

    I think there are plenty of reasons to support FPTP but it does it a disservice when its supporters use half-truths to justify it.

    The fact is that the main benefits of FPTP are the singular local MP and the tendency to produce "strong" government.

    It all comes down to whether you believe those benefits outweigh the democratic costs.

    If you do, fair enough.

    But to pretend there's no downsides to FPTP at all? Come on.

    I don’t believe there is a democratic cost. After all this is a community selecting a representative not trying to reflect the percentage score someone got in an opinion poll
    That would be fine if MPs could act as a representative of their community instead of being lobby fodder and rosette-wearing donkeys.

    Given what we've seen of the reality of the strength of the party system, with Johnson's deselection of internal opponents, then we would be best placed to either weaken the party system (if possible) or choose a different voting system better suited to strong centralised parties.

    One advantage of STV is that it gives a better chance to internal party dissidents excised by their leadership, so it not only better represents the party-dominant nature of our democracy, but also acts to weaken it slightly.
    It would be interesting to know how the European question would have played out over the last 30 years if voters could have chosen not only between parties but between different flavours of member within those parties.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,168

    Endillion said:

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    No, democracy is about winners and losers. The winners become the representatives, the losers don't.

    You can have other means of picking representatives. Like party apparatchiks picking people who are sound and putting them into the legislature, like China does, but that's not democracy.
    I really dislike how you approach this subject. You completely disregard any valid criticism of FPTP and instead revert to ridiculous comparisons with China and other totalitarian regimes.

    Your interpretation of what democracy is not necessary the same as other people's. That doesn't mean they are wrong.
    I wasn't responding to "any valid criticism" though, I was responding to the absurd and ridiculous notion that it is "not about winners and losers".

    Every single voting system in the world is about winners and losers. The concept of winners and losers is a fundamental part of democracy. How you determine who the winner is varies depending upon the system, but the concept of winners and losers is not unique to FPTP it is a fundamental part of democracy itself.

    If the critics of FPTP actually used any "valid criticism" and didn't leap to absurd arguments then it wouldn't be necessary to show why the absurd is absurd.
    But you always miss the point, deliberately might I add.

    Let's take Israel.

    In Israel my vote directly influences the amount of seats a party gets in their parliament regardless of whether my party "wins" or "loses".

    It's not about "winners" and "losers". It's about the amount of representation.

    You view a General Election as being about one thing only - who the government is. If you view a GE like that, then FPTP is a pretty good system and the degree of representation is immaterial.

    However if you view a General Election about being representation in a legislature, it is hard to justify that a 30% vote share can result in a majority. It's hard to justify how a party who receives a 30% vote share can be seen as a "winner".

    Like I said, there's plenty of factors in favour of FPTP but there are obvious downsides that must be acknowledged.
    I don't think you can fairly say that sentence I've bolded above, and then argue for PR, which will typically, almost at random, create "winners" and "losers" among parties with much smaller vote shares than 30%, based solely on which numbers happen to add up to 50.1%+.
    British people are obsessed with there having to be a "winner" and a "loser".

    You can elect a legislature without thinking about "winners" and "losers". The formation of a government can be separated from that action.

    If a coalition government represents the votes of more than 50% of people, those parties are not "winners", they are simply in government.
    There's an article in the Atlantic about a similar debate the Founders had about representative democracy.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/whole-point-was-avoid-mob-violence/618312/
    ...In his farewell address, warning that the “spirit of party” might undermine the republic, George Washington noted that “it agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.”...

    I suspect some here ( @Charles , perhaps ?) might find themselves admirers of John Adams...

    ...Some Founders feared that ordinary citizens would never be able to govern their partisan passions with reason sufficiently to be capable of personal and political self-government. When John Adams read Adam Smith’s account in The Theory of Moral Sentiments of the “passion for distinction,” or the desire to be admired and approved of by others, he became despondent about whether leaders (including himself) could resist the lure of courting popularity with the mob. For that reason, Adams decried universal suffrage and came to conclude that all offices should be hereditary, writing to his son in 1795: “The Mob must ever be in the Power of Government—Government never in the Power of the Mob.”...

    I think the Founders fooled themselves that parties would not become inevitable in any democratic system. I do, however share their distaste for parties - not least as I've never really found one whose politics more than tangentially align with mine.
  • rkrkrkrkrkrk Posts: 7,863
    Charles said:

    I think there are plenty of reasons to support FPTP but it does it a disservice when its supporters use half-truths to justify it.

    The fact is that the main benefits of FPTP are the singular local MP and the tendency to produce "strong" government.

    It all comes down to whether you believe those benefits outweigh the democratic costs.

    If you do, fair enough.

    But to pretend there's no downsides to FPTP at all? Come on.

    I don’t believe there is a democratic cost. After all this is a community selecting a representative not trying to reflect the percentage score someone got in an opinion poll
    In some constituencies it's unclear who to vote for if you just want to get rid of the incumbent.
    That to me is a pretty clear drawback of FPTP.
  • GIN1138GIN1138 Posts: 20,673
    Sandpit said:

    Floater said:
    Awaits the headline that “Concerns about the AZ vaccine have NEARLY DOUBLED in GB”.
    HYUFD would probably say a majority of Brit's think AZ is unsafe in that poll ;)
  • maaarshmaaarsh Posts: 3,391
    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Andy_JS said:
    Meyer has said nothing pro-Orban. he's pointing out the EU has reduced itself to Orban's level. Rachman showing a touch of Strasbourg Syndrome there
    Mary Riddell has a worse case.
    https://twitter.com/maryriddell/status/1373914075692929025?s=21
    There is a real danger here for hardcore Remoaners - ie the 5-10% who are still "backing" the EU over Britain, blaming us not Brussels, hoping our grannies die to save the career of President Macron, and so forth.

    At some point the outraged public will turn on THEM, if they keep this up. Someone like Riddell should just STFU
    At work this morning there was an (online, natch) conversation about the census - one of my teammates asked if anyone else did as he did and put 'European' as nationality. There was no response. I'm slightly curious about this - presumably from the fact he has made this comment he is pretty confident the rest of us share his Europhilia, despite the current situation. (It's a public sector organisation). Maybe he is right.
    Pretty standard for people of that persuasion to not give a second thought to sharing their views at work with the unspoken assumption that their opinions are uncontrovertial so they needn't keep them to themselves. Quite irratating.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,952

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    They'd have to form a coalition of some kind to produce a PM candidate who can command the confidence of the Commons.

    So the winners would be whomever ends up in that coalition, and to a lesser extent (probably significantly lesser, in this somewhat reductive scenario), everyone who vote for those specific independents.

    By next election, they'd have formed parties of pre-agreed coalitions to prevent the same thing happening again.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,456

    kinabalu said:

    Floater said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Breaking news:

    Welsh supermarket shoppers can now buy Barbara Cartland novels.

    A nation rejoices .... or not
    Heard Drakeford speaking the other day. Very impressed with his nuanced and intelligent use of language.
    Drakeford is universally disliked. He closed the pubs (as a teetotaller himself) whilst Johnson (and the Conservatives) invented, procured and vaccinated the population. Very much the view on the ground. May is going to see Tories with most seats.
    And he wants to continue restrictions into 2022
    I suspect Boris might be continuing restrictions into 2022 too.
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,244
    edited March 2021
    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Andy_JS said:
    Meyer has said nothing pro-Orban. he's pointing out the EU has reduced itself to Orban's level. Rachman showing a touch of Strasbourg Syndrome there
    Mary Riddell has a worse case.
    https://twitter.com/maryriddell/status/1373914075692929025?s=21
    There is a real danger here for hardcore Remoaners - ie the 5-10% who are still "backing" the EU over Britain, blaming us not Brussels, hoping our grannies die to save the career of President Macron, and so forth.

    At some point the outraged public will turn on THEM, if they keep this up. Someone like Riddell should just STFU
    At work this morning there was an (online, natch) conversation about the census - one of my teammates asked if anyone else did as he did and put 'European' as nationality. There was no response. I'm slightly curious about this - presumably from the fact he has made this comment he is pretty confident the rest of us share his Europhilia, despite the current situation. (It's a public sector organisation). Maybe he is right.
    I did the same and know several people who did. It's more common than it used to be, as a reaction to Brexit.

    Leon overstates the case, of course. A realistic view is that the EU leadership have screwed up badly on this occasion and the UK approach, after a horrible start, is now turning out well - of course we're pleased as anyone sane would be and willing to give some credit to the leadership for it. Europhilia doesn't mean we hope our grannies die - you can feel part of a wider cultural identity and still recognise when its leadership screws up. I have no intention of STFU about it - we are still a free country and if Brexiteers don't like it, tant pis.

