UK Elections May 6th

When I first saw the numbers : The Tories winning roughly 100 seats and Labour losing as much I thought that the right thing would be a Tory  Prime Minister but when I look at the percentage, it's not so clear and a coalition against the Tories would be just as legitimate in my opinion, what do you English voters think?

^yep
the tories are stating that 10 million voted for them but ignore the fact that 20 million didnt!
and i am also wondering this little nitbit: how can the Tories claim to be in charge of the UK when they only have 9 seats in the whole of Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland combined?

St Ives just been announced:
STILL LIB DEM COUNTRY here in my part of Pastyland :-D

YourValentine wrote: When I first saw the numbers : The Tories winning roughly 100 seats and Labour losing as much I thought that the right thing would be a Tory  Prime Minister but when I look at the percentage, it's not so clear and a coalition against the Tories would be just as legitimate in my opinion, what do you English voters think? reply:
yeah this is the thing,no one won over-all control so therefore Gordon Brown didnt lose so he is legitimatley the Prime Minister still.
however,if he cannot form a hung government with the help of Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems then he is a lame duck and will be forced to resign and the Queen will then ask David Cameron to form a government with the aid of the Lib Dems.all in all the ball is now firmly in the court of the Lib Dems and who they want to share their bed with :-p
for a more thorough going over i suggest you have a little google at what happened in 1974 here in the UK with Ted Heath and Harold Wilson as its virtually the same thing again

Interesting times for sure.  It certainly does take you nice people a looooong time to count votes.  What's up with that? :)

GratefulFan wrote: Interesting times for sure.  It certainly does take you nice people a looooong time to count votes.  What's up with that? :)
in the case of the St Ives votes here in Cornwall,my constituency also includes the Isles Of Scilly and so their ballot papers had to be collected from all the islands after 10pm when the polling stations shut which meant that they couldnt be delivered to the mainland in Penzance until the morning.which meant the delay in the result being announced until almost 14 hours later.
other places like Sunderland up North were able to announce the outcome within an hour of the closing.

there are three key points to come out of this election:

1. how did Cameron go from "landslide" february to "minority government" by May?
2. how did the Lib-Dems lose all the momentum they gained after the first live debate? did they ever really gain that much momentum?
3. how bad are labour at tactics? they missed a serious trick - tactically. Ok so you have some MPs who were embroiled in the "expenses scandal" - so what do you do with them? - easy - you stand them down and also stand down the candidates running in unwinnable "Tory" seats. Then you interchange them so "nice clean new guy runs in the safe seat, and sleaze-monger runs in the "unwinnable seat". this effectively gives you a clean face in your "safe seat" and "cannon fodder" in the unwinnable one.

were "safe" MPs like Jacqui Smith really so arrogant as to think they couldn't lose? down the road from me in Bromsgrove - the biggest sleaze-merchant of the lot - Julie Kirkbride - stepped down and - strangely enough, the fresh clean "new candidate" amanged to hold the tory majority.

how naive were labour? - or were they just stupid?

YourValentine wrote:

"I have a question for the English people (voters) here:
Don't you find the majority voting system terribly unfair? The Labour party won 29 % of the votes and gets 250+ seats while the Liberals got 23% and only 54 + seats!! Shouldn't each vote count the same in a democracy? And what do you think about the many voters who were denied their right to vote last night because the queues at the polling stations were too long or the ballot papers went out? Unbelievable for an old democracy like the UK..."

We use the same parliamentary system in Canada - constitutional monarchy.  The green party got about 7% of the votes in the last election, and they didn't get a seat in parliament (they've never had one).  On the other hand, the Bloq Quebecois (a party that represents the interest of only one of our 10 provinces, Quebec) got about 10% of the votes, and they have 49 seats.  Democracy at work..

A few years ago the people of Canada had a chance to change the voting system to allow for more proportional representation (i.e. not making it just about seats, but the number of votes as well), but it was voted down about 60% to 40%.

But the people of Canada as a whole are very ignorant on matters of politics and the parliamentary/voting system, so this wasn't a surprise.  Like the current situation in UK, there was a chance a couple years ago that Canada's three opposition parties could have formed a coalition, but our prime minister denounced it as  "unconstitutional"... and 1/3 of the population still supports him.  I envy the people of Britain for understanding how the system works, and the politicians for adhering to it in all circumstances.

