Thanks for the header - I've heard a very little bit of chatter about this late last year, but it may be too late timewise.
In other news, at least one Council has formally told Raise the Colours to cease and desist from abusing their lamp posts like incontinent labradors:
Oxfordshire County Council has today issued a formal legal notice to Raise the Colours in response to their continued placing of flags across Oxfordshire.
This notice requires an individual or organisation to stop a specified activity. The council has taken this action following the repeated installation of flags on or near highways without consent.
If the group does not comply with the letter, the council will consider all available options to include, but not limited to, civil and criminal proceedings against the organisation and individuals affiliated with it to prevent further unauthorised action.
Councillor Liz Leffman, Leader of Oxfordshire County Council, said: “The scale and persistence of this activity is affecting communities across Oxfordshire.
“We are proud of our diverse communities in Oxfordshire and of being the first county council to be awarded Local Authority of Sanctuary status. We proudly fly the Union Jack and St George’s flags, which are visible symbols of democracy and unity.
“However, the widespread installation of flags by Raise the Colours is not a sign of patriotism. It is an act of intimidation and division that is having a real and damaging impact on our communities.. https://news.oxfordshire.gov.uk/unauthorised-flags/
This seems like a stupid thing to do, especially if they actually want them to stop.
Left alone, people will probably get bored of putting them up. Making a big fuss about it means there will be a renewed attraction to do it to "stick it to the man".
As for "Local authority of sanctuary status", haven't they got more important things to be doing, like filling in potholes and organising bin collections?
“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…”
Bring it on
Tell him to get the fuck out of Mildenhall and Lakenheath and block access to Fairford and Chagos.
“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…”
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…”
Starmer is losing to his right, but more so his left with the Greens dramatic appearance on the scene with Polanski leadership
I think it is fair to say that Starmer simply does not have the political skills to be a PM, and is terrified of leadership delegating decisions to others ('It hasn't passed my desk') and now telling industry his government cannot do everything, notwithstanding their anti business rhetoric and ham-fisted tax decisions
I just cannot understand how telling resident doctors he will close off 4,000 training places if they do not call off their strike is anyway a positive step
On Iran he is again losing from the right and left and went into this crisis with his polling already on the floor
Overnight a More In Common poll just confirms how cynical the electorate have become of Starmer and his government:
Do you think that the following is true or false ?
Morgan McSweeney faked the theft of his phone in order to hide messages between him and Peter Mandelson
Definitely true 15%
Probably true 59% Total True 74%
Probably false 22%
Definitely false 4% Total False 26%
Even 70% of labour, 74% Lib Dens and 82% Greens thought total true
I would add that it is not discussed much, but the Lib Dems seem marooned and if anything may also have a problem with the Greens
That fails the neutral question polling test.
Starmer is the only credible leader the UK has right now.
Certainly we don't have one to the left and certainly not war mongers to the right.
“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…”
Bring it on
Tell him to get the fuck out of Mildenhall and Lakenheath and block access to Fairford and Chagos.
Sell Chagos to China
Alternatively, tell him that we’re right behind his MidEast war as soon as the Ukraine war is sorted by Putin’s defeat.
As I was saying at the weekend when first pitched by Far right Israeli cabinet member, Smotrich.
Greater Israel will now include the annexation of S Lebanon to the Litani river
‘ BREAKING: Israel will establish a buffer zone inside southern Lebanon and maintain control over the entire area up to the Litani River, Israel's defence minister has said
Starmer is losing to his right, but more so his left with the Greens dramatic appearance on the scene with Polanski leadership
I think it is fair to say that Starmer simply does not have the political skills to be a PM, and is terrified of leadership delegating decisions to others ('It hasn't passed my desk') and now telling industry his government cannot do everything, notwithstanding their anti business rhetoric and ham-fisted tax decisions
I just cannot understand how telling resident doctors he will close off 4,000 training places if they do not call off their strike is anyway a positive step
On Iran he is again losing from the right and left and went into this crisis with his polling already on the floor
Overnight a More In Common poll just confirms how cynical the electorate have become of Starmer and his government:
Do you think that the following is true or false ?
Morgan McSweeney faked the theft of his phone in order to hide messages between him and Peter Mandelson
Definitely true 15%
Probably true 59% Total True 74%
Probably false 22%
Definitely false 4% Total False 26%
Even 70% of labour, 74% Lib Dens and 82% Greens thought total true
I would add that it is not discussed much, but the Lib Dems seem marooned and if anything may also have a problem with the Greens
That fails the neutral question polling test.
Starmer is the only credible leader the UK has right now.
Certainly we don't have one to the left and certainly not war mongers to the right.
“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…”
Bring it on
Tell him to get the fuck out of Mildenhall and Lakenheath and block access to Fairford and Chagos.
Sell Chagos to China
Alternatively, tell him that we’re right behind his MidEast war as soon as the Ukraine war is sorted by Putin’s defeat.
The Ayrshire hotelier is up and ranting about the UK.
Why is he up? Has somebody provided a 13 year old girl for him again?
All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT
“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…”
Bring it on
Tell him to get the fuck out of Mildenhall and Lakenheath and block access to Fairford and Chagos.
Sell Chagos to China
Fine sentiments. But meanwhile the BBC is leading the 1pm news bulletins with the headline that King Charles' state visit in late April will go ahead.
“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…”
“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…”
“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…”
Bring it on
Tell him to get the fuck out of Mildenhall and Lakenheath and block access to Fairford and Chagos.
Sell Chagos to China
Fine sentiments. But meanwhile the BBC is leading the 1pm news bulletins with the headline that King Charles' state visit in late April will go ahead.
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
The Ayrshire hotelier is up and ranting about the UK.
Why is he up? Has somebody provided a 13 year old girl for him again?
All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT
If it's there for the taking, why has he withdrawn the US Navy? Why isn't he stealing it himself?
(Also, is he right about the US supplies? @rcs1000 's post suggest not, but I'm not an expert.)
The US certainly manufacturers various grades of aviation kerosene. I would doubt whether they have “lots” - more than civil and military consumption?
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…”
Bring it on
Tell him to get the fuck out of Mildenhall and Lakenheath and block access to Fairford and Chagos.
Sell Chagos to China
Alternatively, tell him that we’re right behind his MidEast war as soon as the Ukraine war is sorted by Putin’s defeat.
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
Trump is many things but he is not Hitler and he was elected by the US electorate to be their President and in 2024 even won the popular vote. The King has to visit other heads of state whatever his views of them and I doubt he wants to go to the US independence celebrations of the removal of his ancestor King George III as head of state of the then American colonies much either
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
Thanks for the header - I've heard a very little bit of chatter about this late last year, but it may be too late timewise.
