Ironically when I got to the end of this article, I was greeted by a No to AV advert.

And this is why FPTP is rubbish and why Cameron wants to keep it.

PS: Pleased don’t be fooled into thinking the No2AV=Yes2PR (Yes2FPTP=Yes2PR?) campaign is separate to the regular No2AV campaign. Matthew Elliott and Charlotte Vere are behind both. And they will spread similar lies about PR if AV loses and we do somehow manage to get a FPTP vs PR referendum. (although to be honest I think a referendum for PR is more likely if AV wins this one, as well as more winnable)

2015… Britons went to the polls yesterday to elect a new government.

The elections saw a surge in support for the centre left Labour Party, which increased its share of the vote from 29% to 42%, and the collapse of the Liberal Democrats, whose leader, Nick “smoking gun” Clegg, even lost his own seat.

Despite the Tories, Liberals and UKIP polling 54% between them, the election – conducted under First Past the Post – was won by the Labour Party, who secured an absolute majority of seats with 42% of the vote, winning seat after seat where the anti-Labour vote split between different parties.

‘centre left Labour Party’
What/where is this imaginary party?

@5 Joe

You beat me to it! Who knows, perhaps Ed’s “clean sheet of paper” WILL lead to such a beast emerging? I wait with baited breath!

Much as I’m drawn towards anything that seems anti-FPTP, I’m not sure how this story is relevant. Because it shows FPTP lets you win on less than half the vote? We know that already, and it would be better to emphasise it with UK examples. Trying to energize Labour supporters by showing that FPTP got a Tory government in? Bad argument, and as John Stewart said “I should point out that the Canadian Conservative Party is the equivalent of our Gay Nader Fans for Peace Party.”

@7 chaise

It’s the same system, in a country with strong links to the UK, and it is very recent and shows clearly how a Tory party will capitalise on a crooked system. It is germane… whether it will make any difference is another matter.

Poor analysis there Don – it only stands up if you accept the central basis that the Canadian electorate either support the Conservative Party (are they called Tories, as that has a very particular resonance in North American history?) or vote against it as an anti-Tory vote. You might as well divide the votes up into NDP and anti-NDP votes, or Liberal and anti-Liberal.

If this was about supporting the Conservatives or not, what would have happened was that almost all the non-Conservative vote in each constituency would have gone behind the anti-Conservative candidate most likely to win (in a few obviously it would have split due to no clear anti candidate, but not many). What actually happened however was that voters went out and voted for the parties they wanted, which did indeed split the anti-Conservative vote, and the anti-NDP vote, the anti-Liberal vote etc, but only because this vote is almost entirely a fiction – how much of the Canadian population actually went out to vote against the Conservatives rather than for a particular party?

Or do you really think that only supporters of right-wing parties are capable of voting positively and for a platform, rather than against something?

Galen10,

It’s the same system, in a country with strong links to the UK, and it is very recent and shows clearly how a Tory party will capitalise on a crooked system.

Bit of a strong claim, considering that the system is possibly unfair (for a given definition of fair – I can also point out AV and PR are unfair), but also considering that in three of the last four elections, did not the Labour party capitalise on the electoral system we have, suggesting there is no clear electoral bias?

Remind me again how many Labour MP’s, peers and councillors support AV?

@10 Watchman

No, I think it is a fair response to Chaise’s original point, that the comparison wasn’t relevant because it was Canada, and didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.

My point was that being recent, it has some resonance, and that since the Canadian system is pretty comparable with ours (rather than say the system in France or the USA) then it reinforces the point.

No system is perfect; the issue is whether “this” system is fit for purpose. One of the failures of the “yes” campaign is that they haven’t sold the message that alternative systems are fairer, and a better reflection of plural politics where there are not only 2 major parties slugging it out.

The fact that Labour are just as capable as the Tories of benefitting from a crooked system wouldn’t seem to me a great justification. If any non-Tory needed a reason to can FPTP, they need to think about how different politics in this country would have been over the past generation had not both Labout and the Tories managed to force unpopular polices down the throats of the people with a minority of the electorate supporting them.

