No, PR is not the answer to the current problems. In fact it would be worse.

Do we really want candidates selected by a "list" making them even more tied to the party line and not the voters?

This happens in Scotland now and it's crap, corrupt and throttles any chance of anyone good (aka "maverick") coming through.

(please nobody mention Margo "we are worth it" MacDonald - her comment made when the Scottish parliament voted initially for Westminster scales of pay and expenses)

The FPTP system works as it "centralises" our system, making those extremists like the BNP or their opposites at the other end of the extreme spectrum have no chance.

This may be frustrating to those who now want to support the BNP, but the numbers are still (thankfully) small enough that democracy can safely ignore them and still work.

Our system also localises politics. One of the refreshing things about the recent issues over expenses is that "local" people have started to think about their "local" representatives and how to get rid of them. What is missing is some power to allow them to do something about it.

The answers are simple :

- The ability to recall MPs, by a percentage of their majority or those who voted - not those qualified to vote. If they could only get a turnout of 40% then a % of that 40% can order a re-run.
- Fixed terms between general elections, why the feck does Brown or anyone else get to choose when we get rid of him ? Councils run on fixed terms as does Cardiff and Edinburgh.
- General election now to get this started.

PR is nonsense. Come on Craig you can do so much better if you put your back into it ;-)

The merits and demerits of the fundamentals of PR aside (and I am sceptical), one cannot seriously propose that now - after twelve years of centralisation, impingement of liberties and tax and spend - is the time to condemn us to the stasis of government by coalition.

Now is the time for a radical government to roll back the state and free the individual. That is likely to require two terms of a Cameron government committed to the principles outlined in his speech of last week.

(Well, we can hope)

Chris,

Plainly the bee in your bonnet was buzzing so hard that you could not actually read my post.

I specifically reject party list systems.

Actually FPTP does not centralise our system at all. It gives nutters like Thatcher and Blair virtually complete power.

I also happen to believe that if people are daft enough to vote for the BNP, or the Communists, or whoever, they are entitled for their view to be represented. You cannot wish people out of existence because you do not agree with them.

There is actually plenty of experience of BNP councillors being elected, being shown up for the twats they are, and being rejected subsequently. No bad thing.

@Chris

PR does not have to be a list system.
The Single Transferable Vote variant of PR is the way to go.

David,

I fear I missed something. You appear to have "radical" and "cameron" in the same sentence.

@David

If the Single Transferable Vote system had been used for the 2001 General Election, it is submitted that Labour would have required the support of the Lib Dems to govern. Had this been the case, would the UK have participated in the costly Iraq invasion? Would civil liberties have been infringed?

Personally I am against proportional representation because I believe that it leads to political instability, and Israel is a classic example. As to STV, I prefer one MP to represent one constituency, because that makes the link between voters and their MP that much more real. Regarding alleged 'unfairness', no-one is compelled to vote for or against anyone. If Labour have built up a solid community of urban supporters thanks to decades of activism, good luck to them - they might also lose it if they disenchant too many voters. I am quite happy that nutters don't stand a chance of being elected to Parliament under FPTP. Therefore, on balance, I would retain the present system as it is.

So we are all agreed then.....no list system.

Not in the Commons and not in the Upper House either.

Yes, Proportional representation would be a good thing......

......but would the differences such a system would make be merely cosmetic.

What difference would PR make to the current debacle?

We are so dumb we are letting this ridiculously inflated scandal obscure a hugely more important issue.

How much money has been fiddled by M.P.'s fraudulent expenses claims? A million pounds? Two?
We have had a month of this saturation coverage by the entire media. Surely enough is enough.

The Bank of England's 'quantitative easing' programme is picking the publics pocket to the tune of £150 billion.
That's one hundred and fifty thousand million pounds.
For this disaster our government is also responsible but this is a more serious matter BY A FACROR OF ABOUT ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND.

Come on!
Whose strings are being pulled here?

It is an amazing thing. Bankers can bankrupt themselves (and if they were forced to reveal the extent of their 'toxic assets' we would all know that they are, truly, bankrupt). Because of this, many thousands of families or perhaps, who knows, millions of them will lose their jobs and their incomes. They will fail to pay their mortgage debts. Then what will happen. They will be evicted.

Then what does society do. It hands over the homes of these poor wretches to the bankrupt party that caused their unemployment in the first place.
There is a satanic madness to this that takes the breath away.

If PR would sort out this nightmare for us I'm all for it, but if we can be so easily manipulated and abused can we really expect PR to correct for our witlessness when even directing our attention to this issue is to somehow miss the point?......