Believe it or not, Northern Ireland dabbled with PR a while back. Sadly, it didn't make a huge difference as there wasn't a properly-functioning Assemby in place. I'm all for it: hopefully the Lib-Dems, who I voted for, will be able to negotiate a new voting system with the Conservatives in a new Govt. However, Cameron is opposed to it as it will radically shift the balance of power in the UK away from the Conservatives and Labour.

Sir GH wrote:

A few years ago the people of Canada had a chance to change the voting system to allow for more proportional representation (i.e. not making it just about seats, but the number of votes as well), but it was voted down about 60% to 40%.

But the people of Canada as a whole are very ignorant on matters of politics and the parliamentary/voting system, so this wasn't a surprise.  Like the current situation in UK, there was a chance a couple years ago that Canada's three opposition parties could have formed a coalition, but our prime minister denounced it as  "unconstitutional"... and 1/3 of the population still supports him.  I envy the people of Britain for understanding how the system works, and the politicians for adhering to it in all circumstances.

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I was going to make these same points yesterday but have been uber swamped, so thanks for all that typing. :)  People in general definitely didn't understand what was being proposed when proportional voting was voted down in Ontario (I don't recall the question being put federally?  Maybe I'm wrong).  My mother is a very smart woman who consumes a lot of media and even she had things wrong at fundamental levels.  Thought that meant that parties could slide in whoever they wanted, so you were voting into a black box essentially.  Not true of course, as lists had to be made public prior to election day.  She also had some perception that it was good for the GTA and bad for everybody else.  So the information campaign clearly failed if it failed somebody like my mom.

I have spent a great number of life moments rolling my eys at Stephen Harper and quietly despairing over some piece of his underhanded bullshit or other, but never had I actually seethed until that stunt with the 'unconstitutional' coalition.  Our PM and his party are willing to actively encourage ingorance, hell CAUSE ignorance, about something so fundamental to our democracy, for short term political gain.  And then he prorogues parliament (twice!) to make it all go away. And, in general, most people are okay with that? Kind of unbeliveable.

JoxerTheDeityPirate wrote: GratefulFan wrote: Interesting times for sure.  It certainly does take you nice people a looooong time to count votes.  What's up with that? :)

in the case of the St Ives votes here in Cornwall,my constituency also includes the Isles Of Scilly and so their ballot papers had to be collected from all the islands after 10pm when the polling stations shut which meant that they couldnt be delivered to the mainland in Penzance until the morning.which meant the delay in the result being announced until almost 14 hours later.
other places like Sunderland up North were able to announce the outcome within an hour of the closing.
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I love that Penzance is a real place.  I didn't know that. LOL @ me.

This was the first time I actively watched UK results/returns in real time.  I always do so for Can/US, but usually just catch the overall UK result the next day.  I was surprised at a couple of things because I expected you to be just like us (because we're supposed to be just like you) and the seemingly interminable wait for seat results was confusing, as was the somewhat low key coverage at bbc.co.uk.   It seemed one could click on election coverage or a story on puff pastry or something pretty much equally. Here, front pages are often given over almost entirely to real time numbers and developments.  The video feed at bbc did look and sound like every other election night talking head feed though.  So that felt like home.

The first surprise was the immediate annoucement of overall seat projections based on the exit polls. Here exit polls are used by media seat by seat in conjunction with real numbers to eventually call a candidate elected when a sufficient percentage of the vote has been counted to make it a reasonable assumption.  So within a very short time of polls closing we having 'leading or elected' numbers rolling and start to see seats assigned in the win columns quite quickly. Adding to the perception of fast results is the fact that we're dealing with 5 time zones.  When polls close locally, there are hard results from somewhere east.  It's not unusual at all to be able to call a national result within and hour and a half of the commencement of coverage in Ontario because of the population distribution in Canada.  I was still up at 2 am local time with a work project and the UK wasn't half sorted even then at 7 in the morning the next day GMT.  So I was surprised.  It was an enjoyable and informative experience watching a little closer this time because I learned a lot of things.

The majority voting system is really old fashioned. It's even worse in the United States where the electoral college adds to the mis-representation because it has never changed since the 19th century. As a result the votes of citizens in the smaller Eastern states count up to seven times as much as a vote in California because the smaller states are totally over-represented.