THIS IS THE END OF DEMOCRACY.
The conservatives are brainwashing pellet-feeders.

fu,

THIS IS THE END OF DEMOCRACY.

I don’t know. Capitalising everything is a bad habit, but could hardly be called the end of democracy.

Galen10,

No system is perfect; the issue is whether “this” system is fit for purpose. One of the failures of the “yes” campaign is that they haven’t sold the message that alternative systems are fairer, and a better reflection of plural politics where there are not only 2 major parties slugging it out.

Actually, I think No stole a march and claimed fairness first (albeit maybe Yes should have concentrated on its key points rather than celbrity endorsement or whatever the hell it was doing early in the campaign) – and in all honesty, no system is fair or not unless considered under its own rules. We are simply arguing whether any particular system suits a particular definition of fairness well or not.

The fact that Labour are just as capable as the Tories of benefitting from a crooked system wouldn’t seem to me a great justification. If any non-Tory needed a reason to can FPTP, they need to think about how different politics in this country would have been over the past generation had not both Labout and the Tories managed to force unpopular polices down the throats of the people with a minority of the electorate supporting them.

Wouldn’t be an argument for me either really – its just your original post said it was the Conservatives benefitting from the system, and I was addressing that. That said, AV will not address the issue of forcing unpopular politices down people’s throats without majority support, since it will still allow a party to win nationally with less than 50% of the national vote (indeed, if it comes in I would bet on this happening). And you can’t really count second and subsequent preferences as support anyway, since to be equitable in assessing support you’d have to calculate the second preferences of all parties and finding a way of weighting for this.

@ 8 Galen10

“It’s the same system”

True, and I agree it serves as an example of FPTP delivering a bad result. I just think the OP is trying to get more out of this story than it deserves. (And yes, I know that there’s no analysis in the OP, but how would you react if an anti-AV site posted a story like “Communists Handed Victory by AV System”?)

“in a country with strong links to the UK, and it is very recent and shows clearly how a Tory party will capitalise on a crooked system. It is germane… whether it will make any difference is another matter.”

I don’t see how Canada’s links to the UK, nor the fact that the party in question shares a name and a nickname with our own Tory party, are germane. The Canadian and UK Conservatives may have historical connections (or not) but they are now two completely seperate entities, so it’s a leap to try to make the actions of one reflect on the other.

@16 Chaise

“I don’t see how Canada’s links to the UK, nor the fact that the party in question shares a name and a nickname with our own Tory party, are germane. ”

Jeezus you are hard work sometimes! It isn’t rocket science…..

The Canadian system, for the obvious colonial reasons, has more in common with ours than it does with that of other western democracies which were not former dominions, therefore the comparison in the OP (however imperfect) carries more weight than if we were discussing a “less similar” polity. Simples.

@ 17 Galen

So? That still doesn’t mean that the Canadian Tory party reflects on our Tory party. The similarities in the two countries’ underlying voting system is relevant, yes, but which party won the Canadian vote is irrelevant as regards our system.

@18 chaise

That isn’t the point the OP was making, nor is it particularly the issue; the party is immaterial.. altho for all I know the Canadian Tories are as bad or worse than ours. The general issue is that the result is a timely and apposite reminder of why the FPTP system is crap.

divide and conquer is the only way the right can gain power, as its policies inevitably count against the majority’s interests. Thats why it relies on tools like FPTP and will defend it to the death.

Galen 10,

That isn’t the point the OP was making, nor is it particularly the issue; the party is immaterial.. altho for all I know the Canadian Tories are as bad or worse than ours. The general issue is that the result is a timely and apposite reminder of why the FPTP system is crap.

