i've allowed the dust to settle on the result and read and listened to alot of expert opinion on the ins and outs of the British electoral system and its time to highlight these massive flaws that make the UK probably the most undemocratic democracy in the world
in 1997 both Scotland and Wales were given a body of government to allow desicion making for themselves but only on selected issues...these are known as devolved powers and allow those parliments to address their own Health policies among other things
however
both Scotland and Wales still have members of parliment in Westminster (the entire UK governing house)
these mp's although representing people from Scotland and Wales, have no say on the devolved issues in their own country...but DO have a say on those same issues only in application to England...so essentially you have mp's from Scotland, powerless to make change in Scotland...but able to effect change in England
now this might seem a little trivial but when put in the context of the recent election results it makes for a disturbing reality
to start with
Labour won again...Labour is the party that has been in power for the last 8 years...headed by Tony Blair
they won by a majority of 66 seats in the house of commons...this means that they have 66 more members of parliment than all the other parties combined
second in the election were the conservative party (remember maggie thatcher?...that's the party she led from 1979-1990 and who were ousted by labour in 1997)
ironically if England were taken as a separate country...then the conservative party would have won...but when the mp's of Wales and Scotland are taken into consideration then Labour won...despite the fact that i previously mentioned that those same mp's have little say in their own countries and have more power over England than they do over Wales and Scotland
remember all the bleating about the US 2000 elections when Bush lost the popular vote but still got into the whitehouse?
well the exact same thing happened in the UK this time and no-one batted and eyelid
the conservatives won the popular vote but still lost heavily
why?
it all comes down to constiuencies
the areas of the country that each member of parliment represents
unlike the states in the US...constituencies in the UK are flexible...the labour government manipulated the constituency boundaries so that they could secure more of an even spread of regular labour votes or in many cases...changed boundaires to try and gain marginal seats
marginal seats are where a party won the last election or a recent bi election by a small number of votes...labour would change the boundaries to incorporate a few extra towns that have traditionally voted more for labour in order to try and change the mp in their favour
these small changes led to a big change
essentially it meant that if both labour and the conservatives got the same % of the overall vote throughout the country...labour would end up with a majority of over 120 seats and could easily use that majority to impose any piece of legislation they wanted
as it stands in the wake of the election...labour got half that majority...despite the fact that they only got 36% of the popular vote
the elections have gotten to the point where only a handful of people in the marginal constituencies are now deciding the election result...it was estimated that 800,000 people decided the election this year and that the rest of the country might as well not have bothered with the trip to the polling station
on top of that...there are investigation ongoing into the use of postal votes...labour party members were sending off for postal votes in other peoples names and then filling them in for labour votes
what about 1 person 1 vote?
not in this election...in some cases people had a voting card delivered in their name in several different constituencies and could easily have cast several votes without it being noticed
now...if things werent complicated enough...the Scottish parliment has an entirely different representational method...where as in England they use the constituency method...in Scotland they use proportional representation...this means that the parliment takes the total % of the vote from the whole country for each party and divides the seats in the parliment to reflect this
but to add another twist...the people who run for election in the Scottish parliment do so by representing a certain area of the country...a constituency by any other name
what this means for the country essentially is that one person can receive the most votes in a certain area of the country...but end up NOT being elected because of the proportional representation method
is this a bad thing?...i don't know...because it has a flip side
in the last Scottish elections the conservative party got 20% of the total vote...and as such are represented in the parliment in that %...but if Scotland were a constituency only parliment then the conservatives would not have a single member of parliment because they never got the majority of the vote in any area...
so would it be right that the 20% of the people who voted for the conservatives would have no representation of their politics in their governing body
bizzare is it not?
it seems this democracy is in a ridiculous state of affairs and needs to be sorted out before all faith in it has been lost completely
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you have members of parliment from Scotland...who work and decide policy in England...but have little power in Scotland because Scotland has its own devolved parliment
you have an electoral system that if both the main parties had the same share of the vote...then one party would still win by over 100 seats in the parliment
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We have accepted en masse that democracy is another word for freedom. Like hell it is. Democracy
is not freedom, it is a dictatorship camouflaged as freedom. The same
force controls, directly or indirectly, every major political party and
movement. It created most of them. When you vote at an election, you
are choosing between different aspects of the same force. The money
and the media decide who becomes president of the United States and
the money and the media are owned and controlled by the same people.
Let us write the following in letters 20 feet high: Democracy Is Not
Freedom. 30 people telling 49 what to do is not freedom. In fact, most
governments are elected by a minority of the population and they still
call it a “democratic” election. Freedom is the right of all people to
express who they are, what they think, and how they wish to live their
lives: free from imposition or hassle from anyone. It is to be able to
celebrate our individual uniqueness without rules, regulations, ridicule
and condemnation from those who seek to impose their view of life
upon the rest of us.
Well, true freedom is more akin to anarchy than democracy. However, there can be no truely free society ruled by a governement. I can't really speak for the British system of self rule, but here in America, the problem is the people who practice it. The politicians are the problem. More ability to make decisions for itself should be turned over to the people. It should be one person=one vote. The electoral college should be done away with.
We have democracy in Britain!!?? When did this happen!!??!!?? Why was I not told??????? I always believed that what we had was that evil that masquerades as democracy, the Party System..... we are allowed to vote for a party.... by doing so, we are saying "I want this party to rule my country, regardless of the fact that it only represents some of my views and not others, and agree that my vote means I am still held to support that party even if that party totally changes those of its policies that I did agree with...." Democracy?? not quite.... as far as I am concerned, until we get rid of these self serving political parties, and have a system where MPs represent their constituents, rather than the Party or themselves, we can never have democracy.... I also dislike the fact that if no one votes at all, this is taken as agreement with the status quo... we shouyld have, on voting slips, a box marked "none of the above..." thus enabling the people to register their dislike of all the candidates put forward.... if enough people tick the box, someone else would then have to be found, rather than forcing people to participate in the election of someone who they believe cannot adequately represent th views of the constituency.....
Aaand once more spectacular misapprehension of what 'Democracy' means being spouted around these forums.
We live in a representative democracy. Work out what that means and you have your answer. Don't live in a fantasy world where this is either a dictatorship or that some other option would be better.
Also don't think for one moment that such representation can work without parties.
If you want to talk about boundary reform, there is probably a case. But babbling about the death of democracy, or how we have never had democracy, or how this is a dictatorship, is massively ignorant.
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"We've got maybe seconds before Darth Rosenberg grinds everybody into Jawa burgers and not one of you buds has the midi-chlorians to stop her!"
well one of the main methods of vote counting must be undemocratic
as i said
in Scotland we use proportional representation
under this method...the 20% of the people who voted tory are represented by about 20% of the number of seats in the Scottish parliment
but they never actually got the most votes in any single area where they stood
if it had been a constituency method whereby each constituency is represented by the person who got most votes in that area...then the tories would have had not a single person in the Scottish parliment
so which is the right method?
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Representative democracy is flawed in that it relies on politicians to vote the way their constituents want them to... Much of the time they don't. Hell, much of the time they don't even know what their constituents want, not that they care.
WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM!! AMERICA IS BASICALLY A DEMOCRACY AND IT IS THE BEST THING EVER. YOU GET TO SAY BASICALLY EVERYTHING YOU WANT AND DO JUST ABOUT ANYTHING!!!!!
KMC Community Forums
May 12th, 2005 11:00 PM
....and of course I would be right
THIS IS TO Deano
