[A_D_E_P_T]

> all things considered within a democratic framework

The UK has a very funny (literally ha-ha funny) notion of "democracy" -- with people just voting against the status quo most of the time and with "first past the post" resulting in leadership that doesn't have, and cannot even credibly claim, genuine popular support. It's a totally broken system.

[BoxOfRain]

If there is one political change I could make to the UK it'd be the adoption of the single transferable vote. There's massive amounts of political alienation in the UK which have complicated causes (often related to the 'managed decline' policies of governments past) but a big contributing factor in my opinion is how many votes are completely wasted under first past the post, if you're in a safe seat voting often feels completely futile. FPTP means there's a lot of seats where a donkey with the appropriate rosette would win easily and there's not a lot of competition to win these seats, and so these seats get taken for granted by politicians.

A move to STV wouldn't be a silver bullet but at the very least it'd eliminate the phenomenon of wasted votes and make safe seats less safe, forcing politicians to care about all the seats rather than just currently competitive ones. The problem is there's no incentive for either major party to end their duopoly in the national interest, it's the same sort of problem the 'rotten boroughs' of old faced in that the people who benefitted from them were the only people with the power to deal with them. Labour in particular are notorious on this subject, they'll promise electoral reform in opposition and change their tune instantly once in power.

[pas]

are there term limits for these seats?

[BoxOfRain]

No, term limits aren't really a thing in the UK for elected officials in general and the longest-serving MPs today have been there since the early '80s. Even Prime Ministers can stay in their position for as long as they have the support of their party and can command the confidence of the House of Commons which in some cases will be for over a decade, although it's normal practice in the UK for a governing party to change their leader and therefore the Prime Minister mid term.

Some appointed positions have term limits (some 'machinery of government' kind of functions, some quangos and public bodies etc) but a few are for life or retirement such as members of the House of Lords.

[pjc50]

There are no term limits. (I don't think there's any term limit for any elected position in the UK?)

[pas]

how is it not popular support? or your point is that plurality is not enough? or that in a different voting system (alternate voting, ranked choice, etc..) the winner would be completely different?

[HPsquared]

Conservatives + Reform got more votes than Labour. More people voted against Labour than for them. In any other system they wouldn't have won, and at the very least wouldn't have a majority.

The other thing to consider is that the electorate basically moved to the right in 2024 (Tory voters moved to Reform), but parliament shifted hard to the left.

[pjc50]

The same is true of many different pairs of parties! It's been a long time since any winner had over 50% of the popular vote.

2024: 33%

2019: 43.6%

2017: 42.3% (Lab: 40%!)

2015: 36.9%

2010: 36.1%

2005: 35.2%

2001: 40.7%

1997: 43.2%

1992: 41.9%

The last election where the winning party got over 50% of the popular vote was .. 1931.

[HPsquared]

Yes it's been undemocratic for a long time. The 2024 one was just particularly egregious.

[foldr]

If you have more than two parties then the winning party may have less than 50% of the votes. That's just how the math works out.

Somewhat ironically, given your arguments, UK voters decisively rejected a plan to change the voting system to a more proportional one in a 2011 referendum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...

[pjc50]

Yes, but: the winning party having less than 50% of the votes still feels incredibly undemocratic, as you get a situation where a majority of the voters picked a different choice.

Proportional systems give an outcome where a majority of voters voted for at least one of the parties in the winning coalition. Coalitions become explicit rather than internal to parties. The internationalist/isolationist split in the Conservative party that they were desperately trying to put off would have happened much earlier.

The referendum failed because only the LDs really supported it. I note that all sorts of devolved assemblies, councils, and (former) Euro elections used different systems.

[throw646577]

It's not particularly egregious because it's not a national vote for a party, is it?

It's a series of (balanced) regional votes for elected representatives from equal-sized constituencies who are supposed to be responsive to that region.

Suddenly this is a massive problem for tories because it's red-faced angry right-wingers on the losing side. Whenever it contributed significantly to a tory win, it has not been a problem.

If you look at what actually happened you will see that, repeatedly, right-wing candidates lost out on a constituency-by-constituency level because the Conservatives were largely incumbents who had built up enough very personal bad reputation to be booted out, or inexperienced first-time candidates who are very rarely elected anyway and were parachuted at the last minute into seats where grandees were retiring, and the Reform candidates were a gaggle of weirdos, randoms, odd-bods, extremists and idiots who were lining up to stand for election for a party that had such a thin platform it ultimately resolves to "oooh we don' t like them", where "them" varied a little region by region but usually meant foreigners.

(And, of course, they split part of the vote between them.)

[pessimizer]

> It's not particularly egregious because it's not a national vote for a party, is it?

You're talking with someone who thinks that it is egregious that a party that gets the minority of the vote runs the government, and the grandfather of your own comment points out that in 2024 it was with the lowest percentage vote in 30 years, which is particular.

The electorate lurched from the Conservatives farther right, and the result of that was a centrist government.

[monooso]

> In any other system they wouldn't have won…

I can think of at least one other system where they would.

[vogon_laureate]

The Online Safety Act came into being under a Conservative government.

[youngtaff]

Not sure what your point is bit Labour, LibDems, Greens, SNP, Plaid combined got way more votes than Tories + Reform

[HPsquared]

Now that's a good point. They would need to actually debate things if parliament had this composition.

[pas]

Okay, but what kind of voting system can capture this well (and what does it mean)?

We don't know how people would have voted in this hypothetical. (Likely there would be a lot more parties, which generally is good.)

Also C+R could have formed a coalition. (Or merge into a new party ... or - I haven't looked up how R came to be, but I assume it's a spin-off of/from C - R could have merged back into C, right?)

[throw646577]

Reform is a spinoff, yes, in the same way that UKIP is a spinoff: it's a party consisting of people who didn't/couldn't/wouldn't get selected as conservative MPs, plus on the odd occasion one or two who left (Lee Anderson, who is terrible, awful, self-serving and alarming, and before him for UKIP Douglas Carswell, who was largely better characterised as a nice enough bloke who was completely wrong)

[pjc50]

The Scottish and Welsh assemblies use AMS. The NI assembly uses STV. You can see how this produces completely different results from the Westminster elections held in those areas.

Reform are, like UKIP and the Referendum party, Trumpist parties organized around a popular figure and external funding (Richard Tice). They're not really spin offs although a few MPs may cross over.