......we don't have time for this.

Let's take on the (penniless, if we could force the truth to be revealed)thieves who not only bind us all in debt but have ALREADY done the same to our grandchildren!

SJB
If the Single Transferable Vote system had been used for the 2001 General Election, it is submitted that Labour would have required the support of the Lib Dems to govern. Had this been the case, would the UK have participated in the costly Iraq invasion? Would civil liberties have been infringed?

To answer this question you have to find out why the UK took part in an illegal war and why our civil liberties have been infringed under the pretext of terrorism.

Of course in the war there would have been support from the arms industry and corporations and those within the Establishment/permanent government who would personally benefit. But I don't believe this is enough. I believe the government was driven/is being driven to act illegally to keep the country from drowning. Its economic position has been dire for many years and survival has been brought about by massive frauds of all descriptions. With this activity at the heart of government it isn't really surprising that it filters down to MPs lining their pockets.
Hence, if a political party comes into power it will have little choice but to succumb to illegality and repression.
Democracy (if it can exist) is a luxury for rich nations.

Good post, Craig, agree with pretty much every word.

After reading such a well-expressed case for STV and against closed party lists, it's dreadfully dispiriting to read poorly informed comments like Abe Rene's - that he is opposed to PR because it leads to Israel, where the situation is an extreme case of a national closed party list with a very low threshold for representation (2%).

STV has none of these problems, you vote for the individual. Crucially, you can choose between different individuals of the same party - a very powerful tool where (say) you oppose a party's leadership but respect the individual.

Against these virtues Abe Rene posits the classic fallacy that there is some kind of mystical sacred bond between a constituent and their single MP. All I can say is that I have never lived in a town that didn't have to be split into 2 or more completely arbitrary and artificial constituencies, and I have never ever felt this mystical bond. More frequently, I wished I lived on the other side of town.

I am represented by three local councillors, and I have a sense of the strengths, weaknesses and specialist subjects of each of the three, and, if I needed help with something, would approach the best one for the task in hand. I object to voting for them under the unfair FPTP system and if I was represented by 5 or 6 councillors and 5 or 6 MPs from a suite of parties, I would be absolutely delighted.

The system operating at present in the UK has delivered one dimensional politics favoured by the "two" parties that have a stranglehold on power A healthy political system would include diverse opinions and views. Sadly many issues of concern to the electorate are ignored or taboo.

Change in this system is not going to come about through the willing participation of Labour or Tory - two faces of the same agenda. It's going to be forced on the elite through folks voting for "extremist" parties as the centrists represent no one but themselves and their corporate masters.

The only obstacle to reform is postal voting fraud as witnessed in Glenrothes and elsewhere.

Spot on, Craig.
There are absolutely no rational arguments against STV.
In Ireland, where they've had it since 1921, governments have three times held referenda to get STV abolished and three times the people have told them to get lost.
There is no other electoral system that so firmly ties the Mp to their constituents.
No absenteeism there!
If they're not constantly on the spot finding problems to solve, they don't get the second or third preferences most of them need to get in.
80% of Irish voters vote for a winner!
And the Dail represents Irish opinion in accurate proportions.

Concerning Strategists' post, I should have mentioned that Italy as well as Israel are examples of the results of the political instability that PR can bring. When Roy Jenkins' commission came to the Midlands, I was able to make a contribution to the discussion, along the lines I have indicated, and Jenkins subsequently said that they had had the most rational and informed contributions there, which would have included my own. The relationship between constituents and their MP that I referred to was an ordinary one that operates by email or conversation, not mysticism, but is real for all that. It would not be the same with a 'parliamentary team', and the constituency involved would be too big with too many candidates to choose from. This is a reason in fact that the Jenkins Commission rejected STV. The FPTP system will not change in the foreseeable future, which is fine by me.

Abe Rene

Israel and Italy are usually quoted as examples of the shortcomings of PR, but they are exceptional, for many reasons. A dispassionate look at all PR systems shows that governments and ministers have around similar terms of office under PR as under other systems.

You also implicitly assume that political stability is a good thing. If that is what we currently have, I'm afraid many people would dispute its value with you. The cheerleaders for this 'stability' - which in fact is simply stagnation - tend to be politicians.