    Less provocatively, it's clearly a pity that relations between the UK and EU have deteriorated so badly - that has to be a bad thing for both sides since we live next door, and it's daft to think there will be winners from it, or that only one side is to blame. I do think the EU is to blame for the latest escalation, but if we'd not had so much anti-EU crap fostered by Brexit the underlying resentment wouldn't have arisen.
  • Time_to_LeaveTime_to_Leave Posts: 2,547
    edited March 2021
    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    Basically, if you support a large standing army in 2021, you’re more interested in parades than military effectiveness. This review looks eminently sensible to me.

    Will we be able to hold and contest ground against insurgents as in Iraq or Afghanistan? No. Do we want to? Also no.

    Our interests are served by being able to strike hard and fast against threats, not hold ground in someone else’s country and try to westernise it.

    Afghanistan is a good example actually - in retrospect we’d have been far better off with a simple mission of denying a safe space to terrorists via death from above and SF, but leaving the governance of Afghanistan to the Afghans.

    It was only by invading Afghanistan we were able to force Al Qaeda from the country into Pakistan where US special forces were able to kill Bin Laden, it was not drones that killed him.

    The governance of Afghanistan is now made up of democratically elected Afghans
    Yes but now - or very soon, in five or ten years - we will be able to send in robots and drones to do a BETTER job than soldiers on the ground. A soldier is absurdly vulnerable, to capture, torture, injury, death - and weariness, sadness, anomie, human error - and if you lose too many men the public at home want the war to end

    The public won't care if you lose 10,000 weaponised digidogs a day (which you won't). That means a war can be fought relentlessly and endlessly, the only limit is money and industrial capacity
    Soldiers need to know the area, get to know the people on the ground and win hearts and minds too.

    Drones alone just means you blow up a target, often at risk of hitting civilians as well and lead to more resentment, you also cannot build a peacekeeping force purely through drones, contain Putin or protect the Falklands
    The Falklands is now protected by a garrison, and in any case Argentina is in no state to invade (its armed forces are ancient a decrepit). In many ways the Falklands is a good example actually - the four typhoons present are pretty much enough to deter their entire airforce.

    As far as peacekeeping is concerned: the countries not capable of the high end stuff can do that, where it must be done.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,600
    Andy_JS said:

    The majority of German pollsters now have the CDU/CSU below 30%.

    https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/

    Yet more reason CSU leader Soder not CDU leader Laschet will be Union candidate
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,602
    Cookie said:

    Charles said:

    I think there are plenty of reasons to support FPTP but it does it a disservice when its supporters use half-truths to justify it.

    The fact is that the main benefits of FPTP are the singular local MP and the tendency to produce "strong" government.

    It all comes down to whether you believe those benefits outweigh the democratic costs.

    If you do, fair enough.

    But to pretend there's no downsides to FPTP at all? Come on.

    I don’t believe there is a democratic cost. After all this is a community selecting a representative not trying to reflect the percentage score someone got in an opinion poll
    That would be fine if MPs could act as a representative of their community instead of being lobby fodder and rosette-wearing donkeys.

    Given what we've seen of the reality of the strength of the party system, with Johnson's deselection of internal opponents, then we would be best placed to either weaken the party system (if possible) or choose a different voting system better suited to strong centralised parties.

    One advantage of STV is that it gives a better chance to internal party dissidents excised by their leadership, so it not only better represents the party-dominant nature of our democracy, but also acts to weaken it slightly.
    It would be interesting to know how the European question would have played out over the last 30 years if voters could have chosen not only between parties but between different flavours of member within those parties.
    Yes. I suspect that you would have seen a lot more Labour MPs who supported Brexit.

    I might disagree with the policy, but I can see that would have been a more accurate reflection of public opinion in the Commons.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,739

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    No, democracy is about winners and losers. The winners become the representatives, the losers don't.

    You can have other means of picking representatives. Like party apparatchiks picking people who are sound and putting them into the legislature, like China does, but that's not democracy.
    I really dislike how you approach this subject. You completely disregard any valid criticism of FPTP and instead revert to ridiculous comparisons with China and other totalitarian regimes.

    Your interpretation of what democracy is not necessary the same as other people's. That doesn't mean they are wrong.
    I wasn't responding to "any valid criticism" though, I was responding to the absurd and ridiculous notion that it is "not about winners and losers".

    Every single voting system in the world is about winners and losers. The concept of winners and losers is a fundamental part of democracy. How you determine who the winner is varies depending upon the system, but the concept of winners and losers is not unique to FPTP it is a fundamental part of democracy itself.

    If the critics of FPTP actually used any "valid criticism" and didn't leap to absurd arguments then it wouldn't be necessary to show why the absurd is absurd.
    No. Stop it. Not "winners and losers". That's football. This is democracy.

    Representation.
  • ChameleonChameleon Posts: 3,885
    On the whole voting system debate, for me the clear winner is the Irish system. To map it onto the UK you'd combine 3/4/5/6/7 current constituencies in logically consistent ways (e.g. Cornwall would be a 6 MP constituency), both one vote (with party lists a la EU elections) or STV with open choice would work well. Because I'm a dirty populist I'd also be tempted to only have 600 constituency seats, with an extra 50 handed out proportionally with the national vote (e.g. UKIP got 12.6% of the vote in 2015, so they'd have got 6 or 7 national MPs.

    Keeps local representation intact, yet is somewhat proportional.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,600
    edited March 2021

    RobD said:

    The froth coming off No, it always looked fleeting and was born of The Sturge being on the telly interrogated day after day about an issue nobody understands.
    There are no changes since this pollster apparently hasn't asked this question previously, so the direction is unclear.
    The pollster has asked the question four times previously, all of them showing a lead for no.
    They have not asked the question since 2017, all the polls show Yes under 50% including don't knows, most now show No ahead excluding them
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited March 2021
    Shocked I tell you, shocked....

    https://order-order.com/2021/03/22/billionaire-backed-tax-dodging-guardian-claims-200000-furlough-funding-from-taxpayers/

    Criticising companies / individuals, however rich, for using the government scheme to claim furlough to support staff is like criticising companies for employing reasonable measuring to right off genuine expenses against tax.

    I don't expect a rich person to personally support their staff for best part of a year when the government force their business to be shut, just because on paper they have lots of money (most of which will be tied up in their businesses).
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,259
    Chameleon said:

    On the whole voting system debate, for me the clear winner is the Irish system. To map it onto the UK you'd combine 3/4/5/6/7 current constituencies in logically consistent ways (e.g. Cornwall would be a 6 MP constituency), both one vote (with party lists a la EU elections) or STV with open choice would work well. Because I'm a dirty populist I'd also be tempted to only have 600 constituency seats, with an extra 50 handed out proportionally with the national vote (e.g. UKIP got 12.6% of the vote in 2015, so they'd have got 6 or 7 national MPs.

    Keeps local representation intact, yet is somewhat proportional.

    I agree that the Irish system is one of the best. The only problem is that if we implemented it in the UK we'd have about 2,000 members of parliament.
  • felixfelix Posts: 15,122
    Lunacy in Europe episode 555 - Spain will welcome German tourists over the Easter period while continuing to ban any internal travel to Spanish nationals. Cases in Spain are currently low. Caes in Germany are high.
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,147
    Chameleon said:

    On the whole voting system debate, for me the clear winner is the Irish system. To map it onto the UK you'd combine 3/4/5/6/7 current constituencies in logically consistent ways (e.g. Cornwall would be a 6 MP constituency), both one vote (with party lists a la EU elections) or STV with open choice would work well. Because I'm a dirty populist I'd also be tempted to only have 600 constituency seats, with an extra 50 handed out proportionally with the national vote (e.g. UKIP got 12.6% of the vote in 2015, so they'd have got 6 or 7 national MPs.

    Keeps local representation intact, yet is somewhat proportional.

    If we're going to have PR, let's have PR. A system that works against marmite parties is not on.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    No, democracy is about winners and losers. The winners become the representatives, the losers don't.

    You can have other means of picking representatives. Like party apparatchiks picking people who are sound and putting them into the legislature, like China does, but that's not democracy.
    I really dislike how you approach this subject. You completely disregard any valid criticism of FPTP and instead revert to ridiculous comparisons with China and other totalitarian regimes.

    Your interpretation of what democracy is not necessary the same as other people's. That doesn't mean they are wrong.
    I wasn't responding to "any valid criticism" though, I was responding to the absurd and ridiculous notion that it is "not about winners and losers".

    Every single voting system in the world is about winners and losers. The concept of winners and losers is a fundamental part of democracy. How you determine who the winner is varies depending upon the system, but the concept of winners and losers is not unique to FPTP it is a fundamental part of democracy itself.

    If the critics of FPTP actually used any "valid criticism" and didn't leap to absurd arguments then it wouldn't be necessary to show why the absurd is absurd.
    No. Stop it. Not "winners and losers". That's football. This is democracy.

