Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by BoxOfRain 556 days ago
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.

1 comments

are there term limits for these seats?
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.

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