PR alone will require long timescales to bring about change - all Craig's other measures are also needed. In Scotland despite several years of PR (albeit the limited and unsatisfactory party list system) there is little sign of evolutionary progress. Labour still cannot see themselves as anything other than a thwarted political autarky, carrying along the Lib Dems as an auxiliary of useful idiots. Socialists and Greens, who I expected to flourish under the system, have yet to do so (although they may have lost out unfairly in the Dougie Alexander designed debacle of the last elections).

Great post, Craig, and convincing just on the unfairness of the disproportionate number of seats achieved by New Labour under the existing system. (As an aside, I suspect - being a bit cynical - that whichever party was in power long enough under the FPTP system would manipulate the constituency boundaries to favour themselves in the same way. Didn't the Tories do that in the 80s or 90s?)

@Abe Rene
"I prefer one MP to represent one constituency, because that makes the link between voters and their MP that much more real."

I don't get the need for this link at all. I would be a very happy indeed for a team of people to work on 'my' behalf, perhaps with specialisation in different areas of life: health, schooling, policing, etc. But above all I want them to be there holding Government to account.

Surely the one thing that everyone misses about PR is that any party that could prove itself popular enough with electorate to get 51% of the vote wouldn't need coalitions anyway. Perhaps that should be the incentive.

As for the BNP etc... They are loathsome but if they represent the views of a proportion of the population then it is truly anti-democratic to refuse them representation. Perhaps we should instead look at the factors that lead to the rise of extremists and address those, and put the blame for their very existence on the current system and the two main parties (and the Daily Mail) where it squarely belongs.

And, please, Craig. Can you address the issue of why there are two people posting here called 'Chris', as the views of the other are driving me nuts.

I would just like to say that to categorise people who are voting BNP as "daft" is a little worrying. They are not daft. They are being systematically lied to. How many of the recent articles on the BNP have highlighted this? None that I have found. And yet, here is Griffin,
setting out his stall in an address to white nationalists in 2000. "We are determined now to sell. That means basically to use the saleable words: freedom, security, identity, democracy....Once, by being rather more subtle, we get ourselves in a position where we control the British broadcasting media then perhaps one day the British people will change their minds and say, yes, every last one must go...But if you hold that out as your sole aim to start with you're going to get absolutely nowhere. So instead of talking about racial purity we talk about identity".

The Youtube video of his speech (shown by the BBC) is below. The thought of this man in a tent controlling anything seems amusing, if anything. And yet apparently they just got the funding to distribute 29 million leaflets. Not quite so funny?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/neo-nazis-for-israel_b_156497.html

testcomment

The present party system and first past the post are inventions of the last century. They may have had a place when society was polarised between rich and poor, workers and land owners etc and two main parties could represent the majority of the population.

This no longer applies, a new system is needed. We have instant electronic communications and the ability to organise a much better voting system than we have been given so far.

FTP is as corupt and out dated as both Tory and NuLiebour. RIP!

Vronsky,

I wouldn't call Italy or Israel exceptional. I understand that the Netherlands, Belgium and Finland have all had this problem, and PR in Weimar Germany got Hitler to power. Therefore I view stability as basically a good thing; stagnation leads to electoral loss, as it did for the Tories in 1997, and I expect it will for Labour next year.
To be fair to advocates of PR-STV, it appears to work well in smaller countries where there is a broad political consensus. So far as I can tell, it works well in the Irish Republic, and it might work well in an independent Scotland. But in Australia, a bigger 'laboratory', we have an interesting return to FPTP from STV in Western Australia:
http://www.strategicthoughts.com/record2009/wa_fptp.html
Therefore, in the UK I'm still not convinced about alternatives to FPTP, though an AV+ system may be worth considering that uses STV for a 'regional' top up vote.

Electronic voting in the US has been proved to be completely corruptible - do the research.

Society is still split into rich and poor - the problem is that the party who previously represented the poor no longer do so.

I researched the STV. It took me several days and conversations to understand it. There are also many variations on it.

Is it really worth allowing the ideologically mad into our parliament, in order to get this shower out? Would it not be better to change the electoral boundaries to produce a proportionate result(something which would have to happen for the STV to be brought in anyway)?

The Irish may like the STV but they still hate their politicians, who have proved to be as corrupt and incompetent as anyone else. So how has that worked, then?

This is a testcomment

You never know, if Labour get really hammered on the 4th it would be in their interest to change the voting system before the general election.

@Abe

Abe: "... PR in Weimar Germany got Hitler to power."

I would like to see some evidence that the electoral system was responsible.

