UKIP’s and the Conservative’s Pickle

It is interesting that the Conservatives are branding themselves as the “party that will give the people a choice” (through an in/out referendum) and UKIP are also promising to “give the country back to the people”. Yet both are worried about splitting the vote at the next general election. Hence the calls for pacts or coupon elections from worried conservatives; hence UKIP playing hard-ball. This is disingenuous.

The Alternative to Primaries

Today (22 May 2014) Democratic Audit has a post about Primary Elections (in Latin America) – a mechanism that has some superficial attractions for the British political system and which has been tried in some parliamentary constituencies. They state that primaries:

have been asked to deliver several – and sometimes competing – goals: promoting intra-party democracy, solving conflicts between party factions, strengthening party links with society and institutionalizing party systems and electoral coalitions.

(ref: The Latin American experience suggests primary elections can be effective but not a magic recipe for party democratisation Flavia Freidenberg and Julia Pomares)

It’s all about parties and not about ideas. Is there a better way?

Engaging voters in a PR election

The Eastminster blog (at UEA Norwich) published a post “The Big Sleep” (11 April 2014)

Mark Wells stood as a candidate in both a general election and European election. The European election was much less engaging for candidates and the electorate, he argues, because of the proportional electoral system.

His  experiences as a bottom of the list European candidate sounds dire but I take issue with his final conclusions that:

In reality, the PR system in use is too democratic to stir the blood.

STV for MPs electing a Speaker, but not for us!

So in the by-election for a new deputy speaker there are seven candidates and according to the BBC News website (15 October 2013 Deputy Speaker: Seven Conservative MPs to contest ballot):

The election will be conducted under a system known as single transferable vote, where MPs will be able to list their preferred candidates in order of one to seven on the ballot paper.

If no candidate secures 50% plus one of the votes in the ballot, the candidate with the least votes will be eliminated and their preference votes re-distributed to other contenders. This process will continue until a winner emerges.

A system to blow your mind

Just come across this as a voting system – and have severe brain-ache. It does however appear to have something going for it when it comes to wanting to vote for or against candidates or indeed for or against “the system”.

It’s called chiralkine logic.

What makes an election system democratic?

How offended can you be before an election result is “not democratic”?

UKIP Vote split

Nigel Farage stated today (BBC Today in Politics 1 March 2013)  in response to UKIP pushing the Tories into third place in the Eastleigh by-election (result):

The UKIP vote was split by the Tories

Daniel Hannan (Conservative MEP) blogging on the Daily Telegraph (The Eurosceptic Right wins more than half the vote, the Europhile Left gets in with less than a third) urged the Tories and UKIP to come to a pact.

Between them, the two Centre-Right parties secured 53 per cent; yet the Lib Dems got in with 32 per cent. This is worse than the SDP/Labour split of the early 1980s. It is more like the Conservative/Reform split in Canada in the 1990s, a split that gifted the Left vast parliamentary majorities on a minority of the vote for over a decade.

Imagine Eastleigh being replicated in 100 constituencies at the 2015 general election. Or in just 50. Yet again, the first-past-the-post system would see an essentially Eurosceptic electorate return an essentially Euro-integrationist House of Commons.

Oh dear, what to do?

uKippered – need an Alternative?

So a Tory campaign group lead by Michael Fabricant is recommending an electoral pact with UKIP (BBC News 26 November 2012)

He says an electoral pact with UKIP – in which the Conservatives would promise a referendum after 2015 and in return UKIP would not stand against Tory candidates – could help the Conservatives win an extra 20-40 seats at the next election.

This is surely nearly the ultimate in cynicism.  He is recommending that the Conservatives prostitute themselves to UKIP in exchange for extra seats.  Who wins seats should be up to the electorate.

Supplementary Voting

Some commentators have tried to explain away the high number of “spoilt ballots” in last weeks PCC election as the public being confused by the voting system.  Detailed analysis of the spoilt ballots might confirm this, but I am left wondering why they did not use the simpler Alternative Vote?  Oh, yes they screwed up a referendum on that issue earlier this year.

Broken Promises and the Westminster System

I can’t help but notice an occasional Labour refrain, “The Lib Dems are breaking their election promises” – admittedly, not quite as regularly as the Conservative refrain “The mess we were left with”.  Both should be dropped.