    Representation.
    FPTP is ideal for representation: Every person in this country has one representative.

    No voter in the country has more or less than a single local representative.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    There's no point discussing this with you because you're living in your fantasy world where every voter rationally votes for a nice local resident to represent them in Westminster who then votes as they wish.

    However in reality most voters vote for the party they least dislike out of the Conservatives and Labour, who then vote as they are told with most not even attending debates.

    In theory FPTP is great. In reality it produces "winners" with minority vote shares. Like I said, maybe the benefits outweigh the negatives but the negatives are there.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 11,144
    Leon said:

    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Andy_JS said:
    Meyer has said nothing pro-Orban. he's pointing out the EU has reduced itself to Orban's level. Rachman showing a touch of Strasbourg Syndrome there
    Mary Riddell has a worse case.
    https://twitter.com/maryriddell/status/1373914075692929025?s=21
    There is a real danger here for hardcore Remoaners - ie the 5-10% who are still "backing" the EU over Britain, blaming us not Brussels, hoping our grannies die to save the career of President Macron, and so forth.

    At some point the outraged public will turn on THEM, if they keep this up. Someone like Riddell should just STFU
    At work this morning there was an (online, natch) conversation about the census - one of my teammates asked if anyone else did as he did and put 'European' as nationality. There was no response. I'm slightly curious about this - presumably from the fact he has made this comment he is pretty confident the rest of us share his Europhilia, despite the current situation. (It's a public sector organisation). Maybe he is right.
    I doubt it greatly. But who knows? Need polling.
    I doubt it too. But the confidence in the hardcore Europhiles that almost everyone agrees with them is remarkable.
    It is like the Naga Munchetty flag imbroglio; it wasn't so much the 'I find flags rather gauche' point of view which was remarkable - that's not a view which I'd criticise or find particularly surprising. But I do find surprising the apparent assumption that 'everyone finds flags rather gauche'. Similarly, I don't necessarily find it surprising that someone identifies as 'European' rather than British or English. But I do find it surprising that - even after the last three months - he would assume that everyone else would start from a position of EU = good, UK = bad.
  • sarissasarissa Posts: 1,735
    MattW said:

    malcolmg said:
    Contempt of court proceedings should be used when the actions of a person bring the standing of the judicial system into disrepute. Here, it is the actions of the use of contempt of court that is bringing the judicial system into disrepute. All to save the blushes of a lying politician.
    Jigsaw identification of complainants allegedly possible due to his blog-reports on the Salmond Trial.
    Action was taken at the instigation of the COPFS prosecution counsel, but identical transgressions by journalists, or even outright naming goes unpunished.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,788
    Wales continuing to get on with it

    14,417 7,099

    419k UK equivalent

    Previous high for Wales reporting on a Monday was 16,120 jabs last week.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,692
    HYUFD said:

    RobD said:

    The froth coming off No, it always looked fleeting and was born of The Sturge being on the telly interrogated day after day about an issue nobody understands.
    There are no changes since this pollster apparently hasn't asked this question previously, so the direction is unclear.
    The pollster has asked the question four times previously, all of them showing a lead for no.
    They have not asked the question since 2017, all the polls show Yes under 50% including don't knows, most now show No ahead excluding them
    Hey, I'm just correcting the statement that this pollster hasn't asked this question previously. I'm sure you wouldn't want people to be misled.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 17,938
    My illusions have been shattered.

    Our Defence Secretary looks like a Junior Manager from Dilbert.



  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited March 2021
    felix said:

    Lunacy in Europe episode 555 - Spain will welcome German tourists over the Easter period while continuing to ban any internal travel to Spanish nationals. Cases in Spain are currently low. Caes in Germany are high.

    Why are Germany allowing non-essential foreign travel? Crazy. In the first wave, they sensibly closed their borders.
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,952

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    This would only be true if there was some relationship between the views of each electorate, and the voting patterns of the MP they send to Parliament. While there might be in theory, in practice the MPs can basically do what they want 98% of the time.
  • sarissasarissa Posts: 1,735
    edited March 2021

    Leon said:

    eek said:

    Fishing said:

    Scott_xP said:
    Just say no.

    Johnson's cabinet need to hold the line on this. No bloody foreign holidays this summer. Having such a holiday is very nice but it is a First World thing. People can live without it.
    This is a risk we should take. With tests at the airport and a few days later it is manageable. There will always be some danger of infection, but we can't put normal life on hold forever.
    Pop Quiz: do you prefer:

    a) UK life largely back to normal for 2021, very limited risk of more lockdowns, social life back to having no limitations, pubs, theatres, cinemas, restaurants all open, freedom to holiday anywhere in the UK - just not foreign holibobs until 2022;

    or

    b) foreign holibobs for Brits allowed from June 2021, but that comes with a material risk that a new variant comes into the UK to which our vaccines are far less effective. Consequent risk of lockdowns and closures.

    I know where I stand.
    I would tend to agree on b. But just to say there are few more annoying words on PB than ‘holibobs’. It tends to be used by those who think holidays unimportant. Yet holidays are very important things, even though they may be domestic only for a while.
    The problem with holidays is that people want a complete change of scene and for a lot of people that means being outside the UK.

    Equally trying to find anywhere in the UK looks like it's going to be hard work - we are going away but that's mainly because of friends giving us very first dibs on cancellations.
    I do wonder about capacity in the UK - if we all want a nice cottage in Devon/Cornwall/the Lakes etc. Might be time to explore those lesser visited places.
    Everywhere in the West Country, Lakes, Hebrides, is booked out for the rest of the year. All gone.

    My advice: try eastern England. Rural Suffolk. Ely. Lincoln. Or far north Scotland.

    Explore....

    The run across from John O'Groats to Cape Wrath is spectacular. And deserted. (Well, it used to have quite a few Dutch and Germans, but not much else.)
    Sadly, numbers and traffic have rocketed since the promotion of the North Coast 500 route.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,602
    Chameleon said:

    On the whole voting system debate, for me the clear winner is the Irish system. To map it onto the UK you'd combine 3/4/5/6/7 current constituencies in logically consistent ways (e.g. Cornwall would be a 6 MP constituency), both one vote (with party lists a la EU elections) or STV with open choice would work well. Because I'm a dirty populist I'd also be tempted to only have 600 constituency seats, with an extra 50 handed out proportionally with the national vote (e.g. UKIP got 12.6% of the vote in 2015, so they'd have got 6 or 7 national MPs.

    Keeps local representation intact, yet is somewhat proportional.

    One interesting thing about the Irish experience with STV is that, for various historical and cultural reasons, it doesn't preclude TDs from representing smaller areas within the larger constituency.

    So, in the election commentary, you will find discussion about how one candidate mainly draws their support from Skibbereen, while another concentrates on Bantry.

    Therefore, if, for example, the Isle of Wight ended up in a constituency with parts of the big island to the north, you'd still expect at least one MP elected from the constituency to style themselves as representing the island to the south in particular.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,932

    HYUFD said:

    RobD said:

    The froth coming off No, it always looked fleeting and was born of The Sturge being on the telly interrogated day after day about an issue nobody understands.
    There are no changes since this pollster apparently hasn't asked this question previously, so the direction is unclear.
    The pollster has asked the question four times previously, all of them showing a lead for no.
    They have not asked the question since 2017, all the polls show Yes under 50% including don't knows, most now show No ahead excluding them
    Hey, I'm just correcting the statement that this pollster hasn't asked this question previously. I'm sure you wouldn't want people to be misled.
    Thanks, sorry I didn't look far enough back.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited March 2021

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    There's no point discussing this with you because you're living in your fantasy world where every voter rationally votes for a nice local resident to represent them in Westminster who then votes as they wish.

    However in reality most voters vote for the party they least dislike out of the Conservatives and Labour, who then vote as they are told with most not even attending debates.

    In theory FPTP is great. In reality it produces "winners" with minority vote shares. Like I said, maybe the benefits outweigh the negatives but the negatives are there.
    I haven't stepped into discussing how voters or MPs choose to vote.

    However if you must ask then I will say this: it is up to them.

    Every voter in every constituency gets 1 vote. They can vote for whoever they want to vote for, for whatever reasons they want to vote for (within the law).

    If voters are unhappy with their local MP they can hold them to account and vote to get rid of them. If they like their local MP they can vote to keep them. If they want to vote on national issues they can do so. It is their choice, not yours and not mine.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059

    felix said:

    Lunacy in Europe episode 555 - Spain will welcome German tourists over the Easter period while continuing to ban any internal travel to Spanish nationals. Cases in Spain are currently low. Caes in Germany are high.