In other news, at least one Council has formally told Raise the Colours to cease and desist from abusing their lamp posts like incontinent labradors:
Oxfordshire County Council has today issued a formal legal notice to Raise the Colours in response to their continued placing of flags across Oxfordshire.
This notice requires an individual or organisation to stop a specified activity. The council has taken this action following the repeated installation of flags on or near highways without consent.
If the group does not comply with the letter, the council will consider all available options to include, but not limited to, civil and criminal proceedings against the organisation and individuals affiliated with it to prevent further unauthorised action.
Councillor Liz Leffman, Leader of Oxfordshire County Council, said: “The scale and persistence of this activity is affecting communities across Oxfordshire.
“We are proud of our diverse communities in Oxfordshire and of being the first county council to be awarded Local Authority of Sanctuary status. We proudly fly the Union Jack and St George’s flags, which are visible symbols of democracy and unity.
“However, the widespread installation of flags by Raise the Colours is not a sign of patriotism. It is an act of intimidation and division that is having a real and damaging impact on our communities.. https://news.oxfordshire.gov.uk/unauthorised-flags/
This seems like a stupid thing to do, especially if they actually want them to stop.
Left alone, people will probably get bored of putting them up. Making a big fuss about it means there will be a renewed attraction to do it to "stick it to the man".
As for "Local authority of sanctuary status", haven't they got more important things to be doing, like filling in potholes and organising bin collections?
Whatever the philosophical arguments pro and con, I thought the painting of red crosses on min-roundabouts was very pretty, a definite plus to a boring bit of street furniture. I saw someone, somewhere had started planting flowers in potholes that had gone unrepaired for ages - that's lovely too and helps drivers spot them.
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
Starmer needs to make Reform’s support for Trump a campaign issue.
Rupert Lowe's early condemnation of the war could give Restore a boost at Reform's expense. This was his statement after the initial bombings:
The consequences of these bombings in Iran are VAST. It is going to be brutal, for all of us. Reform and Farage should have thought far more carefully about that before cheering on this war.
Our political party's priority is the British people - that is Restore Britain's only priority.
Slightly random idea, but which could partially solve the problem: Bin the Lords, and replace it with a weighed national vote.
So imagine Reform get 30% nationally, Labour, Tories, Greens get 20% each, Libdems 10%. (I'm pretending the nationalists and minor parties don't exist for simplicity.
The Commons (and government) function as now. Reform Majority gov.
The Lord's is replaced by the votes of the MPs weighed by their parties national share. This weighed vote cannot ammend legislation, but a bill must win a straight up yes/no vote by the weighed to become law.
So, for the numbers I give above: Each Ref MP gets a vote worth 30%/350 = 0.086% Each Lab MP gets a vote worth 20%/75 = 0.267% Each Tory MP gets a vote worth 20%/60 = 0.333% Each Green MP gets a vote worth 20%/90 = 0.222% Each Lib MP gets a vote worth 10%/75 = 0.133% (the whole chamber should sum to ~100%)
Lots of wins with this, including the following obvious ones: You retain the constituency link. You generally have a majority government, but that government is constrained by only being able to pass legislation supported by MPs supported by >50% of all voters. There's no duplication of representation, saving loads of cash.
I don't think there is much appetite on either side of the aisle in the US to be having forces in Europe, less still risking troops to secure Europe's oil supply. Almost half of Americans are not of European descent, and most of those that are it is now a distant past thing.
The likes of JD Vance have no interest, and I don't think the next generation of Democrats would be deploying troops either absent a humanitarian peacekeeper angle.
Why did the Tories spend none of the time in government digging up oil? It’s bizarre they’ve suddenly discovered a load of apparently game changing things.
“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…”
Bring it on
Tell him to get the fuck out of Mildenhall and Lakenheath and block access to Fairford and Chagos.
Sell Chagos to China
A response almost as irrational as the provocation itself.
“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…”
I have a suggestion for Trump...GTF.
That won't keep our planes flying.
The only reason the Strait is closed is because of Trump and his Israeli friends. I don't think groveling to him now is really going to help us in the slightest.
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
🇬🇧🇺🇸 On advice of His Majesty’s Government, and at the invitation of The President of the United States, The King and Queen will undertake a State Visit to the United States of America. Their Majesties’ programme will celebrate the historic connections and the modern bilateral relationship between the UK and the US, marking the 250th anniversary of American Independence.
I don't think there is much appetite on either side of the aisle in the US to be having forces in Europe, less still risking troops to secure Europe's oil supply. Almost half of Americans are not of European descent, and most of those that are it is now a distant past thing.
The likes of JD Vance have no interest, and I don't think the next generation of Democrats would be deploying troops either absent a humanitarian peacekeeper angle.
Depends Harris backed US military aid to Ukraine and troops still in Europe but has opposed US strikes on Iran
Slightly random idea, but which could partially solve the problem: Bin the Lords, and replace it with a weighed national vote.
So imagine Reform get 30% nationally, Labour, Tories, Greens get 20% each, Libdems 10%. (I'm pretending the nationalists and minor parties don't exist for simplicity.
The Commons (and government) function as now. Reform Majority gov.
The Lord's is replaced by the votes of the MPs weighed by their parties national share. This weighed vote cannot ammend legislation, but a bill must win a straight up yes/no vote by the weighed to become law.
So, for the numbers I give above: Each Ref MP gets a vote worth 30%/350 = 0.086% Each Lab MP gets a vote worth 20%/75 = 0.267% Each Tory MP gets a vote worth 20%/60 = 0.333% Each Green MP gets a vote worth 20%/90 = 0.222% Each Lib MP gets a vote worth 10%/75 = 0.133% (the whole chamber should sum to ~100%)
Lots of wins with this, including the following obvious ones: You retain the constituency link. You generally have a majority government, but that government is constrained by only being able to pass legislation supported by MPs supported by >50% of all voters. There's no duplication of representation, saving loads of cash.
The upper house would say they had a mandate to block not just revise Commons legislation and more of a proportional fair electoral mandate than the lower house
Slightly random idea, but which could partially solve the problem: Bin the Lords, and replace it with a weighed national vote.
So imagine Reform get 30% nationally, Labour, Tories, Greens get 20% each, Libdems 10%. (I'm pretending the nationalists and minor parties don't exist for simplicity.
The Commons (and government) function as now. Reform Majority gov.
The Lord's is replaced by the votes of the MPs weighed by their parties national share. This weighed vote cannot ammend legislation, but a bill must win a straight up yes/no vote by the weighed to become law.