Arguably under a first-past-the-post ("FPTP") system the Nazi Party would have obtained an overall majority of Reichstag seats with their 33.1% share of the vote (November 1932 election); for instance, 35.3% was enough under FPTP for Labour to have a 66-seat majority in our 2005 election. However, under PR the Nazi Party failed to win an overall majority.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_election,_November_1932

@SJB
Here's one relevant website:
http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/germany/lectures/23weimar_collapse.html

"If it had been a matter of single-man constituencies, the National Socialists could not have won much more than about 20 seats. In no district did they poll more than 40 per cent of the vote. But under proportional representation their national popular vote percentage of a mere 18.3 gave them 107 deputies."

@Paul

It was in Labour's wider interest to change the voting system years ago. For example, would the Lib Dems (their likely coalition partners) have supported the Iraq invasion? Similarly, would the Lib Dems have endorsed Blair's u-turn on Labour's 2001 manifesto commitment: "We will not introduce 'top-up' fees and have legislated to prevent them."
http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/2001/2001-labour-manifesto.shtml

@Abe

Thanks for the link. But 107 out of 577 deputies did not get Hitler to power. The Nazi Party's representation in the Reichstag (18.5%) corresponded almost exactly to the "mere 18.3[%]" share of the vote. Contrast this with our dear Labour government who in 2005 got 55.1% of the seats in the House of Commons on 35.3% share of the vote.

Sorry, forgot the link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_election,_1930

@SJB

My point was less that without PR the Nazis would have gotten much less than the 107 seats that they did. thus the rise of Nazism could have been held back.

There are a few comments about the 'instability' of governments allegedly caused by PR systems. I don't actually accept this, but if you want the fairness of PR combined with stable government may I offer a solution? Direct election of the Prime Minister for a fixed term. The PM is thereby answerable directly to the voters.

I am mystified by some of the comments here that seem to be implying that STV returns more than one MP per constituency, in its simplest form it certainly does not. Neither is the basic STV system a form of 'proportional representation' although there are hybrid variants which are. The last thing that we need right now is a muddying of the waters, which would give the opponents of electoral reform a pretext to put the issue on the backburner for a few more decades using the argument 'if people cannot make up their minds which system to choose, we should stick with what we've got'.

I have been an advocate of STV for decades but an opponent of 'proportional representation' so I find the conflating of the two systems particularly galling. My main objections to PR are :-

1) It entrenches parties even further into the electoral process.
2) A proportion of our MP's would be unelected wonks chosen from party lists (in the nightmare scenario the constituency MP's deal with constituency issues while the unelected party wonks run the country)
3) It is grossly unfair to those who would vote for independent candidates, their votes are treated differently to those who vote for parties.

The basic STV system would allow people to vote for a party (however obscure) which really represents their views without the fear that their vote is wasted. STV would also be cheap and simple to implement; don't believe their lies. Only the ballot forms and the subsequent counting process would have to be changed.

STV would be ideal, but not with multi-member constituencies. I don't think we want to go back to the old county MPs, and it'll be hard enough to have accountability with 70-ish thousand constituents, as we see in America it's impossible with more.

@Mark,

Ireland has PR with STV in multi-seat constituencies.
We have no TDs (MPs) who are unelected.
Votes for independents are treated in exactly the same way as the rest. I have voted for independents who were elected -- and played quite decisive roles in the Dail.

I don't "vote party" and never have. I vote for candidates I like and whom I think will be trustworthy and competent (unless their politics are anathema to me, obviously.)

Sitting TDs (MPs) are in competition with each other in their performance on behalf of their constituents, whether it's a three or a four-seater, or whatever. It seems to me that this must be a far better system when it comes to accountability at local level.

MarkU - can you explain how you see a "simple" STV system working, and how it would not elect more than one MP per constituency? The Electoral Reform Society's version certainly advocates multiple representatives from re-drawn constituencies. Does your system not use the Droop quota? Because otherwise, if a candidate has reached the required quota of votes, and a second candidate, thanks to the STV, also then reaches that quota, that second candidate would be elected too. And so on.

I ended up being rather in favour of the STV myself. Am still concerned that it would allow ideological fanatics a way into our parliament which they don't have at the moment. Voters who might stick the BNP down as their third choice without taking it terribly seriously, and then find that they've actually elected them, for example.

Look forward to hearing how your version works, though.

@ dreoilin

Thank you for the information. I did a quick google search on 'STV in multi-seat constituencies' and it was quite interesting. I am however confused as to how we would introduce it in the UK, do we merge constituencies and turn them into multi-seat constituencies? or do we multiply the number of MP's? (not a popular option I would imagine, especially at the moment) I'm not at all convinced that this is the way forward for the UK, our population being 15-20 times larger than that of Ireland.