That only holds if you believe Don’s (or Joe just above’s) strange assumption the world is divided into those who vote Conservative and those who don’t. Because that explains the perfect agreement between Greens, Liberal Democrats, Socialist Workers and Labour(s?) so well…

Otherwise, if you believe in a world with more to it than just two sides (you know, real life…) then you may have to admit that there are positive reasons why people might chose to vote for different parties…

5/6 As we’ve been through here twice before, the incentive under AV is for Labour to move to the right, not further to the left. So if you’re unhappy with our level of leftyness now, you have a whole heap of disappointment coming under AV.

incorrect. it would allow support for other left wing parties to grow without the ever present bogeyman of ‘letting the tories in’. Once critical mass began to be achieved, the labour party wouldnt be able to count on all the nosepeggers that vote for them (like me) and would need to take their many, many normal ignored voters into account – centre left voters that dont see a slightly slower selling off of what remains of this country’s civil society as much of an alternative. It would also bring the lie to the loudmouth reactionary right of the party’s TINA bullshit.

This was an interesting enough election in its own right to deserve perhaps a little more attention here than merely being the latest opportunity for another round of stale (and increasingly tedious) debate about AV. Or at least the issue could be looked at more within the context of the election and specific problems with the electoral system in Canada (such as highly undemocratic boundaries in Saskatchewan, or the problem of malapportionment generally).

@22 oldpolitics

Olpolitics by name and nature I see…..

It isn’t really a question of one’s preferred level of “leftyness”, it’s about coming up with a system which is better than the current one, even if it isn’t perfect. FPTP would be tolerable (altho I for one would still oppose it’s use) in a situation where the vast majority voted for one of 2 major parties. Since this is no longer the case, the structural unfairness the current system builds in needs to be addressed, because it is corrosive to our politics generally.

I’m not interested in a Labour party that is further to the left; it was tried under Foot et al and didn’t worked. Neither am I interested in keeping New Labour alive.. or even Ed’s pale imitation. I want something radical and progressive, and if Labour can’t or won’t provide that alone (which I strongly suspect will be the case given the appallingly low quality of their front bench, and the presence of so many New Labour hangers on), then the best hope of tackling the Tories is to reform the voting system.

AV isn’t perfect, but it’s the only game in town. If it fails, we’re stuck with the same clapped out system for generations to come, and the same sterile governance we have always had.

@ 19 Galen10

“That isn’t the point the OP was making, nor is it particularly the issue; the party is immaterial.. altho for all I know the Canadian Tories are as bad or worse than ours.”

That’s the thing: what point IS the OP making? There’s no comment in the piece, just a news story about a foreign election emphasising the involvement of FPTP. So we’re left to draw our own conclusions. Given this site’s raison d’etre and its take on the AV debate, I can’t help being suspicious that the article is inviting us to draw silly conclusions from the fact that a government that goes by the name “Conservative” won.

“The general issue is that the result is a timely and apposite reminder of why the FPTP system is crap.”

Don’t need telling! Fingers crossed for tomorrow.

Some people here are saying that it wasn’t wrong for the Tories to win, as a non-Tory vote wasn’t necessarily an anti-Tory vote.

But bear in mind that in Canada the Liberal Party are the Tories’ historic and long-standing enemies. Also bear in mind that the CBC is currently running on a poll on whether the Liberals and NDP should merge. Clearly, the way Don has presented things is the same way that they are seen in Canada.

AV has helped Australia’s Tory Parties over the years – maybe it will here?

“And this is why FPTP is rubbish and why Cameron wants to keep it.”

AV would have given Thatcher bigger majorities in the 80s – Liberal/SDP second preferences favoured the Tories over Labour. Both systems have their flaws but AV is potentially worse for the reasons given by Lord Jenkins in his report on electoral reform over a decade ago.

@24

“This was an interesting enough election in its own right to deserve perhaps a little more attention here than merely being the latest opportunity for another round of stale (and increasingly tedious) debate about AV. ”

+1.

Canadian domestic politics gets very little attention in the British media (mainstream or otherwise) and it would’ve been nice to see a bit of a spotlight on Harper’s corrupt Conservative Party in Canada & how they’ve gone about achieving power this time round.