Thoughts On Fair Votes
Con Home are raising a good subject but it does tend to get bogged down by politics students lecturing the world with their freshly learnt soft science .This is impressive : If Labour and the Conservatives had the same vote share [at the 2005 General Election] Labour would still have won 111 more seats. If the Conservatives had the same lead over Labour as Labour did over the Conservatives, Labour would still have had 57 more seats. Only a Conservative lead of 6.4% would have resulted in equality of seats and the Conservatives would have required a lead of 11.8% before gaining an overall majority."
Nit Alex Hilton
The nit Alex Hilton AKA Recess Monkey took time off form his busy career of grovelling up the centre left `s inside trouser leg to opine disingenuously about all Party consensus on voting reform , ie PR.( He recently described all Conservatives as the moral equivalent of child torturers and paedophiles and is a prat ) . Amongst his Mephistophelean smarm there was this comment : Forgive me if I am wrong but I detect a distinctive opposition to proportional representation from Conservatives yet have never put my finger on why that is so‘. I answered and I admit it is long and tedious .
Answering The Parasite Alex Hilton
PR Empowers The Political Class
Well I doubt his low reptilian cunning is inadequate to that task but lets pretend .It is because it breaks the MP community link, because it hands power to an elitist coterie in the centre and brokers between fragmented groups . Because it infantilises Politics by allowing people to avoid the balancing process in their own minds and vote in single issues , not coherent manifestos. This paradoxically , further empowers the poltical class and therefore benefit’s the Liberal elite across both Parties . Thus cross Party communitarian issues like capital punishment , the EU and immigration will slide further down the agenda while indistinguishable progressive groupings throw hankeys at each other. As if it was not bad enough already !
Democracy Is More Than The Rules
Democracy is not a matter of voting systems and this is what students of politics so often misunderstand . There are perfectly good systems in Kenya and in Northern Ireland .It is about the way the voter and the system interact and the cultural inherited knowledge of it ,often unconscious . Many discussions of systems are redundant for this reason .Hilton calls this “ favouring the ideologically incorrect if it works “.Not so. It is just a more subtle ideology than he will be used to
Labour Britain and PR
It has been predicted for a long time , first by Michael Portillo I believe ,that Gordon Brown will offer the Lib Dems PR rather than hand over power to the Conservative if he is beaten by the loss of Scotland or the loss of unfair seats. In other words , he will break open the constitution which if he was not abusing it would be working quite well, rather than face its consequences. I am somehow reminded of a Banana republic by our Supreme leader and not for he first time . He has no more belief in PR than anyone else which is quite obviously less democratic than FPTP. This is exactly why he has to be beaten whatever it takes
Labour Cynicism
This is why the Labour Party have discovered a sudden interest in PR it has the same integrity as their Damascene conversion to British Nationalism. The injustice is that they have benefited from the break up of the UK as the unionist vote dwindles to the North for the last forty years . Oh how Brown would love it if he could present this audacious theft of our rights as a cross Party agreement to selflessly re-frame the constitution. The Conservative may do such thing but that will be the of it for me and I will not be alone The way for small parties to thrive in FPTP is to become bigger , they have natural advantage of being to blame for nothing which the Liberals exploit ruthlessly .
On Majoritarian Voting
Comparative Comments ( David Soskice is the source /New Statesman)
Majoritarian systems in the 20th century elected centre left Governments only one quarter of the time. PR has had an almost equal bias to the centre left ,( I doubt this is news to Mr. Hilton )..by the way.Majoritarian systems will have two Parties competing for the centre vote This section will also tend to be a middling income of infinitely varying sorts . They may be tempted to prefer the right side of the equation because while they may well funded public services they are equally happy , if not more, with private income . So if the right Party favours income groups above them it can only do so by allowing them more retained income . If the left prefer the bottom fifth , 60% of whose income is the states then they will get nothing and yet pay. Essentially Blair convinced the middle group that he imposed their needs on his Party which would naturally veer left once in power .
How Blair Won
He said they could be safe from his ideological wing and feel good about themselves ,according to certain paradigms carefully cultivated by the BBC and its cultural fifth column .He lied but that we know . Incidentally this is one reason the “leader “ is becoming more important as time passes. He is the broker between the swing voter and the Party. We can see the crucial importance of the new middle class Public Sector elite to Labour then ,and their determination to expand it. We can also see how they are always seeking to present give ways as universal in nature like tax credits ( Tax credit catastrophe almost cannot be unsaid )
Majoritarian Voting Corretcs The Endemic Imbalance In Systems Where Non Taxpayers Vote
So majoritarian two party voting provides a protection against “first cheat “ syndrome for the middling .. The bottom fifth say will vote for other peoples money , whatever they think of the process. A middling group will differ for combinations of ideological and self interested motives . A Higher group seek cultural and political power may seek to exploit the compulsory paid for vote to predate on the middling especially those at the margins.Its buying power with other people’s money .
Conclusion
You might say majoritarianism provides some balance to the natural imbalance caused by non-contributors having an equal vote in a mixed democracy.. When allied to the “political class “ bias mentioned above , it is an authoritarian system to be loathed and feared by Conservatives . Look at things in this way and you will see that the gulf between the elite of the left ad the labour voter (35% of which say the BNP is the second choice) , is so large and quite different the spectrum of Conservatives. That dishonest alliance would be ‘politics’ under PR
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8 comments:
Most interesting post N.
ha ha ...bet noone in the whole world reads it ever
Well how boring am I then?
reddit.
I have read it three times (with great interest) in order to understand the conclusion, which I still can't do. Did majoritarianism end up being good or bad for People Like Us?
Its Good LBS and PR is crap...I apreciate your effort
I agree, PR is a poor system. Some days I struggle to come up with my first choice - a second would be impossible.
Lets face it the only time it really comes to the fore is when we have a Government that is sinking with all hands. If we can't kick out the powers that be because we end up with more of the same due to the horse trading that inevitably goes on with PR, then we are in big trouble.
I didn't read it.
:-((
Don`t blame you EK
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