So, for the numbers I give above: Each Ref MP gets a vote worth 30%/350 = 0.086% Each Lab MP gets a vote worth 20%/75 = 0.267% Each Tory MP gets a vote worth 20%/60 = 0.333% Each Green MP gets a vote worth 20%/90 = 0.222% Each Lib MP gets a vote worth 10%/75 = 0.133% (the whole chamber should sum to ~100%)
Lots of wins with this, including the following obvious ones: You retain the constituency link. You generally have a majority government, but that government is constrained by only being able to pass legislation supported by MPs supported by >50% of all voters. There's no duplication of representation, saving loads of cash.
Won't ever happen, it fails the 'Sinecure for our Mates' test.
I don't think there is much appetite on either side of the aisle in the US to be having forces in Europe, less still risking troops to secure Europe's oil supply. Almost half of Americans are not of European descent, and most of those that are it is now a distant past thing.
The likes of JD Vance have no interest, and I don't think the next generation of Democrats would be deploying troops either absent a humanitarian peacekeeper angle.
That's nonsense.
However it polls, the US get enormous strategic value from being able to station forces in Europe. The loss of those bases would make projection of power far more difficult and far more extensive for them.
And there is in any event strong bipartisan support for NATO membership in Congress - and majority support among the public, though much more skewed between the parties.
Of course if the US truly wants to fully retreat from influence over half the globe, then that might make sense. But it would be the diametric opposite of 'MAGA'.
Fewer flights because of shortages by Friday, in Northern Europe and the UK. Looks as though we're about to get some unexpected carbon reductions, and economic tourism effects, in many different countries.
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
Agree. What question you want to answer and what problem you want to resolve governs the rest. Trollope's political novels - the Palliser sequence of six - give a bit of a picture of a very imperfect system but one in which government was less in charge of parliament and parliament mattered quite a lot. factions were quote fluid.
I'd be more open to changing my view if PR advocates could stop pretending it's axiomatic, and actually make arguments.
For one thing, given a situation like the present, with four or five parties having significant electoral support, and none in any position to form a majority, PR would at least provide a Parliament roughly approximating the views of the voters.
FPTP is likely to end up with hugely disproportionate representation, along with the necessity if still forming a coalition to govern.
Worst of both worlds.
And the idea that individual MPs provide meaningful representation for their constituents (with a few honorable exceptions) is a bit of a joke.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
First cracks in US-UK security co-operation are appearing in working relationships btwn diplomats, officials & military personnel
US officials embedded in Whitehall are having access to sensitive info restricted, while US basing requests have become “stickier”, FT told
UK diplomats say their traditional channels in Washington have narrowed under second Trump presidency, with access increasingly dependent on a small group of advisers https://x.com/LOS_Fisher/status/2038910446573392103
Slightly random idea, but which could partially solve the problem: Bin the Lords, and replace it with a weighed national vote.
So imagine Reform get 30% nationally, Labour, Tories, Greens get 20% each, Libdems 10%. (I'm pretending the nationalists and minor parties don't exist for simplicity.
The Commons (and government) function as now. Reform Majority gov.
The Lord's is replaced by the votes of the MPs weighed by their parties national share. This weighed vote cannot ammend legislation, but a bill must win a straight up yes/no vote by the weighed to become law.
So, for the numbers I give above: Each Ref MP gets a vote worth 30%/350 = 0.086% Each Lab MP gets a vote worth 20%/75 = 0.267% Each Tory MP gets a vote worth 20%/60 = 0.333% Each Green MP gets a vote worth 20%/90 = 0.222% Each Lib MP gets a vote worth 10%/75 = 0.133% (the whole chamber should sum to ~100%)
Lots of wins with this, including the following obvious ones: You retain the constituency link. You generally have a majority government, but that government is constrained by only being able to pass legislation supported by MPs supported by >50% of all voters. There's no duplication of representation, saving loads of cash.
It is imaginative, but I think it solves one problem by creating several worse ones.
The first is that it would split democratic legitimacy in two. The Commons would still be elected on a constituency basis and would still form the government, but the decisive legislative authority would then rest on a different principle altogether, namely a national weighted party vote. That means the government would derive authority from one electoral logic and legislation from another. I think that is constitutionally unstable.
Secondly, it would make party labels even more important than they are now. An MP’s effective voting power would no longer rest simply on being elected for a place, but on the national performance of his party label. So you would retain the constituency link formally, but hollow it out in substance. The member would still sit for a seat, but his legislative weight would be determined elsewhere.
Thirdly, it would greatly strengthen central party control. If an MP’s parliamentary weight depends on national party share, then party affiliation becomes even more decisive than under either FPTP or most PR systems. You would not be constraining party politics. You would be constitutionalising it.
And there is a more basic objection. It is not clear to me why an MP for a constituency should cast a vote in Parliament that is worth materially more or less than another MP’s vote depending on how well their party did elsewhere in the country. At that point you no longer really have a House of Commons in the traditional sense. You have a chamber of locally elected delegates whose legislative force is retrospectively adjusted by national party arithmetic.
So while I can see the attraction as a clever hybrid, I think it combines the vices of both systems more than the virtues. It keeps FPTP for choosing governments, but then imports PR logic at the legislative stage in a way that weakens the equality of members, strengthens party centrality, and muddies where authority really lies.
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
ON topic, I have accidentally acquired a “latten bowl” from the 15th century. Probably made in Nuremberg, buried in English soil for centuries. Mine was very likely used as a finger bowl for diners to wash their hands
It’s led me down a rosy path of research to the (to me) astonishing discovery that the British commonly ate with their hands well into the 17th century. Literally spooning food with their fingers
Indeed finger-eating likely persisted in rural Ireland, the Balkans, Scandinavia into the early 20th century
For a long time forks - which emerged from Byzantium then Venetian Italy were regarded as “effeminate luxuries”
Fewer flights because of shortages by Friday, in Northern Europe and the UK. Looks as though we're about to get some unexpected carbon reductions, and economic tourism effects, in many different countries.
If you want to book CenterParcs for half term week, do it now!
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
The Ayrshire hotelier is up and ranting about the UK.
Why is he up? Has somebody provided a 13 year old girl for him again?
All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT
One other thought, what should China, which gets far more of its oil and gas from the region than we do, make of this suggestion ?
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
Agree. What question you want to answer and what problem you want to resolve governs the rest. Trollope's political novels - the Palliser sequence of six - give a bit of a picture of a very imperfect system but one in which government was less in charge of parliament and parliament mattered quite a lot. factions were quote fluid.
I'd be more open to changing my view if PR advocates could stop pretending it's axiomatic, and actually make arguments.
For one thing, given a situation like the present, with four or five parties having significant electoral support, and none in any position to form a majority, PR would at least provide a Parliament roughly approximating the views of the voters.
