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So, on the face of it things went pretty badly for the Liberal Democrats, who look set to end up with less sets than they had in 2005. However, you then start to look at how many people actually voted for the Liberal Democrats and you start to get pretty angry with the current system. The Conservatives gained 10,615,958 votes and currently have 302 seats. The Liberal Democrats received 6,781,005 votes (over 60% of the Conservative total) and currently have just 57 seats. That means the Conservatives have less than twice as many votes, but six times as many seats.
The results for Labour are equally unfair. Labour received 8,535,952 votes, less than two million more than the Liberal Democrats, but currently have exactly 200 more seats - nearly four times as many as the Liberal democrats, even though the Liberal Democrats had over 75% as many votes as Labour. The Liberal Democrats made electoral reform one of the central features of their campaign and, fittingly, the election results have more than proven their point that reform is needed.
I made these points on Twitter and someone responded with a 'problem': 'ah', they said, 'but if you brought in Proportional Representation then UKIP and the BNP would win seats, and that is a bad thing'. I'd disagree in principle: it isn't necessarily a 'bad thing', it is merely democracy in action. We need to realise the reasons why the BNP are gaining support (up 1.2% in this election) and it isn't - as newspapers would argue - that immigration is 'uncontrolled' or that British people are being treated as 'second-class citizens'.
If we want to stop the BNP gaining seats in an election we shouldn't block electoral reform, we should actually tackle the reasons why people vote BNP. The reasons are simple: a lack of education, a lack of personal experience of immigrants - meaning that they always remain an abstract concept (the 'other', 'them', 'they'), rather than a human being - and most importantly the constant dishonest stories run by the press that are regularly quoted on the BNP website and by BNP voters when they explain why they vote BNP. If we want to stop the BNP gaining voter share we need to tackle an unregulated, racist press that has an agenda of creating hatred towards immigrants.
As I pointed out recently, immigration is an issue that cannot be discussed whilst the current dishonest tabloid narratives remain unchallenged. Research has been conducted that has shown that BNP voter share is less in areas with a high immigrant population, precisely for the 'access to reality' reason I have mentioned above. When newspapers blame New Labour's immigration policy for the rise of the BNP they are lying to cover their own complicity in the rise of the far right in this country.
This does raise an interesting dilemma for the tabloid press. Currently they can offer implied support to the BNP by printing a consistent stream of lies for BNP voters and leaders to feed on without having to overly worry about such lies having an electoral consequence. As we saw last night, most BNP candidates polled quite poorly (although in several areas - such as the almost exclusively white, immigrant-free Blaenau Gwent - they got well over 1,000 votes) and not even party leader Nick Griffin could win a seat. However, if PR was brought in then the tabloid press would be well aware that the current BNP vote could win the party seats. Then when the inevitable recrimination starts after such a result the press wouldn't be able to avoid their own complicity in creating the very lies that drives people to vote BNP.
Essentially, PR would demonstrate just what a evil influence the tabloid press has other poorly educated or poorly integrated voters. Currently a lot of people understand that the tabloid press is the biggest recruiter for the BNP, but because of our electoral system we can all be content with just a quiet boo when the low polling results are announced for each BNP candidate. I cannot help but think that if BNP votes turned into BNP seats we'd all have to be a lot more vociferous about just who is to blame.
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Ok, here goes:
1. PR means bigger constistuencies, of at least 20 members. Bigger constituencies mean a) it is less likely that you will know who even represents you and b) it is less likely that the people who DO represent you will have even visited the place where you live, let alone know what it is like to live there. Both of these mean less cohesion between the elected representatives and the electorate, which will result in people caring less about who represents them and lead to another factor in ...
2: PR means you can (mostly - I am not considering plus-voting in this comment) only vote on party lines. Most PR systems involved voting for a party, who will then put in the MPs (or equivalent) in accordance with who THEY have lined up for the job. So no voting for someone because you like THEM as a parlimentarian (as I did with my local MP). See above for problems when you don't know who will be representing you.
3: PR leads to backdoor deals and 'horse-trading'. Think about it. If one party has a clear majority in government, they can afford to be open about the issues that they will push (i.e. if Lib Dems had a majority, they would openly state that they will integrate further with the EU). PR forces partes to compromise, leading to the fact that they will have to negotiate, behind closed doors, which issues they will agree can be pushed, and which will be dropped (i.e. "If you stop pusing for PR, we'll stop NHS cuts).
Finally, a positive word for PR - it doesn't mean that extremist parties will be elected - most places that use PR will require a mimimum of 5% of the vote (in each constituency) before a party can be given a seat. This is both to stop extremist parties and to ensure parity (if there are 20 seats in a constituency, you MUST have 5% of the vote to get a seat). I will also assume that the 1.2% figure given earlier for the BNP's share of the vote is for the whole of the UK, and not just a gven constituency, and point out that, if that is the national average, then only in a rare aberration would one BNP candidate gain a seat.
Re PR: in Scotland we have "list" MSPs, who in effect take up the slack by ensuring larger mionority parties prejudiced by first past the post, but who do not obtain a derisory percentage of the total vote, have their seats topped up in multi-member local constituencies - not perfect, but ends with a result that's more representative. If you receive 40% of the votes, you'd struggle to take 50% of seats. We have become used to coalitions since 1998, without rioting in the streets, and without tiny fringe parties (Greens have an MSP based on percentage) obtaining disproprtionate benefit.
It might mean one or two extremists in the Commons, but that's democracy for you.
So what would the problem with PR be? Ludicrously extreme right-wing fascist party attracts votes from only the most ludicrously extreme right-wing fascist voters? Achieves 3 or 4 seats in parliament but gets totally ignored by all the important parties? I think there are some good arguments against PR, but this isn't one.
"The Swedish voting system is basically a full multi-party, proportionate system, but in order to avoid deadlocks there are two tweaks, first an odd number of seats in the parliament, and a 4% bar for getting a seat in the parliament."
"The 4% bar means that in order to get a seat in the parliament a party must get at least 4% of the votes. This rule stabilises the parliment and keeps most of the small fringe parties out ( revolutionary communisst/nazis/ultra religious). The parliament has been lead by different coalitions for many decades now and while there are often negotiations needed to form the coalition that is typically done in a few days when only larger parties are involved."
The full blog post and the comments are well worth a read, after all this isn't a uniquely British problem, all democratic system face such problems:
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/is-the-british-voting-system-fair/
It would also allow green and socialist parties to win seats and would actually return a parliament more representable of today's society.