    Why are Germany allowing non-essential foreign travel? Crazy. In the first wave, they sensibly closed their borders.
    Because the whole thing is starting to crack.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 11,144
    Andy_JS said:

    Chameleon said:

    On the whole voting system debate, for me the clear winner is the Irish system. To map it onto the UK you'd combine 3/4/5/6/7 current constituencies in logically consistent ways (e.g. Cornwall would be a 6 MP constituency), both one vote (with party lists a la EU elections) or STV with open choice would work well. Because I'm a dirty populist I'd also be tempted to only have 600 constituency seats, with an extra 50 handed out proportionally with the national vote (e.g. UKIP got 12.6% of the vote in 2015, so they'd have got 6 or 7 national MPs.

    Keeps local representation intact, yet is somewhat proportional.

    I agree that the Irish system is one of the best. The only problem is that if we implemented it in the UK we'd have about 2,000 members of parliament.
    Not really - as Chameleon says, you combine six existing constituencies (e.g. all the Cornish ones) into one multi-member constituency (i.e. Cornwall) with six representatives. You end up with the same number of MPs.
    I don't like Chameleon's idea of PR-ing on top of that though. What I like about STV is the ability to choose between different flavours of MP of the same party (or of no party at all). I don't really want parties then to have an extra layer back on top.
  • BluestBlueBluestBlue Posts: 4,556
    edited March 2021
    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    No, democracy is about winners and losers. The winners become the representatives, the losers don't.

    You can have other means of picking representatives. Like party apparatchiks picking people who are sound and putting them into the legislature, like China does, but that's not democracy.
    I really dislike how you approach this subject. You completely disregard any valid criticism of FPTP and instead revert to ridiculous comparisons with China and other totalitarian regimes.

    Your interpretation of what democracy is not necessary the same as other people's. That doesn't mean they are wrong.
    I wasn't responding to "any valid criticism" though, I was responding to the absurd and ridiculous notion that it is "not about winners and losers".

    Every single voting system in the world is about winners and losers. The concept of winners and losers is a fundamental part of democracy. How you determine who the winner is varies depending upon the system, but the concept of winners and losers is not unique to FPTP it is a fundamental part of democracy itself.

    If the critics of FPTP actually used any "valid criticism" and didn't leap to absurd arguments then it wouldn't be necessary to show why the absurd is absurd.
    No. Stop it. Not "winners and losers". That's football. This is democracy.

    Representation.
    Every citizen of this country is represented in Parliament; but only if they vote for the winner of the election are they represented in government.

    Oddly enough, parties that can win elections prefer to think of democracy as an exercise in the allocation of power; parties that can't see it as a means of representing a range of opinion.

    The former set of parties tend to win the argument de facto, since they are, er, in power and don't need to concern themselves with what the latter think.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,692
    RobD said:

    HYUFD said:

    RobD said:

    The froth coming off No, it always looked fleeting and was born of The Sturge being on the telly interrogated day after day about an issue nobody understands.
    There are no changes since this pollster apparently hasn't asked this question previously, so the direction is unclear.
    The pollster has asked the question four times previously, all of them showing a lead for no.
    They have not asked the question since 2017, all the polls show Yes under 50% including don't knows, most now show No ahead excluding them
    Hey, I'm just correcting the statement that this pollster hasn't asked this question previously. I'm sure you wouldn't want people to be misled.
    Thanks, sorry I didn't look far enough back.
    No worries, I think it was another poster that originally suggested it was the case.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Endillion said:

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    This would only be true if there was some relationship between the views of each electorate, and the voting patterns of the MP they send to Parliament. While there might be in theory, in practice the MPs can basically do what they want 98% of the time.
    And they answer to their electorate for doing so.

    If the MP does a bad job then at the next election the voters can pick a new representative to replace them.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 11,144

    Cookie said:

    Charles said:

    I think there are plenty of reasons to support FPTP but it does it a disservice when its supporters use half-truths to justify it.

    The fact is that the main benefits of FPTP are the singular local MP and the tendency to produce "strong" government.

    It all comes down to whether you believe those benefits outweigh the democratic costs.

    If you do, fair enough.

    But to pretend there's no downsides to FPTP at all? Come on.

    I don’t believe there is a democratic cost. After all this is a community selecting a representative not trying to reflect the percentage score someone got in an opinion poll
    That would be fine if MPs could act as a representative of their community instead of being lobby fodder and rosette-wearing donkeys.

    Given what we've seen of the reality of the strength of the party system, with Johnson's deselection of internal opponents, then we would be best placed to either weaken the party system (if possible) or choose a different voting system better suited to strong centralised parties.

    One advantage of STV is that it gives a better chance to internal party dissidents excised by their leadership, so it not only better represents the party-dominant nature of our democracy, but also acts to weaken it slightly.
    It would be interesting to know how the European question would have played out over the last 30 years if voters could have chosen not only between parties but between different flavours of member within those parties.
    Yes. I suspect that you would have seen a lot more Labour MPs who supported Brexit.

    I might disagree with the policy, but I can see that would have been a more accurate reflection of public opinion in the Commons.
    And as such, we might have been able to put the brakes on with Lisbon in 2007, rather than getting to the all-or-nothing choice of 2016.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    There's no point discussing this with you because you're living in your fantasy world where every voter rationally votes for a nice local resident to represent them in Westminster who then votes as they wish.

    However in reality most voters vote for the party they least dislike out of the Conservatives and Labour, who then vote as they are told with most not even attending debates.

    In theory FPTP is great. In reality it produces "winners" with minority vote shares. Like I said, maybe the benefits outweigh the negatives but the negatives are there.
    I haven't stepped into discussing how voters or MPs choose to vote.

    However if you must ask then I will say this: it is up to them.

    Every voter in every constituency gets 1 vote. They can vote for whoever they want to vote for, for whatever reasons they want to vote for (within the law).

    If voters are unhappy with their local MP they can hold them to account and vote to get rid of them. If they like their local MP they can vote to keep them. If they want to vote on national issues they can do so. It is their choice, not yours and not mine.
    This is the problem. You fail to acknowledge reality while only tackling the question of a voting system in theory.

    The choices voters make BECAUSE of FPTP is relevant in discussing the merits and downsides of the system regardless of how it works in theory.

    I assume you are happy to debate Capitalism vs Communism purely on a theoretical basis while disregarding the choices people might make whilst living under those systems?
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,641
    sarissa said:

    MattW said:

    malcolmg said:
    Contempt of court proceedings should be used when the actions of a person bring the standing of the judicial system into disrepute. Here, it is the actions of the use of contempt of court that is bringing the judicial system into disrepute. All to save the blushes of a lying politician.
    Jigsaw identification of complainants allegedly possible due to his blog-reports on the Salmond Trial.
    Action was taken at the instigation of the COPFS prosecution counsel, but identical transgressions by journalists, or even outright naming goes unpunished.
    It is quite unbelievable the number of non Salmond supporting journalists that have named or obviously pointed them out and yet the only 3 convictions are all Salmond supporters. The COPFS and Crown do not even try to hide their bias.
    Puppets for Sturgeon.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,602
    tlg86 said:

    Chameleon said:

    On the whole voting system debate, for me the clear winner is the Irish system. To map it onto the UK you'd combine 3/4/5/6/7 current constituencies in logically consistent ways (e.g. Cornwall would be a 6 MP constituency), both one vote (with party lists a la EU elections) or STV with open choice would work well. Because I'm a dirty populist I'd also be tempted to only have 600 constituency seats, with an extra 50 handed out proportionally with the national vote (e.g. UKIP got 12.6% of the vote in 2015, so they'd have got 6 or 7 national MPs.

    Keeps local representation intact, yet is somewhat proportional.

    If we're going to have PR, let's have PR. A system that works against marmite parties is not on.
    One of the criticisms of PR, and defences of FPTP, is that the former can encourage extremism, while the latter forces parties to aim for at least a large minority of support.

    It's a benefit of STV that it makes life difficult for parties that are strongly disliked.
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,952

    Endillion said:

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    This would only be true if there was some relationship between the views of each electorate, and the voting patterns of the MP they send to Parliament. While there might be in theory, in practice the MPs can basically do what they want 98% of the time.
    And they answer to their electorate for doing so.

    If the MP does a bad job then at the next election the voters can pick a new representative to replace them.
    Oh, stop it. I'm nominally on your side in this and you're making it impossible to agree with you. You know as well as the rest of us that it doesn't work that way, most of the time.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    No, democracy is about winners and losers. The winners become the representatives, the losers don't.

    You can have other means of picking representatives. Like party apparatchiks picking people who are sound and putting them into the legislature, like China does, but that's not democracy.
    I really dislike how you approach this subject. You completely disregard any valid criticism of FPTP and instead revert to ridiculous comparisons with China and other totalitarian regimes.