FPTP is likely to end up with hugely disproportionate representation, along with the necessity if still forming a coalition to govern.
Worst of both worlds.
And the idea that individual MPs provide meaningful representation for their constituents (with a few honorable exceptions) is a bit of a joke.
If MPs now provide poor representation, that seems to me an indictment of our political class and party discipline, not proof that the representative principle itself is a joke.
My objection to PR is not that it fails to reflect opinion. It is that it tends to answer the wrong question. I still think Parliament is there first to represent places through identifiable members and then to form a government. You are treating it more as a mechanism for reflecting aggregate opinion. That is the real disagreement.
If MPs are now too weak, tribal or managerial to represent their constituencies properly, I struggle to see why the answer is to lean harder into systems that make party identity still more central.
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
Fewer flights because of shortages by Friday, in Northern Europe and the UK. Looks as though we're about to get some unexpected carbon reductions, and economic tourism effects, in many different countries.
If you want to book CenterParcs for half term week, do it now!
If anyone is looking for a nice holiday closer to home, I can highly recommend Fife - East Neuk of, the Cornwall of Scotland.
1/ The US attempted to send several Iran-bound bombers to an Italian air base without prior authorisation and was refused permission by the Italian government while the aircraft were in flight. The news comes a day after Spain disclosed it was refusing US military overflights. ⬇️ https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/2038935548472021351
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
Agree. What question you want to answer and what problem you want to resolve governs the rest. Trollope's political novels - the Palliser sequence of six - give a bit of a picture of a very imperfect system but one in which government was less in charge of parliament and parliament mattered quite a lot. factions were quote fluid.
I'd be more open to changing my view if PR advocates could stop pretending it's axiomatic, and actually make arguments.
For one thing, given a situation like the present, with four or five parties having significant electoral support, and none in any position to form a majority, PR would at least provide a Parliament roughly approximating the views of the voters.
FPTP is likely to end up with hugely disproportionate representation, along with the necessity if still forming a coalition to govern.
Worst of both worlds.
And the idea that individual MPs provide meaningful representation for their constituents (with a few honorable exceptions) is a bit of a joke.
I'm taking my kids (11 & 15) to London for the first time for half term. Been a since I've been for leisure, mostly works and conferences. Besides the obvious ones, any recommendations?
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
Your argument would be a better one if there were not dozens/a hundred or two Andrew Rosindells re-elected time after time because they have the right colour rosette and no other qualification. I might have been tempted to vote Conservative in 2010, but the candidate put up by that party made it a no-brainer for me to cast my vote against him. If there had been a more sensible candidate under STV I might have voted for them. So your last sentence summarises the whole problem, people vote for the rosette not the person, so calibre doesn't come into it in safe seats.
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…”
Sounds like a feather in Starmer's cap.
Trump is doing for Starmer what he did for Carney in the run up to the Canadian national elections.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
I think you are emotionally wedded to the idea of FPTP. But I think that even you know, deep down, that it's had its day.
1/ The US attempted to send several Iran-bound bombers to an Italian air base without prior authorisation and was refused permission by the Italian government while the aircraft were in flight. The news comes a day after Spain disclosed it was refusing US military overflights. ⬇️ https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/2038935548472021351
Not flying from Greece either, at the moment I think too. The Europeans are building up their naval presence all the way across the Mediterranean, but the U.S.' war is not too popular.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
Your argument would be a better one if there were not dozens/a hundred or two Andrew Rosindells re-elected time after time because they have the right colour rosette and no other qualification. I might have been tempted to vote Conservative in 2010, but the candidate put up by that party made it a no-brainer for me to cast my vote against him. If there had been a more sensible candidate under STV I might have voted for them. So your last sentence summarises the whole problem, people vote for the rosette not the person, so calibre doesn't come into it in safe seats.
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
I think that is a fair criticism of safe seats, and one of the strongest against FPTP.
Where a party label is so dominant that almost any candidate can be returned, the theory of personal representation is obviously degraded in practice. In such places the real election often becomes selection, and the electorate are left choosing less between persons than between entrenched tribal loyalties. I would not deny that for a moment.
But I still think that is a pathology of FPTP, not its essence. The underlying principle remains that one person is elected to answer for one place. My argument is that this is a sound representative ideal even if our degraded party culture often realises it badly.
Your STV point is a stronger one. It may indeed give voters within a party tradition more room to discriminate between candidates of different quality. I can readily see the attraction of that. My hesitation is that the cure comes with its own constitutional cost: one gains more voter choice within the party slate, but loses the clarity of one member being answerable for one constituency as a whole.
So I would put it this way: safe seats show that FPTP often fails to live up to its own representative promise. I am not yet persuaded that the answer is to abandon that promise in favour of a model that makes representation more diffuse and less clear, even if in some cases it offers a better menu of candidates.
Safe seats are a serious vice of FPTP. I just remain unconvinced that the remedy is to turn representation from a public office into a comparative shopping exercise.
“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…”
Sounds like a feather in Starmer's cap.
Trump is doing for Starmer what he did for Carney in the run up to the Canadian national elections.
Carney had the good sense to play into it and criticise Trump/stand up for Canada. Starmer is still equivocating too much.
I think King Charles III might become as infamous King Edward VIII.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
I think you are emotionally wedded to the idea of FPTP. But I think that even you know, deep down, that it's had its day.
I am wedded to the representative principle behind FPTP, yes. Guilty as charged.
What I do not accept is that because our current political class often fails to live up to that model, the model itself is therefore obsolete. That seems to me too quick.
FPTP may be working worse than it once did. But I still think there is constitutional value in one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to it. My objection to PR is not sentimentality. It is that I think it often solves a different problem from the one I regard as fundamental.
So I am indeed attached to the principles behind it. That seems to me rather better than being attached to a prettier spreadsheet.
Karl Turner MP @KarlTurnerMP I am being told that I have had the whip suspended but I have not had any notification from the whips about this. It seems journalists have been told but I have not. 1:45 pm · 31 Mar 2026 · 1,666 Views
I'm taking my kids (11 & 15) to London for the first time for half term. Been a since I've been for leisure, mostly works and conferences. Besides the obvious ones, any recommendations?
The museums. Science Museum in particular is now very good for teenagers, lots of practical exhibits.
BM, V&A, NHM, SM, all absolutely world class and with free admission.
Tower of London is quite the history lesson.
The big wheel is worth a look too, if you’re good at pointing out landmarks, and be sure to walk past Downing Street and the Cenotaph.
The Ayrshire hotelier is up and ranting about the UK.
Why is he up? Has somebody provided a 13 year old girl for him again?
