This time it’ll be different, they say.
This time it’ll be about the people, they say.
This time it’ll be a change for the better, they say.
This time the system won’t win, they say.
Colour me apathetic. Another PM we didn’t vote for —I know, we vote for the party not the person— in a system that feels increasingly broken.
But what choice do we have? It’s this or the right wing.
Right?
You can reply by email, or leave a comment below.
I know, we vote for the party not the person
I mean… no. You vote for a person: you vote for your local MP. The monarch appoints a PM who has the confidence of the Commons. By convention, this is the MP who’s the leader of the party (or coalition, sometimes) with the majority of the seats in the Commons. But that doesn’t have to be the case at all! And, indeed, there are times in living memory that it hasn’t been the case.
Alec Douglas-Home wasn’t an MP when he became PM in 1963 (he was elected as an MP a month after he became PM!). Going back further – and outside of living memory – Robert Gascoyne-Cecil’s premiership (1895 – 1902) didn’t cover any of the period during which he was PM.
Party politics is a quirky necessity that evolves to simplify our system. Which would otherwise be a bit chaotic (a parliament entirely of independents might make it challenging to find sufficient consensus from which the monarch could appoint a PM: not impossible, I imagine, but they’d probably need to use some sort of Commons mechanism to elect an appointee that they’d recommend to the Crown?). And the fact that parties choose their own leader, and that that leader becomes the PM, is a secondary side-effect of that.
There are, absolutely, improvements we could make. I fully agree with you that the system is broken. A Condorcet-complete electoral system, like more-civilised democracies use, would be a great start (personally I favour STV, but Instant Runoff would be “good enough”). Proportional representation would be a good idea too, but it does have the downside of entrenching party politics somewhat (although that horse bolted a long time ago, soo…). Something radical like sortition might improve representation, but introduces training and management challenges.
But all of those are suggestions I would get behind long before I backed a “presidential” (direcly elect the leader) system. They’re better, in my mind. And some of them (like STV, which incidentally every major political party in the UK already uses internally to elect their leader: it’s just us everyday folk who don’t get to, with a few devolved exceptions) would be relatively easy to implement; it could be knocked out within a single government’s term, and pave the way for PR to follow.
Clearly something I’ve thought about a lot, and I could talk your ear off. Fundamentally we agree: the system’s broken. But I just wanted to swing in and, just for a moment, be one of those annoying “well actually…” guys who points out that while we don’t elect a PM, we don’t (strictly-speaking) elect parties, either. Our system is old, and complicated, and riddled with the baggage of everything the preceded it as well as weighed-down by its own inertia. And I’ll be delighted to see it changed. (I was out knocking on doors in the 2011 AV referendum, and of the 440 voting areas mine was one of the 10 that said “yes”; I don’t even think AV was that good a proposal, but it was much better than FPTP! Sigh.)
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil’s premiership (1895 – 1902) didn’t cover any of the period during which he was PM.
This should read:
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil’s premiership (1895 – 1902) didn’t cover any of the period during which he was an MP.
Whoops!
Thank you Dan! The voting systems of the UK is not something I’m hugely conversant in, so I stand corrected and appreciate you taking the time to detail all of that.
It is an odd system for sure, and I think the way some people vote (for a party) even though technically they are voting for a person so where my head is. I know I look at the ticket and think… not them, not them, DEFINITELY NOT THEM, OR THEM, so it’s them or them… hmmmm and at that point the person may factor in but largely it doesn’t as I vote for wider ideals that myself.
For example, I’ve only ever voted Labour or SNP in my lifetime, because of what the party stood for. I’ve stopped viewing the ‘person’ who will be the MP unless they are completely odious as, in my experience, they are all largely as self-serving and untrustworthy as each other!
Something needs to change for sure.
Also, STV is the Scottish Television channel up here (regionally version of ITV), so I had to go look up that definition, but yes, that sounds good enough (in terms of anything is better than what we have)
Yeah, voting mechanics is definitely something I think about Too Much.
Living out in rural Oxfordshire, my vote goes to whoever stands the best chance of keeping the Conservatives out (we’re not much-threatened by Reform here)! Labour are a damp squib around here (possibly that’s par for the course lately!). The Lib Dems and the Greens have a pact around here that they won’t run against one another, so whichever one’s up is the one that gets my vote.
But every single thing about that paragraph demonstrates the problems with the system! Why do the Lib Dems and Greens have to “take turns”? Why can’t I vote for one and put the other as my “fallback” vote, rather than them having to play political shenanigans to avoid splitting one another’s vote? Given that my opinion is “oh god, not the right, I’ll take anything else, but if I get a choice it’s about here on the spectrum [waves hand moderately to strongly left]”, why do I have to choose to either compromise or else waste my vote? Bloody stupid system, innit!
My one hope from this whole “rise of Reform” nonsense is that both Labour and the Conservatives will realise that a fairer voting system is, at last, in everybody’s benefit (previously, there was no incentive for either of them to push hard for any kind of alternative vote, because the established system kept electing one or the other of them!). And then, at last, people can vote freely, not “tactically”, and we can begin to get a real picture of what it is that the people want.
(My biggest fear is that what the people want might turn out to be racist, regressive, transphobic, isolationist crap. But step one is to fix the voting system; step two is to fix the protest voters; I guess!)
What are your thoughts?