    Your interpretation of what democracy is not necessary the same as other people's. That doesn't mean they are wrong.
    I wasn't responding to "any valid criticism" though, I was responding to the absurd and ridiculous notion that it is "not about winners and losers".

    Every single voting system in the world is about winners and losers. The concept of winners and losers is a fundamental part of democracy. How you determine who the winner is varies depending upon the system, but the concept of winners and losers is not unique to FPTP it is a fundamental part of democracy itself.

    If the critics of FPTP actually used any "valid criticism" and didn't leap to absurd arguments then it wouldn't be necessary to show why the absurd is absurd.
    No. Stop it. Not "winners and losers". That's football. This is democracy.

    Representation.
    Every citizen of this country is represented in Parliament; but only if they vote for the winner of the election are they represented in government.

    Oddly enough, parties that can win elections prefer to think of democracy as an exercise in the allocation of power; parties that can't see it as a means of representing a range of opinion.

    The former set of parties tend to win the argument de facto, since they are, er, in power and don't need to concern themselves with what the latter think.
    Every voter is represented in Parliament but not every voter is represented proportionately.

    This is the usual triumphalist nonsense from you but I expected nothing less.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,739
    edited March 2021

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    No, democracy is about winners and losers. The winners become the representatives, the losers don't.

    You can have other means of picking representatives. Like party apparatchiks picking people who are sound and putting them into the legislature, like China does, but that's not democracy.
    I really dislike how you approach this subject. You completely disregard any valid criticism of FPTP and instead revert to ridiculous comparisons with China and other totalitarian regimes.

    Your interpretation of what democracy is not necessary the same as other people's. That doesn't mean they are wrong.
    I wasn't responding to "any valid criticism" though, I was responding to the absurd and ridiculous notion that it is "not about winners and losers".

    Every single voting system in the world is about winners and losers. The concept of winners and losers is a fundamental part of democracy. How you determine who the winner is varies depending upon the system, but the concept of winners and losers is not unique to FPTP it is a fundamental part of democracy itself.

    If the critics of FPTP actually used any "valid criticism" and didn't leap to absurd arguments then it wouldn't be necessary to show why the absurd is absurd.
    No. Stop it. Not "winners and losers". That's football. This is democracy.

    Representation.
    FPTP is ideal for representation: Every person in this country has one representative.

    No voter in the country has more or less than a single local representative.
    I quite like FPTP. It has some serious upsides. But, no, it is not by any stretch of the imagination "ideal". It's main drawback, as I say, is that it leads to individual voters "winning" and "losing" elections as opposed to being fairly represented. Parties can win and lose, that's fine, but not voters. If you vote for a party and they get 15% of the national vote but no seats, you are not fairly represented at the national level. Your party has lost, that's ok, and so have you, which is not ok.

    And on a practical note, I think PR is becoming more urgent. If we stick with this system we are going to get an increasingly polarized politics with the middle hollowed out and different shades of opinion sidelined. That's fine for people like me, since I'm clearly on one side of this big but to a large extent manufactured and self-fulfilling values divide, but it's not so great for lots of other (I'd say most) people.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    There's no point discussing this with you because you're living in your fantasy world where every voter rationally votes for a nice local resident to represent them in Westminster who then votes as they wish.

    However in reality most voters vote for the party they least dislike out of the Conservatives and Labour, who then vote as they are told with most not even attending debates.

    In theory FPTP is great. In reality it produces "winners" with minority vote shares. Like I said, maybe the benefits outweigh the negatives but the negatives are there.
    I haven't stepped into discussing how voters or MPs choose to vote.

    However if you must ask then I will say this: it is up to them.

    Every voter in every constituency gets 1 vote. They can vote for whoever they want to vote for, for whatever reasons they want to vote for (within the law).

    If voters are unhappy with their local MP they can hold them to account and vote to get rid of them. If they like their local MP they can vote to keep them. If they want to vote on national issues they can do so. It is their choice, not yours and not mine.
    This is the problem. You fail to acknowledge reality while only tackling the question of a voting system in theory.

    The choices voters make BECAUSE of FPTP is relevant in discussing the merits and downsides of the system regardless of how it works in theory.

    I assume you are happy to debate Capitalism vs Communism purely on a theoretical basis while disregarding the choices people might make whilst living under those systems?
    Reality is the system works very well.

    I don't fail to acknowledge reality, reality is the system works. People hold their MPs to account, in practice and not just in theory.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071
    edited March 2021
    I favour STV but I don't *hate* first past the post. What I do hate is zealots pretending there are literally no downsides to it and that it's the most perfect electoral system ever created.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,259
    "Dozens of federal MPs back motion accusing China of human rights breaches against Uyghur people"

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-22/federal-mps-condemn-treatment-of-uyghurs-in-china/100021938
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 12,845
    TimT said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    DavidL said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Blimey just noticed that the Army is likely to be reduced by 10,000 from the current 70,000. I note we're already between Ethiopia and Bangladesh in size of active forces.

    Now, more than ever, we need those on PB who have yearnings in that direction, indeed have displayed strategic aptitude in terms of likely campaigns, to sign up. We simply can't allow the country to be at such risk.

    You know who you are.

    I thought it was to 70,000?
    Ah yes. Soz. To 70,000. Still low.
    When I was a lad in Fallingbostel in the early 1970s we had over 50k troops in Germany alone and more than 20k in NI.

    As you will appreciate better than most our army is now too small to carry out any meaningful task for any extended period of time. We simply could not do what we did in Afghanistan for such an extended period for example. No doubt tech, specifically drones, will make absolute numbers less critical but there comes a point when what you have is a home defence force, not an army. I think that's where we are.
    Didn't the recent Armenian-Azeri war show that troops and tanks are virtually defenceless against well organised drones and missiles? That is the future. Large armies are finished. Analogue military in a world of digital wars.

    The same will soon be true of large aircraft carriers. Ooops
    We still need troops for UN peacekeeping and NATO operations and special forces in particular for counter terrorism operations.

    We need submarines to launch missiles and drones and aircraft carriers to launch airstrikes and also in the event, however unlikely, we needed to recapture the Falklands again. We also need to ensure we continue to have a larger army than Argentina on that basis too
    We're not far from the moment when all the fighting will be done by robots and drones, remotely operated or self drive tanks, everything. It makes obvious sense, why risk a human life when a computer in a robot can do the job, and do it better?

    Unless civilisation collapses and the technology disappears it is likely there will never again be a large army sent to conquer a foreign land, by a major power. Except maybe China retaking Taiwan, but even there I wonder if they would bother with troops and landing ships and all that antiquated malarkey. A few hypersonic missiles, jam Taiwan's internet, retake the place without a boot on the ground. Sorted
    Yet, I'm sceptical how effective any of that would be against insurgents who are willing to take any level of casualties in order to win. A belief that superior equipment can - on its own - win wars, has not proved well-founded.
    Normalcy bias

    Warfare is like science, it doesn't change for ages, and then, suddenly, there is a massive paradigm shift and everything changes very quickly

    https://twitter.com/eha_news/status/1372298354760224771?s=20

    https://twitter.com/mrtrsyns/status/1371579158556516355?s=20
    It's worth remembering that this kind of thing has actually been around for quite a while

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBU-97_Sensor_Fuzed_Weapon

    IIRC they were used to wipe out the vehicles of most of am Iraqi division in a a minute or 2.
    Here's some classified footage from Afghan on the latest technology and its applications.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mymTX-psg5c
    Not a great believer in the technology can win wars on its own viewpoint. Yes, when there is huge asymmetrical access to the technology AND there is limited will to fight on the other side, it can do the job. But Special Forces still train in hand-to-hand combat and knife skills for good reason, despite gunpowder and shot having been around for centuries.
    That is always going to be with us. My door gunner killed an Iraqi with a shovel despite having a fully functional 7.62 GPMG available to him. The recruitment adverts seem to focus more on delivering aid to beaming and grateful recipients though.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    There's no point discussing this with you because you're living in your fantasy world where every voter rationally votes for a nice local resident to represent them in Westminster who then votes as they wish.

    However in reality most voters vote for the party they least dislike out of the Conservatives and Labour, who then vote as they are told with most not even attending debates.

    In theory FPTP is great. In reality it produces "winners" with minority vote shares. Like I said, maybe the benefits outweigh the negatives but the negatives are there.
    I haven't stepped into discussing how voters or MPs choose to vote.

    However if you must ask then I will say this: it is up to them.

    Every voter in every constituency gets 1 vote. They can vote for whoever they want to vote for, for whatever reasons they want to vote for (within the law).

    If voters are unhappy with their local MP they can hold them to account and vote to get rid of them. If they like their local MP they can vote to keep them. If they want to vote on national issues they can do so. It is their choice, not yours and not mine.
    This is the problem. You fail to acknowledge reality while only tackling the question of a voting system in theory.

