There is a close correlation between MPs who represent safe seats in Parliament AND those MPs who still support the archaic British voting system, a system which essentially guarantees they will keep on winning, election after election. That’s the main, if perhaps not startling, conclusion of research conducted by GET PR DONE! into the type […]
The bad news and good news about electoral reform
A major study of successful and failed attempts at electoral reform across the globe delivers both bad news and good news to us. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. After assessing electoral reform promises and projects in fifteen “established democracies” in past decades, “most of the time, reform does not occur”, […]
Sympathy to the Winners
What does winning an election under first past the post feel like for the winners? This is a hypothetical journey for me, an exercise in empathy; because I am a perpetual loser. Not by other measures perhaps, but at 40 years old, by asserting my democratic voice I have only ever lost. I’ve chopped and […]
All good down under: New Zealand’s experience of ditching first past the post
In case we are under any illusions, the UK isn’t the only country that has suffered a democratic deficit when it comes to general elections! Down under, over forty years ago, New Zealand’s famously fair public were ‘treated’ to the results of two consecutive general elections where a party coming second in the polls managed […]
Socialists in the Labour Party should back PR
Support for proportional representation is not the preserve of any one party. But given the opposition of the Tory party to any change, the view of the Labour Party will be key to any reform. For the purposes of providing a greater understanding of the debates within Labour, it is worth considering the views of […]