paulcox, 14 days ago

@Philsturgeon and obviously this means that green party will now get 1/3rd of the media coverage of the conservatives... 😅

boud, 14 days ago

@paulcox @Philsturgeon

Will these local election results the UK parliamentary election give any chance for setting in a long-term shift to democracy by replacing #FirstPastThePost (FPTP) by either a two-round [1] (like in e.g. France, Poland), ranked method [2] (like in e.g. Australia) or rated method [3]?

The Labor and LibDem parties would have to accept a shift to coalitions instead of winner-take-all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rated_voting

nf3xn, 14 days ago

@boud @paulcox @Philsturgeon Libs got that put to a referendum and it was rejected - remember?

kgoetz, 14 days ago

@nf3xn @boud @paulcox @Philsturgeon for those of us not actually familiar... Is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote_referendum the one you are referring to?

nf3xn, 14 days ago

@kgoetz @boud @paulcox @Philsturgeon That's the one - Cleggie got completely outmanoeuvred by "Give 'Em Enough Rope" Cameron.

boud, 13 days ago

@nf3xn @kgoetz @paulcox @Philsturgeon

I don't think I heard about that. The Polling section shows that over 12 months, opinion changed from a big majority in favour to a big majority against:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote_referendum#Polling

That was a decade ago.

I really can't understand how anyone can think an election in which someone getting, say, 25% of the vote is a fair representative of the whole population (because the others got 24%, 22%, 15%, 10%, 4%).

Up to UK people to decide whether to try again.

kgoetz, 13 days ago

@boud @nf3xn @paulcox @Philsturgeon I don't understand either, but I've grown up thinking FPTP is weird and archaic - I'm sure if its what I was more familiar with I'd find it clear and obvious too (side note: looking at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Countries_That_Use_a_First_Past_the_Post_Voting_System.png its not a particularly common system any more).

nf3xn, 13 days ago

@kgoetz @boud @paulcox @Philsturgeon What changed was that the Libs reneged on their election promises making them immediately wildly unpopular. The idea of the referendum was to give parties like them proportionally more say which was suddenly and sharply much less appealing than before. The Tories knew this of course and pressed for the referendum sooner rather than later before they became the hate object again. Politically the Libs have always been rank incompetent.