I think that it would be a mistake to baffle the UK public with a plethora of complicated alternatives, we need something that is to the point, simple, cheap and easy to introduce. Basic STV in single seat constituencies, while not ideal, would address the very negative tactical voting issue and facilitate future changes. IMO the window of opportunity is very small, the last thing we need is a multiplicity of splinter groups, each proposing their own idea of a 'perfect' system.

Unless we stop the idealists and the saboteurs from complicating the issue then nothing at all will happen, its as simple as that.

@technicolour

"Is it really worth allowing the ideologically mad into our parliament, in order to get this shower out?"

Ermm, the current lot are amongst the "ideologically mad", that's part of the problem.

I also say no to PR for Westminster.
People will become even more sickened with the inequity of FPTP, thus bringing about the dissolution of the UK quicker

@ technicolour

1) Voters list candidates in order of preference, stopping wherever they wish.
2) All first preferences are counted, if anyone has more than 50% they have won, if not...
3) The candidate in last place is eliminated, the second preferences of those who voted for the eliminated candidate are allocated accordingly. If someone has more 50% of the vote, they have won, if not...
4) The candidate in last place is eliminated, their votes are then allocated to the next candidate on the voters list and so on.

If all your candidates are eliminated so is your vote. Eventually only two parties will remain, the one with the most votes is the winner.

MarkU - I think that's the system the ERS propose for electing a prime minister. I suppose it would work for parties, but essentially isn't it still a first past the post system - ie the first person to 50 percent makes it? Still, interesting.

Phil - I think they must be mad now: the cognitive dissonance for most Labour MP's especially must be immense. But isn't it a stretch to say that they're as ideologically extreme as the white supremacists? Aren't they mainly opportunistic cowards? (the same may apply to white supremacists too, of course). Afghanistan/Iraq didn't happen because of any "ideology", surely?

Gosh Chris is commenting on a post he didn't read. Yes to proper Proportional Representation. The Jenkins AV+ system could be acceptable simply by making it "open List" i.e. the order of a party's candidates is determined also by the voters' preferences. But STV in Multi-Member-Constituencies is far the best. Jenkins, as a politician, proposed a system that preserved single-member constituencies not because he believed in it but because he knew it was necessary, then, to sell the thing to MPs. MPs always bang on about the delights of the single-member personal-link constituency. Well actually a voting system is supposed to give the Voters, not the MPs, what they want. Anyway, how many councillors complain at having to share their wards? About zero.
Point is, I want to praise the virtues of the multi-member constituency. Almost every voter will be represented by an MP they voted for. If a constituent wants to complain about an injustice, the chances are very good they will find a sympathetic member in their own constituency. MPs and candidates of the same party have to compete with each other to give the best service, or represent truly the views of their voters of issues which divide their party. And multi-member constituencies can be real natural communities. Their boundaries can be exactly in line with local government boundaries (hardly any are under FPTP)and the shape of the constituency will only need to be changed about once a century. At present boundaries are changed about everey decade, and produce results that are chopped up little bits of various communities stuck together to make an arithmetical equality, an aim at which it drastically fails: by the end of the 10-year cycle, the largest constituency can be 500% of the electorate of the smallest!!! But the Multi-member need only have the number of members it returns adjusted up or down for changes in population. This can be done fresh for every election; say, one member per 100,000 registered electors as at the day the Writ is moved. The discrepancy between the proportion of MPs to electors is reduced to a maximum of about 5%.
This is the best moment any of us have ever seen to get a reform of the voting system. Go for STV, go for Multi-member, go for it now!!

@ technicolour

You are absolutely right, in its very simplest form STV is just a (greatly improved) form of the first past the post system. The main advantage of a basic STV system is that voters would be free to express their real preferences without feeling that they are wasting their vote. STV would give new parties and independent candidates a fighting chance. As it stands, at the next election, millions of people are going to reluctantly vote for New Labour or the Conservatives in an attempt to keep the other party out of office.

One more thing, like it or not, a PR system would definitely result in a significant BNP presence in parliament.

STV is clearly the most fair voting system. However, simple electoral reform will leave the second house still stocked by political appointees, partisans with deep pockets and religious nutcases. Real democracy requires every persons vote to be wielded according to their individual desires. Elected representatives are always open to abuyse and manipulation by special interests. If we deploy direct democracy along the lines of the Swiss Model then each citizen has the power to wield their vote over any parliamentary issue, regardless of the stance of their representative. Political representation should be optional, NOT mandatory.