    The choices voters make BECAUSE of FPTP is relevant in discussing the merits and downsides of the system regardless of how it works in theory.

    I assume you are happy to debate Capitalism vs Communism purely on a theoretical basis while disregarding the choices people might make whilst living under those systems?
    Reality is the system works very well.

    I don't fail to acknowledge reality, reality is the system works. People hold their MPs to account, in practice and not just in theory.
    In your opinion.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    No, democracy is about winners and losers. The winners become the representatives, the losers don't.

    You can have other means of picking representatives. Like party apparatchiks picking people who are sound and putting them into the legislature, like China does, but that's not democracy.
    I really dislike how you approach this subject. You completely disregard any valid criticism of FPTP and instead revert to ridiculous comparisons with China and other totalitarian regimes.

    Your interpretation of what democracy is not necessary the same as other people's. That doesn't mean they are wrong.
    I wasn't responding to "any valid criticism" though, I was responding to the absurd and ridiculous notion that it is "not about winners and losers".

    Every single voting system in the world is about winners and losers. The concept of winners and losers is a fundamental part of democracy. How you determine who the winner is varies depending upon the system, but the concept of winners and losers is not unique to FPTP it is a fundamental part of democracy itself.

    If the critics of FPTP actually used any "valid criticism" and didn't leap to absurd arguments then it wouldn't be necessary to show why the absurd is absurd.
    No. Stop it. Not "winners and losers". That's football. This is democracy.

    Representation.
    Every citizen of this country is represented in Parliament; but only if they vote for the winner of the election are they represented in government.

    Oddly enough, parties that can win elections prefer to think of democracy as an exercise in the allocation of power; parties that can't see it as a means of representing a range of opinion.

    The former set of parties tend to win the argument de facto, since they are, er, in power and don't need to concern themselves with what the latter think.
    Every voter is represented in Parliament but not every voter is represented proportionately.

    This is the usual triumphalist nonsense from you but I expected nothing less.
    Why should we care about proportionality?
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    There's no point discussing this with you because you're living in your fantasy world where every voter rationally votes for a nice local resident to represent them in Westminster who then votes as they wish.

    However in reality most voters vote for the party they least dislike out of the Conservatives and Labour, who then vote as they are told with most not even attending debates.

    In theory FPTP is great. In reality it produces "winners" with minority vote shares. Like I said, maybe the benefits outweigh the negatives but the negatives are there.
    I haven't stepped into discussing how voters or MPs choose to vote.

    However if you must ask then I will say this: it is up to them.

    Every voter in every constituency gets 1 vote. They can vote for whoever they want to vote for, for whatever reasons they want to vote for (within the law).

    If voters are unhappy with their local MP they can hold them to account and vote to get rid of them. If they like their local MP they can vote to keep them. If they want to vote on national issues they can do so. It is their choice, not yours and not mine.
    This is the problem. You fail to acknowledge reality while only tackling the question of a voting system in theory.

    The choices voters make BECAUSE of FPTP is relevant in discussing the merits and downsides of the system regardless of how it works in theory.

    I assume you are happy to debate Capitalism vs Communism purely on a theoretical basis while disregarding the choices people might make whilst living under those systems?
    Reality is the system works very well.

    I don't fail to acknowledge reality, reality is the system works. People hold their MPs to account, in practice and not just in theory.
    In your opinion.
    In fact. Do you have any idea how many seats have changed hands over the past 11 years?
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 24,940
    sarissa said:

    MattW said:

    malcolmg said:
    Contempt of court proceedings should be used when the actions of a person bring the standing of the judicial system into disrepute. Here, it is the actions of the use of contempt of court that is bringing the judicial system into disrepute. All to save the blushes of a lying politician.
    Jigsaw identification of complainants allegedly possible due to his blog-reports on the Salmond Trial.
    Action was taken at the instigation of the COPFS prosecution counsel, but identical transgressions by journalists, or even outright naming goes unpunished.
    'Rape Crisis Scotland' identified a complainant to all the newspapers in the metadata of a press release email they sent out recently. Let's hope similar action is taken there.

  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    There's no point discussing this with you because you're living in your fantasy world where every voter rationally votes for a nice local resident to represent them in Westminster who then votes as they wish.

    However in reality most voters vote for the party they least dislike out of the Conservatives and Labour, who then vote as they are told with most not even attending debates.

    In theory FPTP is great. In reality it produces "winners" with minority vote shares. Like I said, maybe the benefits outweigh the negatives but the negatives are there.
    I haven't stepped into discussing how voters or MPs choose to vote.

    However if you must ask then I will say this: it is up to them.

    Every voter in every constituency gets 1 vote. They can vote for whoever they want to vote for, for whatever reasons they want to vote for (within the law).

    If voters are unhappy with their local MP they can hold them to account and vote to get rid of them. If they like their local MP they can vote to keep them. If they want to vote on national issues they can do so. It is their choice, not yours and not mine.
    This is the problem. You fail to acknowledge reality while only tackling the question of a voting system in theory.

    The choices voters make BECAUSE of FPTP is relevant in discussing the merits and downsides of the system regardless of how it works in theory.

    I assume you are happy to debate Capitalism vs Communism purely on a theoretical basis while disregarding the choices people might make whilst living under those systems?
    Reality is the system works very well.

    I don't fail to acknowledge reality, reality is the system works. People hold their MPs to account, in practice and not just in theory.
    In your opinion.
    In fact. Do you have any idea how many seats have changed hands over the past 11 years?
    It's not a "fact". It's your opinion. Others have different criteria on what constitutes the "system working well".
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071
    edited March 2021

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    No, democracy is about winners and losers. The winners become the representatives, the losers don't.

    You can have other means of picking representatives. Like party apparatchiks picking people who are sound and putting them into the legislature, like China does, but that's not democracy.
    I really dislike how you approach this subject. You completely disregard any valid criticism of FPTP and instead revert to ridiculous comparisons with China and other totalitarian regimes.

    Your interpretation of what democracy is not necessary the same as other people's. That doesn't mean they are wrong.
    I wasn't responding to "any valid criticism" though, I was responding to the absurd and ridiculous notion that it is "not about winners and losers".

    Every single voting system in the world is about winners and losers. The concept of winners and losers is a fundamental part of democracy. How you determine who the winner is varies depending upon the system, but the concept of winners and losers is not unique to FPTP it is a fundamental part of democracy itself.

    If the critics of FPTP actually used any "valid criticism" and didn't leap to absurd arguments then it wouldn't be necessary to show why the absurd is absurd.
    No. Stop it. Not "winners and losers". That's football. This is democracy.

    Representation.
    Every citizen of this country is represented in Parliament; but only if they vote for the winner of the election are they represented in government.

    Oddly enough, parties that can win elections prefer to think of democracy as an exercise in the allocation of power; parties that can't see it as a means of representing a range of opinion.

    The former set of parties tend to win the argument de facto, since they are, er, in power and don't need to concern themselves with what the latter think.
    Every voter is represented in Parliament but not every voter is represented proportionately.

    This is the usual triumphalist nonsense from you but I expected nothing less.
    Why should we care about proportionality?
    I care about proportionality. You don't have to.
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,244
    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Andy_JS said:
    Meyer has said nothing pro-Orban. he's pointing out the EU has reduced itself to Orban's level. Rachman showing a touch of Strasbourg Syndrome there
    Mary Riddell has a worse case.
    https://twitter.com/maryriddell/status/1373914075692929025?s=21
    There is a real danger here for hardcore Remoaners - ie the 5-10% who are still "backing" the EU over Britain, blaming us not Brussels, hoping our grannies die to save the career of President Macron, and so forth.

    At some point the outraged public will turn on THEM, if they keep this up. Someone like Riddell should just STFU
    At work this morning there was an (online, natch) conversation about the census - one of my teammates asked if anyone else did as he did and put 'European' as nationality. There was no response. I'm slightly curious about this - presumably from the fact he has made this comment he is pretty confident the rest of us share his Europhilia, despite the current situation. (It's a public sector organisation). Maybe he is right.
    I doubt it greatly. But who knows? Need polling.
    I doubt it too. But the confidence in the hardcore Europhiles that almost everyone agrees with them is remarkable.
    It is like the Naga Munchetty flag imbroglio; it wasn't so much the 'I find flags rather gauche' point of view which was remarkable - that's not a view which I'd criticise or find particularly surprising. But I do find surprising the apparent assumption that 'everyone finds flags rather gauche'. Similarly, I don't necessarily find it surprising that someone identifies as 'European' rather than British or English. But I do find it surprising that - even after the last three months - he would assume that everyone else would start from a position of EU = good, UK = bad.
    I agree with Cookie. It's a very common thing which we often see on PB too - people assume that the whole is much like the people they know. Consciously or not, we tend to seek out people who we agree with as our friends, and then they reinforce our prejudices.