All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT
One other thought, what should China, which gets far more of its oil and gas from the region than we do, make of this suggestion ?
China and Iran to do a deal to guarantee the security of the country and strait. A total strategic failure for the US, and Israel. Also massively changing the global balance of power where China is seen as the safer pair of hands than the US.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
Your argument would be a better one if there were not dozens/a hundred or two Andrew Rosindells re-elected time after time because they have the right colour rosette and no other qualification. I might have been tempted to vote Conservative in 2010, but the candidate put up by that party made it a no-brainer for me to cast my vote against him. If there had been a more sensible candidate under STV I might have voted for them. So your last sentence summarises the whole problem, people vote for the rosette not the person, so calibre doesn't come into it in safe seats.
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
I think that is a fair criticism of safe seats, and one of the strongest against FPTP.
Where a party label is so dominant that almost any candidate can be returned, the theory of personal representation is obviously degraded in practice. In such places the real election often becomes selection, and the electorate are left choosing less between persons than between entrenched tribal loyalties. I would not deny that for a moment.
But I still think that is a pathology of FPTP, not its essence. The underlying principle remains that one person is elected to answer for one place. My argument is that this is a sound representative ideal even if our degraded party culture often realises it badly.
Your STV point is a stronger one. It may indeed give voters within a party tradition more room to discriminate between candidates of different quality. I can readily see the attraction of that. My hesitation is that the cure comes with its own constitutional cost: one gains more voter choice within the party slate, but loses the clarity of one member being answerable for one constituency as a whole.
So I would put it this way: safe seats show that FPTP often fails to live up to its own representative promise. I am not yet persuaded that the answer is to abandon that promise in favour of a model that makes representation more diffuse and less clear, even if in some cases it offers a better menu of candidates.
Safe seats are a serious vice of FPTP. I just remain unconvinced that the remedy is to turn representation from a public office into a comparative shopping exercise.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
Agree. What question you want to answer and what problem you want to resolve governs the rest. Trollope's political novels - the Palliser sequence of six - give a bit of a picture of a very imperfect system but one in which government was less in charge of parliament and parliament mattered quite a lot. factions were quote fluid.
I'd be more open to changing my view if PR advocates could stop pretending it's axiomatic, and actually make arguments.
For one thing, given a situation like the present, with four or five parties having significant electoral support, and none in any position to form a majority, PR would at least provide a Parliament roughly approximating the views of the voters.
FPTP is likely to end up with hugely disproportionate representation, along with the necessity if still forming a coalition to govern.
Worst of both worlds.
And the idea that individual MPs provide meaningful representation for their constituents (with a few honorable exceptions) is a bit of a joke.
If MPs now provide poor representation, that seems to me an indictment of our political class and party discipline, not proof that the representative principle itself is a joke.
My objection to PR is not that it fails to reflect opinion. It is that it tends to answer the wrong question. I still think Parliament is there first to represent places through identifiable members and then to form a government. You are treating it more as a mechanism for reflecting aggregate opinion. That is the real disagreement.
If MPs are now too weak, tribal or managerial to represent their constituencies properly, I struggle to see why the answer is to lean harder into systems that make party identity still more central.
I don't accept that's the case. You're doing your own bit of begging the question there, IMO.
Party identity - as opposed to anything the party actually stands for in practice - is baked into modern era FPTP.
A PR system at least gives the strong MPs of all parties far more of a chance to have influence in government.
If you want places to have more influence, then surely the answer to that is far stronger local government ? FPTP has served the English regions, for example, extremely badly over the last three or four decades. That's more than a passing trend.
The Ayrshire hotelier is up and ranting about the UK.
Why is he up? Has somebody provided a 13 year old girl for him again?
All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT
One other thought, what should China, which gets far more of its oil and gas from the region than we do, make of this suggestion ?
China and Iran to do a deal to guarantee the security of the country and strait. A total strategic failure for the US, and Israel. Also massively changing the global balance of power where China is seen as the safer pair of hands than the US.
It’s fair to say that the GCC nations aren’t seeing it that way.
To them, this is their best ever opportunity to get rid of the 50-year problem in the region.
I'm taking my kids (11 & 15) to London for the first time for half term. Been a since I've been for leisure, mostly works and conferences. Besides the obvious ones, any recommendations?
Have them figure out the right Tube routes to get where you're going.
I'm taking my kids (11 & 15) to London for the first time for half term. Been a since I've been for leisure, mostly works and conferences. Besides the obvious ones, any recommendations?
The museums. Science Museum in particular is now very good for teenagers, lots of practical exhibits.
BM, V&A, NHM, SM, all absolutely world class and with free admission.
Tower of London is quite the history lesson.
The big wheel is worth a look too, if you’re good at pointing out landmarks, and be sure to walk past Downing Street and the Cenotaph.
Tea at Fortnums, don't get your phone out in Picadilly though, if you want to keep it.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
Your argument would be a better one if there were not dozens/a hundred or two Andrew Rosindells re-elected time after time because they have the right colour rosette and no other qualification. I might have been tempted to vote Conservative in 2010, but the candidate put up by that party made it a no-brainer for me to cast my vote against him. If there had been a more sensible candidate under STV I might have voted for them. So your last sentence summarises the whole problem, people vote for the rosette not the person, so calibre doesn't come into it in safe seats.
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
I think that is a fair criticism of safe seats, and one of the strongest against FPTP.
Where a party label is so dominant that almost any candidate can be returned, the theory of personal representation is obviously degraded in practice. In such places the real election often becomes selection, and the electorate are left choosing less between persons than between entrenched tribal loyalties. I would not deny that for a moment.
But I still think that is a pathology of FPTP, not its essence. The underlying principle remains that one person is elected to answer for one place. My argument is that this is a sound representative ideal even if our degraded party culture often realises it badly.
Your STV point is a stronger one. It may indeed give voters within a party tradition more room to discriminate between candidates of different quality. I can readily see the attraction of that. My hesitation is that the cure comes with its own constitutional cost: one gains more voter choice within the party slate, but loses the clarity of one member being answerable for one constituency as a whole.
So I would put it this way: safe seats show that FPTP often fails to live up to its own representative promise. I am not yet persuaded that the answer is to abandon that promise in favour of a model that makes representation more diffuse and less clear, even if in some cases it offers a better menu of candidates.
Safe seats are a serious vice of FPTP. I just remain unconvinced that the remedy is to turn representation from a public office into a comparative shopping exercise.