Coalition governments are the rule in most European countries who have a proportional voting system and not a majority vote. I think that coalitions are not always a good solution because often the urgent problems are not addressed when the parties within the coalition cannot agree. A one-party government is certainly more efficient - if they want to. On the other hand all democratic parties must learn to compromise and to be able to work together in a system where one-party government is very rare.  Certainly true representation by vote is more important than easy government for the parties - after all the government is there for the people and not the other way round. We have a 5% minumum rule - it says that a party is only voted into the parliament when they win at least 5% of the votes. This rule comes from the 1920s when the first democratic parliament was virtually inoperable with all the small parties. It's really funny that the voting system in Germany was implemented under British and American (and French) supervision after WW2 but is really very different and much fairer imo.

bitesthedust wrote: Having sat and watched most of the Election coverage since Friday, I think I have understood what this Proportional Representation lark is about -  it seems to be based upon seats gained dependant upon a parties percentage of the votes cast.

Therefore, this is what I have concluded - under PR we would have something like this - I appreciate one seat is still to be declared, and I've rounded up the figures to reach 650, but work with me here!

CON - 36.1% of the vote - 650 seats in parliament - 235 total seats
LAB - 29% - 189 seats
LIB - 23% - 149 seats
OTH - 11.9% - 77 seats

So under this system we would still have a hung parliament - with the Tories being 91 short of a majority - more than likely every election would result no overall control, and we would possibly have continued Labour-Lib Dem coalitions.

And that would reflect the will of the people. Where's the logic in one party having total control when they only get around a third of the votes cast by the nation? In a PR system the views of the majority of the population will be reflected in the make-up of parliament and the individual's voice will have  more of a say. When voting on proposed legislation, the people's views will carry more weight: at the moment, it's possible for a party which only gets 1/3 of the votes to pass a whole slew of unpopular legislation. It got so bad in the 1980s that we had basically an elected dictatorship, with extreme right wing views foisted upon 60+ percent of the population who never voted for Thatcher. That wont happen in a PR-elected parliament.

Holly2003 wrote: bitesthedust wrote: Having sat and watched most of the Election coverage since Friday, I think I have understood what this Proportional Representation lark is about -  it seems to be based upon seats gained dependant upon a parties percentage of the votes cast.

Therefore, this is what I have concluded - under PR we would have something like this - I appreciate one seat is still to be declared, and I've rounded up the figures to reach 650, but work with me here!

CON - 36.1% of the vote - 650 seats in parliament - 235 total seats
LAB - 29% - 189 seats
LIB - 23% - 149 seats
OTH - 11.9% - 77 seats

So under this system we would still have a hung parliament - with the Tories being 91 short of a majority - more than likely every election would result no overall control, and we would possibly have continued Labour-Lib Dem coalitions.

And that would reflect the will of the people. Where's the logic in one party having total control when they only get around a third of the votes cast by the nation? In a PR system the views of the majority of the population will be reflected in the make-up of parliament and the individual's voice will have  more of a say. When voting on proposed legislation, the people's views will carry more weight: at the moment, it's possible for a party which only gets 1/3 of the votes to pass a whole slew of unpopular legislation. It got so bad in the 1980s that we had basically an elected dictatorship, with extreme right wing views foisted upon 60+ percent of the population who never voted for Thatcher. That wont happen in a PR-elected parliament.

Just for the record - if the 1997 election had been conducted under PR - this is what would have happened:

LAB - 43.2% of the vote - 659 seats in parliament - 285 total seats
CON - 30.7% - 202 seats
LIB - 16.8% - 111 seats
OTH - 9.3% - 61 seats

Whilst I appreciate the argument for PR and take on board your argument - again, even in 1997 when Labour won with a landslide majority, with this they would have been 45 seats short (330 needed then for a majority). It is a fact that only over a third of the population have voted Conservative in 2010, but under half voted for Labour in 1997.

If this system was put into practice, how would it be determined which candidates were awarded the seats? Let's assume it would be decided based upon the amount of votes gained, or the scale of the majority in their constituency. Therefore we would have a situation where an MP would win in his/her area but would not gain a seat in the House Of Commons because he/she did not either receive enough votes or win with a sufficient majority, and thus that constituency would not have a voice representing them in parliament!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8672859.stm

Golden Brown is packing his bags..