Elect for a new approach
As its election time I thought I would have a go at coming up with a different approach to the first past the post system. The main issue at stake (as I understand it) is that the party in government may actually have less votes than the party in opposition. This seem ludicrous. By the time you take the % of people who can vote and then the % of people who do vote, then the % of the people who actually voted for Labour you end up with a government who only gained 22% of the votes. In this election this situation may become worse.
So what could we do about it?
The first thing I would do is to have the party in government the only who gains the most votes. We would still have constituencies. Here's how it would work.
We would have approximately 300 evenly sized constituencies. It actually does not matter if they are even by population or area. Its not that important.
People would make 2 votes at election time. The first vote would be for the party you want to govern. Simple. Which ever party gets the votes gets the job. The winning party would then put in place 300 MPs. One into each constituency. The voters would have no say in these. But there would be one representing you.
The second vote is for a person (although their party alliance can be publicly known). That person (there would be 300 of them) would be the opposition (you would need to do a preference order in case your first choice ended up being in power).
So you would have an MP representative of government in your constituency guaranteed. This is unlike today. If your MP of choice does not make it into government then you do not actually have a voice IN government, only in opposition.
This method would leave you with an opposition MP in each constituency and the opposition would be at a local level on local issues as well as in parliament.
When the government wants to pass a bill then they will nearly always have a majority but never have control of more than 300 MPs (50% of them). So they will have to compromise somewhat.
It is a balance of both true majority vote government as well as effective opposition.
So what could we do about it?
The first thing I would do is to have the party in government the only who gains the most votes. We would still have constituencies. Here's how it would work.
We would have approximately 300 evenly sized constituencies. It actually does not matter if they are even by population or area. Its not that important.
People would make 2 votes at election time. The first vote would be for the party you want to govern. Simple. Which ever party gets the votes gets the job. The winning party would then put in place 300 MPs. One into each constituency. The voters would have no say in these. But there would be one representing you.
The second vote is for a person (although their party alliance can be publicly known). That person (there would be 300 of them) would be the opposition (you would need to do a preference order in case your first choice ended up being in power).
So you would have an MP representative of government in your constituency guaranteed. This is unlike today. If your MP of choice does not make it into government then you do not actually have a voice IN government, only in opposition.
This method would leave you with an opposition MP in each constituency and the opposition would be at a local level on local issues as well as in parliament.
When the government wants to pass a bill then they will nearly always have a majority but never have control of more than 300 MPs (50% of them). So they will have to compromise somewhat.
It is a balance of both true majority vote government as well as effective opposition.
posted by So long and thanks for all the fish at
9:19 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home