STV in multi member constituencies means that many more people would have be represented by a local MP from the party they voted for.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
Your argument would be a better one if there were not dozens/a hundred or two Andrew Rosindells re-elected time after time because they have the right colour rosette and no other qualification. I might have been tempted to vote Conservative in 2010, but the candidate put up by that party made it a no-brainer for me to cast my vote against him. If there had been a more sensible candidate under STV I might have voted for them. So your last sentence summarises the whole problem, people vote for the rosette not the person, so calibre doesn't come into it in safe seats.
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
I think that is a fair criticism of safe seats, and one of the strongest against FPTP.
Where a party label is so dominant that almost any candidate can be returned, the theory of personal representation is obviously degraded in practice. In such places the real election often becomes selection, and the electorate are left choosing less between persons than between entrenched tribal loyalties. I would not deny that for a moment.
But I still think that is a pathology of FPTP, not its essence. The underlying principle remains that one person is elected to answer for one place. My argument is that this is a sound representative ideal even if our degraded party culture often realises it badly.
Your STV point is a stronger one. It may indeed give voters within a party tradition more room to discriminate between candidates of different quality. I can readily see the attraction of that. My hesitation is that the cure comes with its own constitutional cost: one gains more voter choice within the party slate, but loses the clarity of one member being answerable for one constituency as a whole.
So I would put it this way: safe seats show that FPTP often fails to live up to its own representative promise. I am not yet persuaded that the answer is to abandon that promise in favour of a model that makes representation more diffuse and less clear, even if in some cases it offers a better menu of candidates.
Safe seats are a serious vice of FPTP. I just remain unconvinced that the remedy is to turn representation from a public office into a comparative shopping exercise.
You're nearly there, on your road to Damascus.
sorry, this road is paved with too many good intentions...
Karl Turner MP @KarlTurnerMP I am being told that I have had the whip suspended but I have not had any notification from the whips about this. It seems journalists have been told but I have not. 1:45 pm · 31 Mar 2026 · 1,666 Views
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
Your argument would be a better one if there were not dozens/a hundred or two Andrew Rosindells re-elected time after time because they have the right colour rosette and no other qualification. I might have been tempted to vote Conservative in 2010, but the candidate put up by that party made it a no-brainer for me to cast my vote against him. If there had been a more sensible candidate under STV I might have voted for them. So your last sentence summarises the whole problem, people vote for the rosette not the person, so calibre doesn't come into it in safe seats.
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
I think that is a fair criticism of safe seats, and one of the strongest against FPTP.
Where a party label is so dominant that almost any candidate can be returned, the theory of personal representation is obviously degraded in practice. In such places the real election often becomes selection, and the electorate are left choosing less between persons than between entrenched tribal loyalties. I would not deny that for a moment.
But I still think that is a pathology of FPTP, not its essence. The underlying principle remains that one person is elected to answer for one place. My argument is that this is a sound representative ideal even if our degraded party culture often realises it badly.
Your STV point is a stronger one. It may indeed give voters within a party tradition more room to discriminate between candidates of different quality. I can readily see the attraction of that. My hesitation is that the cure comes with its own constitutional cost: one gains more voter choice within the party slate, but loses the clarity of one member being answerable for one constituency as a whole.
So I would put it this way: safe seats show that FPTP often fails to live up to its own representative promise. I am not yet persuaded that the answer is to abandon that promise in favour of a model that makes representation more diffuse and less clear, even if in some cases it offers a better menu of candidates.
Safe seats are a serious vice of FPTP. I just remain unconvinced that the remedy is to turn representation from a public office into a comparative shopping exercise.
STV in multi member constituencies means that many more people would have be represented by a local MP from the party they voted for.
Your MP is your MP regardless of how you voted. They represent the constituency, not just their own supporters.
That is exactly what I think gets lost in a lot of the PR case. It starts from the premise that voters ought to be matched up with a representative from their preferred party, as though Parliament were a customer service desk. I think that weakens the representative principle rather than strengthening it.
An interesting conversation with my (female, ex-police officer, guessed her age correctly - said "30s" and she is mid-40s) plumber over a tenant gas safety inspection.
- Numbers of landlords have been chasing up the gas safety status of their properties.
- The new "Tenants Rights Act" regime comes in tomorrow. Landlords who have not paid attention take note.
- Penalties for being out of date are even more vicious than they have been previously - up to £30k Civil Penalty for a single offence. That's by a Council off their own bat before it gets near a Court. That will motivate serious attention being paid. A first not serious offence is likely to cost an entire year's rent. *
- Life seems to be OK for plumbers - mine got into problems last year because of an unintended overshoot of the VAT threshold. And she is now considering going Limited to avoid the monthly tax regimen.
- People with heat pumps seem to currently have problems, even in new builds - in that she has an (incorrect) impression that ASHPs have a maximum temperature they can heat up to, which is uncomfortable, so they are cold houses. Wearing my Buildhub hat, this is likely to be ASHPs which have not been set up correctly.
But her cited example had small radiators, which sounds like developer-skimp. The normal way to adapt a system from a boiler to a Air-to-Water Heat Pump could simply be to replace single radiators with doubles, which adds 50-60% capacity and would work at a lower running temperature of say 40C rather than 55C.
I would dearly love to get gas out of all my properties for A2A heat pumps, just because it is such High Consequences (in terms of tenant injury or deaths) to get something wrong, or if something happens outside my control.
* I would apply this principle to dodgy drivers who commit lots of offences. Make a totting-up ban 6 years not 6 months, and they would soon pull their socks up.
ON topic, I have accidentally acquired a “latten bowl” from the 15th century. Probably made in Nuremberg, buried in English soil for centuries. Mine was very likely used as a finger bowl for diners to wash their hands
It’s led me down a rosy path of research to the (to me) astonishing discovery that the British commonly ate with their hands well into the 17th century.
They commonly still do, along with much of the globe. "It's finger lickin' good."
I'm taking my kids (11 & 15) to London for the first time for half term. Been a since I've been for leisure, mostly works and conferences. Besides the obvious ones, any recommendations?
Have them figure out the right Tube routes to get where you're going.
lol... true, true
Is it worth getting visitor oyster cards (especially for the kids)?
The Ayrshire hotelier is up and ranting about the UK.
Why is he up? Has somebody provided a 13 year old girl for him again?
All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT
One other thought, what should China, which gets far more of its oil and gas from the region than we do, make of this suggestion ?
China and Iran to do a deal to guarantee the security of the country and strait. A total strategic failure for the US, and Israel. Also massively changing the global balance of power where China is seen as the safer pair of hands than the US.
It’s fair to say that the GCC nations aren’t seeing it that way.
To them, this is their best ever opportunity to get rid of the 50-year problem in the region.
The problem in the region is 78 years old and it wont make it to 100
I'm taking my kids (11 & 15) to London for the first time for half term. Been a since I've been for leisure, mostly works and conferences. Besides the obvious ones, any recommendations?