    That's why my poker circle (in non-pandemic times) is good for me - it's got dozens of people who I'm on good terms with and have generally very different outlooks - many voted for Brexit, tell dodgy jokes, think of a normal evening as being down the pub with mates, have strong opinions about football, vape like chimneys, etc. It's another world, and not an unpleasant one, just different from us earnest lefties spending our evenings watching foreign movies, debating the situation in the Yemen and pondering the Guardian long reads (I satirise only slightly). None of us bother to object to each others' strange views and outlook, 'cos we're there to play poker and the default setting is mates having a relaxed evening. It's...liberating, and I miss it more than most other restrictions of the pandemic.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Endillion said:

    Endillion said:

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    This would only be true if there was some relationship between the views of each electorate, and the voting patterns of the MP they send to Parliament. While there might be in theory, in practice the MPs can basically do what they want 98% of the time.
    And they answer to their electorate for doing so.

    If the MP does a bad job then at the next election the voters can pick a new representative to replace them.
    Oh, stop it. I'm nominally on your side in this and you're making it impossible to agree with you. You know as well as the rest of us that it doesn't work that way, most of the time.
    I said can, not will.

    The reality is most MPs don't do an especially bad job representing their MPs precisely because they want to hold their seat. Is life perfect? No, of course not - but the voters have both the option to vote for someone else and the threat of having the option to vote for someone else to keep their MPs in line - that is why democracy works over non-democratic systems.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071

    Endillion said:

    Endillion said:

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    This would only be true if there was some relationship between the views of each electorate, and the voting patterns of the MP they send to Parliament. While there might be in theory, in practice the MPs can basically do what they want 98% of the time.
    And they answer to their electorate for doing so.

    If the MP does a bad job then at the next election the voters can pick a new representative to replace them.
    Oh, stop it. I'm nominally on your side in this and you're making it impossible to agree with you. You know as well as the rest of us that it doesn't work that way, most of the time.
    I said can, not will.

    The reality is most MPs don't do an especially bad job representing their MPs precisely because they want to hold their seat. Is life perfect? No, of course not - but the voters have both the option to vote for someone else and the threat of having the option to vote for someone else to keep their MPs in line - that is why democracy works over non-democratic systems.
    It doesn't really matter if my MP stays "in line" or not because her party isn't in government. She has zero power.
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,328

    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Andy_JS said:
    Meyer has said nothing pro-Orban. he's pointing out the EU has reduced itself to Orban's level. Rachman showing a touch of Strasbourg Syndrome there
    Mary Riddell has a worse case.
    https://twitter.com/maryriddell/status/1373914075692929025?s=21
    There is a real danger here for hardcore Remoaners - ie the 5-10% who are still "backing" the EU over Britain, blaming us not Brussels, hoping our grannies die to save the career of President Macron, and so forth.

    At some point the outraged public will turn on THEM, if they keep this up. Someone like Riddell should just STFU
    At work this morning there was an (online, natch) conversation about the census - one of my teammates asked if anyone else did as he did and put 'European' as nationality. There was no response. I'm slightly curious about this - presumably from the fact he has made this comment he is pretty confident the rest of us share his Europhilia, despite the current situation. (It's a public sector organisation). Maybe he is right.
    I did the same and know several people who did. It's more common than it used to be, as a reaction to Brexit.

    Leon overstates the case, of course. A realistic view is that the EU leadership have screwed up badly on this occasion and the UK approach, after a horrible start, is now turning out well - of course we're pleased as anyone sane would be and willing to give some credit to the leadership for it. Europhilia doesn't mean we hope our grannies die - you can feel part of a wider cultural identity and still recognise when its leadership screws up. I have no intention of STFU about it - we are still a free country and if Brexiteers don't like it, tant pis.

    Less provocatively, it's clearly a pity that relations between the UK and EU have deteriorated so badly - that has to be a bad thing for both sides since we live next door, and it's daft to think there will be winners from it, or that only one side is to blame. I do think the EU is to blame for the latest escalation, but if we'd not had so much anti-EU crap fostered by Brexit the underlying resentment wouldn't have arisen.
    The trouble is how far back does one go in this sort of analysis, Nick. A husband beats his wife, she asks him to stop, he does not and tells her to shut up, she gets a divorce and it's messy and acrimonious with both sides saying things they should not. The exes now to live next door to each other and the husband is now throwing rocks over the fence, so you blame the wife for leaving and saying things she shouldn't have during the divorce?
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    No, democracy is about winners and losers. The winners become the representatives, the losers don't.

    You can have other means of picking representatives. Like party apparatchiks picking people who are sound and putting them into the legislature, like China does, but that's not democracy.
    I really dislike how you approach this subject. You completely disregard any valid criticism of FPTP and instead revert to ridiculous comparisons with China and other totalitarian regimes.

    Your interpretation of what democracy is not necessary the same as other people's. That doesn't mean they are wrong.
    I wasn't responding to "any valid criticism" though, I was responding to the absurd and ridiculous notion that it is "not about winners and losers".

    Every single voting system in the world is about winners and losers. The concept of winners and losers is a fundamental part of democracy. How you determine who the winner is varies depending upon the system, but the concept of winners and losers is not unique to FPTP it is a fundamental part of democracy itself.

    If the critics of FPTP actually used any "valid criticism" and didn't leap to absurd arguments then it wouldn't be necessary to show why the absurd is absurd.
    No. Stop it. Not "winners and losers". That's football. This is democracy.

    Representation.
    Every citizen of this country is represented in Parliament; but only if they vote for the winner of the election are they represented in government.

    Oddly enough, parties that can win elections prefer to think of democracy as an exercise in the allocation of power; parties that can't see it as a means of representing a range of opinion.

    The former set of parties tend to win the argument de facto, since they are, er, in power and don't need to concern themselves with what the latter think.
    Every voter is represented in Parliament but not every voter is represented proportionately.

    This is the usual triumphalist nonsense from you but I expected nothing less.
    Why should we care about proportionality?
    I care about proportionality. You don't have to.
    You haven't given a reason why we should care about proportionality though. Either in practice or in theory.

    So calling the post you replied to "utter triumphalist nonsense" is unreasonable given proportionality was never claimed. Proportionality is not a good thing in my opinion. If you want to argue it is, make a case for that, don't expect others to assume it is.
  • Daveyboy1961Daveyboy1961 Posts: 3,313

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    There's no point discussing this with you because you're living in your fantasy world where every voter rationally votes for a nice local resident to represent them in Westminster who then votes as they wish.

    However in reality most voters vote for the party they least dislike out of the Conservatives and Labour, who then vote as they are told with most not even attending debates.

    In theory FPTP is great. In reality it produces "winners" with minority vote shares. Like I said, maybe the benefits outweigh the negatives but the negatives are there.
    I haven't stepped into discussing how voters or MPs choose to vote.

    However if you must ask then I will say this: it is up to them.

    Every voter in every constituency gets 1 vote. They can vote for whoever they want to vote for, for whatever reasons they want to vote for (within the law).

    If voters are unhappy with their local MP they can hold them to account and vote to get rid of them. If they like their local MP they can vote to keep them. If they want to vote on national issues they can do so. It is their choice, not yours and not mine.
    I have lost count of the number of national elections I have voted in (i am now 60) and never once have I voted for the winner. Now you may say that that's my own fault for not voting Tory or Labour, but that's beside the point. If I am unhappy with my MP I do have the option to write to him/her and then receive a general policy statement from that party. At the next election I have the same choice which usually results in no change. There must be many millions of voters in this country who never vote for the winner. It is hardly conducive to encouraging participation.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,071

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    IanB2 said:

    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Really not sure I get this argument. Why is a vote "wasted" if I don't choose one of those who get through to the final round but not "wasted" when I vote for someone that loses in FPTP?

    We certainly have more important things to worry about, on that I agree.

    Because your vote is not counted. Literally. You wanted to register a second preference, the system allowed you to do so, and yet it was not counted at all; your voice is missing from the result, not as a consequence of abstention but because of the vaguary and chance of the mechanism and combined vote.

    At least, when you vote for a losing candidate under FPTP, your choice for them (and implicitly, against the winner), is recorded and acts as political mandate for or against the winner, and helps frame actions within the politicians term and future elections.
    Your arguments are getting more and more pitiful.
    Yours are getting more and more evidence-free. You simply make an assertion, mix in some abuse and assume that the natural virtue will shine though.
    To see a Tory try to claim there are no wasted votes when we know the Tories will be round telling voters not to waste their votes on third parties is a level of hypocrisy which I didn't expect from you.
    Voting system and the rhetoric of campaigning are two different subjects. BTW if you assume that voting is a community activity not an individual one the concept of a wasted vote doesn't really mean anything.

