UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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Getting rid of FPTP would be a help. Governments are getting elected on ever smaller shares of the actual vote. Labour only got 34% of the vote at the election. Governing was always going to be hard, and the huge gap between the parliamentary majority and the reality of the public is not helping.
They got 34% of a 60% turnout, or about 20% of the possible vote.
Labour only got 420+ seats in parliment, leading to a surplus from majority required of 80+.
Due to the elections timing law, they had five fucking years with this majority to unfuck the country, two of which are fucking gone.
You'd think they'd be making progress by now.
I don't see how? Labour got 34% of the vote, but has a massive parliamentary majority due to FPTP. That majority should translate into being able to do whatever the fuck they want for 5 years.
In all likelihood, a switch to a more proportional system, though very positive in the long run, would have a serious teething problem in a country like the UK where we're not used to it: political parties would actually have to work together to get anything done. If we still have a prime minister, they would need to retain the confidence not just of their party's MPs, but also of the other MPs in the (likely) coalition. In a country where politicians are used to just being able to have their way when in power, that seems likely to cause problems in the form of coalitions collapsing every five minutes.
This can be a problem in other countries with PR. It's not a necessary feature of PR by any means (and FPTP is so awful that it's also not a reasonable criticism of PR) but I think it's more likely to happen in a young PR system than an established one.