The museums. Science Museum in particular is now very good for teenagers, lots of practical exhibits.
BM, V&A, NHM, SM, all absolutely world class and with free admission.
Tower of London is quite the history lesson.
The big wheel is worth a look too, if you’re good at pointing out landmarks, and be sure to walk past Downing Street and the Cenotaph.
Tea at Fortnums, don't get your phone out in Picadilly though, if you want to keep it.
If you want afternoon tea at Fortnums, they have a resteraunt at The Royal Exchange, by Bank.
Because it is a quadrangle, with a glass roof, the resteraunt is in a large space - something like dining outside but without the British weather
US Defence Secretary Hegseth has concluded a press briefing “in the name of Jesus Christ”.
Good God! Of those around Trump, only Vance and Rubio have any propect of a future, (as President) however unlikely. The rest of them will vanish from view leaving only a nasty smell.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar has travelled to China, with Islamabad stepping up efforts to mediate, as Beijing called on Israel and the US to stop the war.
I'm taking my kids (11 & 15) to London for the first time for half term. Been a since I've been for leisure, mostly works and conferences. Besides the obvious ones, any recommendations?
Have them figure out the right Tube routes to get where you're going.
lol... true, true
Is it worth getting visitor oyster cards (especially for the kids)?
I'm down there so infrequently I just wave and pay - but I have no idea how that works with a traveling family group.
Comments
Left alone, people will probably get bored of putting them up. Making a big fuss about it means there will be a renewed attraction to do it to "stick it to the man".
As for "Local authority of sanctuary status", haven't they got more important things to be doing, like filling in potholes and organising bin collections?
Tell him to get the fuck out of Mildenhall and Lakenheath and block access to Fairford and Chagos.
Sell Chagos to China
That won't land well on her declared expenses.
With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
‘The hard part is done’
Certainly we don't have one to the left and certainly not war mongers to the right.
As I was saying at the weekend when first pitched by Far right Israeli cabinet member, Smotrich.
Greater Israel will now include the annexation of S Lebanon to the Litani river
‘ BREAKING: Israel will establish a buffer zone inside southern Lebanon and maintain control over the entire area up to the Litani River, Israel's defence minister has said
Live updates: trib.al/uFbzKFD
📺 Sky 501 and YT’
https://x.com/skynews/status/2038925898959773779?s=61
But I do agree he is the best available option.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjd8nkezdyxo
King Charles and Queen Camilla will meet US President Donald Trump in late April, as a state visit to the United States has been confirmed by Buckingham Palace.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjd8nkezdyxo
I know a few Cannucks who are very disappointed with this visit.
A wise move to go, KC3 will find himself answering far more questions about his brother and Epstein than about Iran and politics.
Really bad timing and the UK is beginning to resemble a punchbag .
The consequences of these bombings in Iran are VAST. It is going to be brutal, for all of us. Reform and Farage should have thought far more carefully about that before cheering on this war.
Our political party's priority is the British people - that is Restore Britain's only priority.
So imagine Reform get 30% nationally, Labour, Tories, Greens get 20% each, Libdems 10%. (I'm pretending the nationalists and minor parties don't exist for simplicity.
Ref get 350mps, Lab 75, Tories 60, Greens 90, Libs 75.
The Commons (and government) function as now. Reform Majority gov.
The Lord's is replaced by the votes of the MPs weighed by their parties national share. This weighed vote cannot ammend legislation, but a bill must win a straight up yes/no vote by the weighed to become law.
So, for the numbers I give above:
Each Ref MP gets a vote worth 30%/350 = 0.086%
Each Lab MP gets a vote worth 20%/75 = 0.267%
Each Tory MP gets a vote worth 20%/60 = 0.333%
Each Green MP gets a vote worth 20%/90 = 0.222%
Each Lib MP gets a vote worth 10%/75 = 0.133%
(the whole chamber should sum to ~100%)
Lots of wins with this, including the following obvious ones:
You retain the constituency link.
You generally have a majority government, but that government is constrained by only being able to pass legislation supported by MPs supported by >50% of all voters.
There's no duplication of representation, saving loads of cash.
The likes of JD Vance have no interest, and I don't think the next generation of Democrats would be deploying troops either absent a humanitarian peacekeeper angle.
Death toll in Israeli genocidal war on Gaza reaches 72,285 - Al Jazeera
The King showing solidarity with his subjects.
https://x.com/royalfamily/status/2038949626875613423
🇬🇧🇺🇸 On advice of His Majesty’s Government, and at the invitation of The President of the United States, The King and Queen will undertake a State Visit to the United States of America. Their Majesties’ programme will celebrate the historic connections and the modern bilateral relationship between the UK and the US, marking the 250th anniversary of American Independence.
aid to Ukraine and troops still in
Europe but has opposed US strikes on Iran
had a mandate to block not just
revise Commons legislation and
more of a proportional fair electoral mandate than the lower house
However it polls, the US get enormous strategic value from being able to station forces in Europe. The loss of those bases would make projection of power far more difficult and far more extensive for them.
And there is in any event strong bipartisan support for NATO membership in Congress - and majority support among the public, though much more skewed between the parties.
Of course if the US truly wants to fully retreat from influence over half the globe, then that might make sense. But it would be the diametric opposite of 'MAGA'.
Fewer flights because of shortages by Friday, in Northern Europe and the UK. Looks as though we're about to get some unexpected carbon reductions, and economic tourism effects, in many different countries.
at the White House not ceremonial heads of state alone
FPTP is likely to end up with hugely disproportionate representation, along with the necessity if still forming a coalition to govern.
Worst of both worlds.
And the idea that individual MPs provide meaningful representation for their constituents (with a few honorable exceptions) is a bit of a joke.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
US officials embedded in Whitehall are having access to sensitive info restricted, while US basing requests have become “stickier”, FT told
UK diplomats say their traditional channels in Washington have narrowed under second Trump presidency, with access increasingly dependent on a small group of advisers
https://x.com/LOS_Fisher/status/2038910446573392103
The first is that it would split democratic legitimacy in two. The Commons would still be elected on a constituency basis and would still form the government, but the decisive legislative authority would then rest on a different principle altogether, namely a national weighted party vote. That means the government would derive authority from one electoral logic and legislation from another. I think that is constitutionally unstable.
Secondly, it would make party labels even more important than they are now. An MP’s effective voting power would no longer rest simply on being elected for a place, but on the national performance of his party label. So you would retain the constituency link formally, but hollow it out in substance. The member would still sit for a seat, but his legislative weight would be determined elsewhere.
