[anon1385]

The right wing party (Conservatives aka Tories) just won a general election in May and now have a majority for the first time since 1997. They have been in power since 2010 but were moderated to some extent (at least on these kinds of issues) by needing to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

So they are now moving forwards with a bunch of things like this that they wanted to do previously but were unable. See also: repealing human rights legislation.

It's worth pointing out that they only got 37% of the votes, but ended up with just over 50% of the seats in parliament because of the first past the post system. So the majority of people in the UK don't agree with them.

[OJFord]

    > So the majority of people in the UK don't agree with them.

It's also "worth pointing out" that a majority government is exceedingly rarely formed from >50% raw votes.

You also cannot infer that the majority of people disagree with them. By making the subject "the majority of people" you could imply that the British public agrees with no one party. Which would be correct.

But the Conservative Party forms HM Government at present because more "agree with them" than with any other party.

It sounds like you're proposing a system where we're perpetually under a coalition government to ensure that enough MPs to represent 50% raw votes are involved. No thanks.

[anon1385]

>You also cannot infer that the majority of people disagree with them.

The majority of people voted for non-Tory politicians.

>It sounds like you're proposing a system where we're perpetually under a coalition government to ensure that enough MPs to represent 50% raw votes are involved. No thanks.

I'm not at all sympathetic to your argument. Especially when the Tories said that a Labour-Lib Dem coalition in 2010 would have been illegitimate since it didn't have over 50% of the popular vote. What's so bad about coalition government anyway?

In 2015 the Tories got 36.8% of the vote and ended up with 330 seats (50.8%). Labour got 30.5% of the vote and got 232 seats (35.7%). The SNP got 4.7% of votes for 8.6% of seats. UKIP got 12.7% of votes for 1 seat. The Lib Dems got 7.9% of votes and 1.2% of seats. The Greens 3.8% of votes for 1 seat.

So you have a situation where 24.4% of the voters are represented by only 10 seats, which is only 1.5% of the seats! That kind of democratic deficit isn't sustainable.