It’s easy to be seduced by the prospect of change and fairness. After all, who wouldn’t say “Yes to Fairer Votes”, as supporters of the Alternative Vote arrogantly exhort us to do? Are we really expected to believe that all supporters of First Past the Post are deliberately resisting greater fairness? Fairness, of course, depends [...]
Filed under: constitution, democracy, electoralreform, ukpolitics on May 4th, 2011 | No Comments »
In 21st Century Britain, monarchy is faring rather better than democracy. As public trust in politicians sinks to new, unprecedented lows, the Royal Family is enjoying a weird and immensely tedious resurgence in popularity. I don’t know if these things are correlated. But, either way, they are pretty alarming signs of the times.
The upshot [...]
Filed under: democracy, electoralreform, jonathanbirch, ukpolitics on April 21st, 2011 | No Comments »
No matter how hard I try, I can’t help defending the Liberal Democrats, a party for which I have no political affection. But, as students gather for more protests today, they once again need a reality check.
No single party won the general election, and the formation of a coalition government means that no party can [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized, electoralreform, libdems, tuitionfees on November 24th, 2010 | No Comments »
It’s a scandal: in the 2008 US Presidential Election, 47% of the votes counted for nothing! Rather than granting each candidate a slice of power proportional to his or her vote share, America inexplicably uses an antiquated “winner takes all” approach. Consequently, over 50 million voters received no representation whatsoever in the White House.
That [...]
Filed under: electoralreform, jonathanbirch on May 4th, 2010 | 2 Comments »
We are entering a very interesting time in British politics – aren’t we? That’s the statement that seems to be on lips of many politicos at the moment. Blair’s marathon premiership is coming to a close and a shake-up in British politics approaches. Brown versus Cameron, ‘clunking fist’ versus ‘New Conservatism’, question marks over the [...]
Filed under: democracy, electoralreform, history, ukpolitics on May 21st, 2007 | 3 Comments »
This is almost a seamless transition from the discussion of Britishness we see above, into a questioning of the proposed changes to the House of Lords as outlined by Jack Straw. The House of Lords is that old cliché, peculiarly British. Its role has been relatively unclear since at least 1867, though I’m not going [...]
Filed under: constitution, electoralreform, history, labour, ukpolitics on February 10th, 2007 | 2 Comments »
While there may be a baby European elephant in the room (see Owen’s article below), the real, rampaging, galumphing, trumpeting elephant is climate change.
But don’t worry; this isn’t a post on climate change, it’s on electoral reform. My premise is that the adversarial, first-past-the-post (FPP) system of election in the UK is [...]
Filed under: electoralreform, ukpolitics on February 2nd, 2007 | 7 Comments »