Thirdly, it would greatly strengthen central party control. If an MP’s parliamentary weight depends on national party share, then party affiliation becomes even more decisive than under either FPTP or most PR systems. You would not be constraining party politics. You would be constitutionalising it.
And there is a more basic objection. It is not clear to me why an MP for a constituency should cast a vote in Parliament that is worth materially more or less than another MP’s vote depending on how well their party did elsewhere in the country. At that point you no longer really have a House of Commons in the traditional sense. You have a chamber of locally elected delegates whose legislative force is retrospectively adjusted by national party arithmetic.
So while I can see the attraction as a clever hybrid, I think it combines the vices of both systems more than the virtues. It keeps FPTP for choosing governments, but then imports PR logic at the legislative stage in a way that weakens the equality of members, strengthens party centrality, and muddies where authority really lies.
I’ll be sorry to see Canada become a republic.
It’s led me down a rosy path of research to the (to me) astonishing discovery that the British commonly ate with their hands well into the 17th century. Literally spooning food with their fingers
Indeed finger-eating likely persisted in rural Ireland, the Balkans, Scandinavia into the early 20th century
For a long time forks - which emerged from Byzantium then Venetian Italy were regarded as “effeminate luxuries”
Both the Liberals and Conservatives
in Canada back keeping the
monarchy, only the NDP and BQ and
Maxime Bernier want a republic
My objection to PR is not that it fails to reflect opinion. It is that it tends to answer the wrong question. I still think Parliament is there first to represent places through identifiable members and then to form a government. You are treating it more as a mechanism for reflecting aggregate opinion. That is the real disagreement.
If MPs are now too weak, tribal or managerial to represent their constituencies properly, I struggle to see why the answer is to lean harder into systems that make party identity still more central.
So I don’t quite buy this sorrow
1/ The US attempted to send several Iran-bound bombers to an Italian air base without prior authorisation and was refused permission by the Italian government while the aircraft were in flight. The news comes a day after Spain disclosed it was refusing US military overflights. ⬇️
https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/2038935548472021351
I'm taking my kids (11 & 15) to London for the first time for half term.
Been a since I've been for leisure, mostly works and conferences.
Besides the obvious ones, any recommendations?
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
But I think that even you know, deep down, that it's had its day.
Meloni used to be a the "Trump Whisperer".
Where a party label is so dominant that almost any candidate can be returned, the theory of personal representation is obviously degraded in practice. In such places the real election often becomes selection, and the electorate are left choosing less between persons than between entrenched tribal loyalties. I would not deny that for a moment.
But I still think that is a pathology of FPTP, not its essence. The underlying principle remains that one person is elected to answer for one place. My argument is that this is a sound representative ideal even if our degraded party culture often realises it badly.
Your STV point is a stronger one. It may indeed give voters within a party tradition more room to discriminate between candidates of different quality. I can readily see the attraction of that. My hesitation is that the cure comes with its own constitutional cost: one gains more voter choice within the party slate, but loses the clarity of one member being answerable for one constituency as a whole.
So I would put it this way: safe seats show that FPTP often fails to live up to its own representative promise. I am not yet persuaded that the answer is to abandon that promise in favour of a model that makes representation more diffuse and less clear, even if in some cases it offers a better menu of candidates.
Safe seats are a serious vice of FPTP. I just remain unconvinced that the remedy is to turn representation from a public office into a comparative shopping exercise.
What I do not accept is that because our current political class often fails to live up to that model, the model itself is therefore obsolete. That seems to me too quick.
FPTP may be working worse than it once did. But I still think there is constitutional value in one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to it. My objection to PR is not sentimentality. It is that I think it often solves a different problem from the one I regard as fundamental.
So I am indeed attached to the principles behind it. That seems to me rather better than being attached to a prettier spreadsheet.
Karl Turner MP
@KarlTurnerMP
I am being told that I have had the whip suspended but I have not had any notification from the whips about this. It seems journalists have been told but I have not.
1:45 pm · 31 Mar 2026
·
1,666
Views
BM, V&A, NHM, SM, all absolutely world class and with free admission.
Tower of London is quite the history lesson.
The big wheel is worth a look too, if you’re good at pointing out landmarks, and be sure to walk past Downing Street and the Cenotaph.
Party identity - as opposed to anything the party actually stands for in practice - is baked into modern era FPTP.
A PR system at least gives the strong MPs of all parties far more of a chance to have influence in government.
If you want places to have more influence, then surely the answer to that is far stronger local government ?
FPTP has served the English regions, for example, extremely badly over the last three or four decades.
That's more than a passing trend.
To them, this is their best ever opportunity to get rid of the 50-year problem in the region.
I mean him, rather than Him.
That is exactly what I think gets lost in a lot of the PR case. It starts from the premise that voters ought to be matched up with a representative from their preferred party, as though Parliament were a customer service desk. I think that weakens the representative principle rather than strengthening it.
- Numbers of landlords have been chasing up the gas safety status of their properties.
- The new "Tenants Rights Act" regime comes in tomorrow. Landlords who have not paid attention take note.
- Penalties for being out of date are even more vicious than they have been previously - up to £30k Civil Penalty for a single offence. That's by a Council off their own bat before it gets near a Court. That will motivate serious attention being paid. A first not serious offence is likely to cost an entire year's rent. *
- Life seems to be OK for plumbers - mine got into problems last year because of an unintended overshoot of the VAT threshold. And she is now considering going Limited to avoid the monthly tax regimen.
- People with heat pumps seem to currently have problems, even in new builds - in that she has an (incorrect) impression that ASHPs have a maximum temperature they can heat up to, which is uncomfortable, so they are cold houses. Wearing my Buildhub hat, this is likely to be ASHPs which have not been set up correctly.
But her cited example had small radiators, which sounds like developer-skimp. The normal way to adapt a system from a boiler to a Air-to-Water Heat Pump could simply be to replace single radiators with doubles, which adds 50-60% capacity and would work at a lower running temperature of say 40C rather than 55C.
I would dearly love to get gas out of all my properties for A2A heat pumps, just because it is such High Consequences (in terms of tenant injury or deaths) to get something wrong, or if something happens outside my control.
* I would apply this principle to dodgy drivers who commit lots of offences. Make a totting-up ban 6 years not 6 months, and they would soon pull their socks up.
"It's finger lickin' good."
Is it worth getting visitor oyster cards (especially for the kids)?
Well, I think most of us feel about Hegseth it is definitely a case of 'in the name of God, go!'
Because it is a quadrangle, with a glass roof, the resteraunt is in a large space - something like dining outside but without the British weather
Of those around Trump, only Vance and Rubio have any propect of a future, (as President) however unlikely.
The rest of them will vanish from view leaving only a nasty smell.