    Yes but the Tories know that the system effectively ensures most third party votes are wasted (ex where very geographically concentrated) and explicitly uses that to push voters toward a choice between itself and its favourite opponent.

    To have Herdson sink as low as claiming there are no wasted votes and resorting to specious argument like suggesting those votes somehow influence the mandate, is sickening.

    I can only guess that a lead with such little integrity has been written because its author needs or wants to ingratiate with someone in his party
    Third votes aren't wasted in the UK: They lost.

    There's a difference.
    Try and get football off your brain. Democracy is about representation not winners and losers.
    No, democracy is about winners and losers. The winners become the representatives, the losers don't.

    You can have other means of picking representatives. Like party apparatchiks picking people who are sound and putting them into the legislature, like China does, but that's not democracy.
    I really dislike how you approach this subject. You completely disregard any valid criticism of FPTP and instead revert to ridiculous comparisons with China and other totalitarian regimes.

    Your interpretation of what democracy is not necessary the same as other people's. That doesn't mean they are wrong.
    I wasn't responding to "any valid criticism" though, I was responding to the absurd and ridiculous notion that it is "not about winners and losers".

    Every single voting system in the world is about winners and losers. The concept of winners and losers is a fundamental part of democracy. How you determine who the winner is varies depending upon the system, but the concept of winners and losers is not unique to FPTP it is a fundamental part of democracy itself.

    If the critics of FPTP actually used any "valid criticism" and didn't leap to absurd arguments then it wouldn't be necessary to show why the absurd is absurd.
    No. Stop it. Not "winners and losers". That's football. This is democracy.

    Representation.
    Every citizen of this country is represented in Parliament; but only if they vote for the winner of the election are they represented in government.

    Oddly enough, parties that can win elections prefer to think of democracy as an exercise in the allocation of power; parties that can't see it as a means of representing a range of opinion.

    The former set of parties tend to win the argument de facto, since they are, er, in power and don't need to concern themselves with what the latter think.
    Every voter is represented in Parliament but not every voter is represented proportionately.

    This is the usual triumphalist nonsense from you but I expected nothing less.
    Why should we care about proportionality?
    I care about proportionality. You don't have to.
    You haven't given a reason why we should care about proportionality though. Either in practice or in theory.

    So calling the post you replied to "utter triumphalist nonsense" is unreasonable given proportionality was never claimed. Proportionality is not a good thing in my opinion. If you want to argue it is, make a case for that, don't expect others to assume it is.
    I'm not expecting anyone to assume it is. I was merely telling @BluestBlue what I personally thought of his post.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,760

    Bright sunshine, Chiffchaff singing near the window - winter is now but a faded memory.

    Snow is forecast for Friday apparently
    Maybe on the top of Snowdon.
    BBC forecast was cold weather towards the end of the week with risk of snow, but they did not mention Snowdon
    Mentioned even dartmoor (above 200m). Snow at Easter is more common than at Christmas.
    Indeed snow highly unlikely for 95% of the population. Perhaps some on the very high ground where almost nobody lives.

    The Easter snow thing is a myth, by the way.
    No its not.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited March 2021

    Endillion said:

    Endillion said:

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    This would only be true if there was some relationship between the views of each electorate, and the voting patterns of the MP they send to Parliament. While there might be in theory, in practice the MPs can basically do what they want 98% of the time.
    And they answer to their electorate for doing so.

    If the MP does a bad job then at the next election the voters can pick a new representative to replace them.
    Oh, stop it. I'm nominally on your side in this and you're making it impossible to agree with you. You know as well as the rest of us that it doesn't work that way, most of the time.
    I said can, not will.

    The reality is most MPs don't do an especially bad job representing their MPs precisely because they want to hold their seat. Is life perfect? No, of course not - but the voters have both the option to vote for someone else and the threat of having the option to vote for someone else to keep their MPs in line - that is why democracy works over non-democratic systems.
    It doesn't really matter if my MP stays "in line" or not because her party isn't in government. She has zero power.
    That's not true. She can speak in Parliament, encourage the MPs in the opposing party to rebel, put forward amendments to bills and seek to convince the rest of the country to vote differently next time.

    Democracy doesn't end the day the voting has finished counting and practically every democratic nation in the world, under any voting system at all, has parties that are not in government.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,259
    edited March 2021

    I favour STV but I don't *hate* first past the post. What I do hate is zealots pretending there are literally no downsides to it and that it's the most perfect electoral system ever created.

    The only good thing about FPTP is the drama it provides on election night. Otherwise it's a rubbish system that means an MP can be elected with 26% of the vote, as in Inverness in 1992.
  • Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Andy_JS said:
    Meyer has said nothing pro-Orban. he's pointing out the EU has reduced itself to Orban's level. Rachman showing a touch of Strasbourg Syndrome there
    Mary Riddell has a worse case.
    https://twitter.com/maryriddell/status/1373914075692929025?s=21
    There is a real danger here for hardcore Remoaners - ie the 5-10% who are still "backing" the EU over Britain, blaming us not Brussels, hoping our grannies die to save the career of President Macron, and so forth.

    At some point the outraged public will turn on THEM, if they keep this up. Someone like Riddell should just STFU
    It will be interesting to see how the EU vax shenanigans sway people's view on whether Brexit was a success. That their idiocy has literally nothing to do with our idiocy in cutting off our own foot to spite our ingrowing toenail will go over most people's heads.
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,952

    Endillion said:

    Endillion said:

    @Endillion and @Philip_Thompson thought experiment time.

    Let's say under FPTP 650 independent MPs are elected to Parliament.

    Who is the "winner" of that election?

    Well eventually a loose confederation of proto-parties would form. It would have to happen as government is formed from it.
    Well obviously.

    My point is that FPTP works great in a locally orientated election of representatives to a legislature.

    It breaks down when a vast majority of people simply vote on national politics for parties.

    Then you don't get 650 winners. You get 1 winner on 30% of the vote.
    No you don't. You still have 650 MPs. That a majority of locations have chosen MPs of the same party is simply their choice, it could have gone otherwise.
    And yet you still can have 1 winner on 30% of the vote.

    Regardless of how you try and spin it, the ultimate result is that a party with a minority of voters supporting them is proclaimed the "winner" and not just a "winner", usually with complete control.

    That may be worth it for the benefits of "strong" government and the ability to "kick out the party in charge", etc but it's still a fact.
    You don't have 1 winner. You have 650 winners. Every MP counts and the government only gets its bills through if it commands a majority of the house.
    I'm sorry but that's idealised bullsh*t and you know it.
    No it is not. Look at the 2017 Parliament. Heck if over 40 Tory MPs rebel on an issue in this Parliament then votes can be lost even in this Parliament.

    Votes are only won in the House if a majority of the 650 elected MPs vote Aye. MPs can vote however they want, whenever they want, if they're prepared to own the consequences of that.
    This would only be true if there was some relationship between the views of each electorate, and the voting patterns of the MP they send to Parliament. While there might be in theory, in practice the MPs can basically do what they want 98% of the time.
    And they answer to their electorate for doing so.

    If the MP does a bad job then at the next election the voters can pick a new representative to replace them.
    Oh, stop it. I'm nominally on your side in this and you're making it impossible to agree with you. You know as well as the rest of us that it doesn't work that way, most of the time.
    I said can, not will.

    The reality is most MPs don't do an especially bad job representing their MPs precisely because they want to hold their seat. Is life perfect? No, of course not - but the voters have both the option to vote for someone else and the threat of having the option to vote for someone else to keep their MPs in line - that is why democracy works over non-democratic systems.
    I'm unclear who you think on here is advocating for "non-democratic systems", but if that's what you think is the alternative, it explains a few things.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,259
    edited March 2021
    Leon said:

    kinabalu said:

    Floater said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Breaking news:

    Welsh supermarket shoppers can now buy Barbara Cartland novels.

    A nation rejoices .... or not
    Heard Drakeford speaking the other day. Very impressed with his nuanced and intelligent use of language.
    Drakeford is universally disliked. He closed the pubs (as a teetotaller himself) whilst Johnson (and the Conservatives) invented, procured and vaccinated the population. Very much the view on the ground. May is going to see Tories with most seats.
    He's a teetotaller? Never knew that. Makes a lot of sense

    There is a puritan edge to governance in Wales. Puritanism, as in: "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy"
    It's amazing how long-lasting culture is. You go to Massachusetts and everyone there thinks of themselves as incredibly modern, but as a British person you can feel the puritanism in the air almost from the moment you step into the airport.

    The fact that 20 year olds aren't allowed to drink beer, and so on.
This discussion has been closed.