The end of First Past the Post

It would appear the birth of multi party politics for the first time in well over a century is upon us in the United Kingdom.  As SNP, UKIP and even the Greens look to press home gains in the national polls it looks as if only the SNP will benefit from their boom in the polls, as the dated First Past the Post system goes on being a long ignored symbol of everything wrong with our political system

So Scarlet has accused our electoral system of being undemocratic?  Can he back it up?  Of course he can, let us take 1983 as an example, here are the key results with all votes counted:

	% Vote	% Seats
Conservatives	42.4	61.1
Labour	27.6	32.2
Liberal-SDP	25.4	4.5

So here we see everything wrong with the system.  Mrs Thatcher's Tories win less than half of the votes and a huge majority in the house, the Tories control almost all actions of British Law and the Government for several years.  As far as I'm concerned this isn't even the worrying part of it (then again as an arch tory, I wouldn't) the worry lies in the absence of the Liberal SDP alliance in parliament (who are there but have no clout).  As you can see if you wanted to create a government representative of more than half of the votes you need the Tories to buddy up with another party yet no such undertaking was ever neccessary.  This would be excusable if not for the fact that this has been the case in almost every single election in British electoral history.  Churchill, Macmillan, Wilson, Blair not one of them won more than half the vote in a single election, so why keep the system?

Well for many years the system has been considered again and again but there are a couple of points in favour of first past the post.  The most obvious reason which comes to mind is that First Past the Post has protected the big parties very well over the years, the Labour vote collapse in 1983 but the system still gave them more than they deserved with 27.6 of vote and 32.2% of the seats.  Likewise the Tories have benefited in the past but the Liberal Democrats, UKIP and now the Greens will all fall foul of the system.

The other reason often thrown about for keeping First Past the Post is that it often gives us a strong Government, even though it is never what the people of the UK have voted for in the first place.  This may seem a fascist argument but it works out, a strong government is generally a better one, even if it is controversial, provided there are checks and balances of some kind on them and the electorate are still vital to the system.  If the vote is going to be divided up into chunks of 20-40% for the bigger parties we would never get a storng government, indeed this sytems seemed best for many years but now I would argue the tide has turned on this argument.  Here is a poll  from today for expected vote percentage:

	% Vote
Conservatives	34
Labour	34
Liberal Democrats	7
SNP	4
UKIP	14
Green	5
Others	2

Now the first thing that you will probably notice is the squeeze at the top, where would expect one of the two main parties to crack 40% as little as ten years ago the system has opened up, it looks like we will get no clear winner from an election with this kind of spread.  We now reach the time at which it is neccessary to make uneasy allegiances and the most simple way to do this is to draw a line between left and right, the table then broadly looks like this:

Left

% Vote

Right

% Vote

Labour

51

Conservative

49

Liberal Democrat

UKIP

Green

½ Other

SNP

½ Other

With a typical 1% opinion poll margin of error it seems that the nation is heading for electoral stalemate, or at least that is what the polls would imply, near enough a straight down the middle tie, a very unstable government is what the people appear to want, however the projected seat totals when split to left and right don't add up to 325 each, instead we get this:

	Seats
Left	348
Right	302

  Now obvioulsy this is pure conjecture from Scarlet but it looks alarmingly like the right could be underrepresented at the next parliament.  Many British social values are lurching to the right on things such as benefits, crime and immigration we could see the resentment build, particularly if the left's leader is the current leader of the opposition whose personal poll ratings are amongst the lowest for a serious candidate for PM in years.

 So I ask the people of the United Kingdom, is it time to change the system?  Or do we keep calm? Do we invoke the spirit of Proportional Representation or tow the line again?