Citizens should also be required to register their political position in elections. You can abstain or draw willies on your ballot paper if you want but it is your responsibility to society and democracy to actually do so. If you want to do it on line or by postal ballot or if you believe the only viable way of doing so is by requiring people to visit an electoral station personally- I don't care: The point is that that is how it should work.

Applying those Direct Democracy and the STV to elect both Houses of government is the only honest way to operate a democracy.

Lobbying should also be regulated.

MarkU at June 2, 2009 7:29 PM - "Basic STV in single seat constituencies, while not ideal, would address the very negative tactical voting issue and facilitate future changes." MarkU there's no such thing as STV in single seat constituencies. What you describe is called Alternative Vote and the national result (ie in Australia where it's used for the lower House) is no more proportional than First Past The Post. STV in multi-member constituencies has been used in both parts of Ireland for 90 years. If the Irish have no problem understanding it and using it, why on earth do you think the Brits would be to confused to get the hang of it? It would take one day for the Boundary Commission to join constituencies together in groups and allocate the seats according to the size of population. One day. And the result is proportional, ties MPs to the voters rather than to the parties, and gives stable government where once there was bitter division. Why on earth are you hesitant?

Craig,

Have you come across Arrow's Theorem ? It demonstrates that no voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide ranking while also meeting a certain set of reasonable criteria with three or more discrete options to choose from. It is notoriously hard to construct provably fair voting systems. The wikipedia link even shows (in the "Interpretations of the theorem" section) a set-up whose outcome under STV you wouldn't like.

@ Gerard Mulholland

Thank you for the correction regarding terminology, I will use the correct term from now on. I would however point out that I made no claims regarding proportionality, rather the opposite.

It seems that I have failed to get my point across. I am not advocating 'alternative vote' as the best system, in fact it may well be the least satisfactory system advocated on this thread. What I feel you are failing to take into consideration is the issue of implementation. A government elected under the current system has no incentive whatsoever to reform our electoral system, quite the reverse. Even if the government in question had agreed in principle to electoral reform, there is nothing to stop them from stonewalling the process during the implementation phase. Anything which can be quibbled about, will be quibbled about. Study groups, committees and sub committees will be set up. 'Consultations' will occur, 'proposals' will be 'examined' and of course all the competing proposals will have to be costed out. And how long is all of this deliberately obstructive wrangling going to take? As long as they want it to thats how long!

The advantage of the alternative vote system is that could be brought in tomorrow, virtually cost free (its just a different way of handling the ballot papers if you think about it) and it is so devastatingly simple that there are no pretexts for delays in implementation. Personally I don't regard the alternative vote as a final system but rather as a step in the right direction.

Just in case you are not convinced regarding the quibble factor, perhaps you could answer a few questions about multi seat constituencies.

Are we going to multiply the number of MP's (not exactly a popular option at the moment I should think) where are they all going to sit? Do we really want to pay for an extra couple of thousand salaries and second homes (not to mention duck islands and moat clearance) Perhaps we are going to merge single constituencies into much larger multi-seat constituencies, keeping roughly the same number of MP's. Which constituencies should be merged? Perhaps a study group should be set up to examine the issue, it shouldn't take more than a few years to get some preliminary proposals on the table. How do we decide on the number of MP's allocated to each constituency? by the number of registered voters or by gross population? I am sure that arguments could be advanced to support either position. Wouldn't the super-constituency model mean that many voters would have to travel large distances to talk to an MP? look I am just one guy writing off the top of my head, a large proportion of MP's are/were lawyers, they quibble for a living. Not only do you seem to expect the turkeys to vote for Christmas, you are also expecting them to organise it.

I hope this clarifies my position.

Gerard Mulholland: "MarkU there's no such thing as STV in single seat constituencies."

The Wikipedia article on STV [1] thinks otherwise: "When STV is used for single-winner elections, it is equivalent to the non-proportional instant-runoff voting method."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote

I'm currently working on a workable electoral system that will still have link to constituencies, but only if the voters in that constituency decide by an absolute majority. The problem with FPTP is that the large parties warp their policies towards swing voters in a handful of marginal constituencies, which is ultimately unrepresentative of most voters in the country. PR would mean that big parties would have to appeal to a larger section of the electorate. I'd avoid having STV as the essential simplicty and effectiveness of voting is that the one choice that the voter makes. Having several just muddies the waters. The voter themselves must make the crucial, definitve choice once.