The problems with todays system

The parliamentary partisan seat system isn’t democratic nor reflect the way the public voted. It’s disproportionate and ideologically inflexible

This has been common knowledge for a long time. So much so that the idea of changing the voting system to a proportional representation method was discussed in parliament but ultimately rejected as the consensus was that it wouldn’t improve anything.

They were actually right, proportional representation wouldn’t have worked. What they failed to acknowledge though was why it wouldn’t work. The problem wasn’t proportional representation, the problem was the partisan system itself.

• By its very nature it causes division and tribalism making society increasingly hostile.

• By having more than two parties you lower the threshold of votes needed in order to win a seat below 50%. Meaning a party can win despite having more votes against them than for them. This problem gets worse the more candidates there are.

• Extending that problem, this allows for a party to win a majority of seats and therefore form government even though the majority voted against them. In 2024 Labour barely had a third of total votes but have almost two thirds of the seats in parliament.

• Once a party takes control of government, even if they somehow have a majority of votes, we are committed to that ideology for everything. Essentially putting all our eggs into one basket.

• Having this rigidness means when we want to change course on an issue we have to replace the entire government. This is like getting a whole new car when all you needed was a new spark plug.

• The Prime Minister isn’t directly elected by us to that position. We only hold votes for local representatives.

• There isn’t a single ministerial position that we elected to fill that role. The PM choses his favourite team mates to take top level jobs. Even if they have won a majority in their constituency they were only elected to be a local representative.

• It’s misleading to call them “local representatives”, largely we assume that they will represent our locality in parliament, this is only true of Independent candidates. Any candidate affiliated with a party has a commitment to the party and a whip to keep them in line. While this affiliation persists they can’t represent both party and locality when the localities desires contrast with the party’s.

  In short, Local Representatives don’t represent your locality in parliament, they represent parliament in your locality.