Canada leading the way?

[purpletigron]

Votes are being counted in the Canadian province of British Columbia in a referendum to adopt "a form of proportional representation called the single transferable vote (STV)" for Provincial elections.

Edit To allow for absentee ballots, the final count in this referendum will commence on May 30 and end on June 1.

Comments

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

STV's my favourite option. I often don't understand all the ins and outs of electoral reforms, but it seems to me to be a fair method.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

There's a fairly good discussion of some alternative voting systems here:

http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/votingsystems/systems2.htm

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Ta :)

[profundo-rosso.livejournal.com]

My favoured idea is putting everyone who wants to be PM into the Big Brother house and tell them it's going to be decided by telephone ballot.

Then we brick up all the doors, switch off the cameras and close down the telephone lines.

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

No, not STV! It produces mediocre winners rather than people with any fire. I like PR as a concept, but I´ve seen too often in student societies just how awful STV is in practice.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

We used to use multi-ballot anti-vote in the society I ran at college :-)

More seriously, should STV be rejected due to 'lack of fire'? What should a voting system be trying to achieve?

[del-c.livejournal.com]

This is why I favour the Klingon method of choosing leaders by challenging the incumbent to mortal combat. Do not coddle the weak!

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

OK - who do we have as a good candidate to challenge Blair?

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

Paddy Ashdown? Actually, Iain Duncan Smith would probably have a damned good chance on those grounds too. :)

[profundo-rosso.livejournal.com]

"People with fire" tend to be the kind of folks who lead us into illegal wars because they confuse first belief with fact and then fact with justification.

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

Whatever else you say about Blair, he is an excellent leader. Look what happened to Howard. Or Iain Duncan Smith. Or William Hague. Mediocre men who didn't have the fire to do anything with their party, and look where the conservatives are now.

Blair has fire, and used it to make labour electable again. What he did afterwards is a different matter, of course.

[profundo-rosso.livejournal.com]

Whatever else you say about Blair, he is an excellent leader.

Judged purely on that basis, so was Adolf Hitler.

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

Absolutely right. And he got Germany out of a depression, made the trains run on time and made people proud of their country again. Then he went too far and had to be dealt with.

I don't think that any government can do the big things that need to be done - and there are always big things that need doing - without a charismatic leader.

Similarly, if you want something done locally - the sorts of things you want your MP to do - you need someone who can galvanise the appropriate agencies into getting things done. An MP should be a figurehead for change at a local level. He can't be that if he's a mediocre individual elected because the vote split equally between two charismatic individuals who the populace either loved or hated and he got as everyone's second choice as a result.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

But Blair isn't doing the things that need to be done. He may talk the talk, at times, but he hardly ever walks the walk because too many out in voter land aren't going to accept expensive changes.

Examples include:

The Environment - he talks this up all the time, but has he ever tried to put Bush's feet to the fire on Kyoto, did he stand up to the petrol price complainers, is he prepared to make people pay more for electricity so that they use less?

Education - just about everyone involved in education thinks that over-specialisation at A-level is a bad thing, and a broader-based baccalaureate-style qualification is needed. But the voters see A levels as the 'gold standard' and nobody is prepared to touch them.

The Euro - Blair is in favour of it, Brown not. But Blair isn't going to ruffle anyone's feathers to push for it.

And the list could go on and on.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

A need for a strong party leader, or even a strong Prime Minister, is not the same as a need for strong Government. Accepting party politics as a given, the parties will presumably continue to seek strong leadership. A coalition Government would be presumably be led by one of those strong party leaders. The coalition itself could still be as politically mixed as the country?

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

Except that any coalition is paralysed by the lack of a majority. In an ideal world a coalition works by having only the good things getting through. In the real world nothing gets done because everyone's too busy arguing about what they can get out of it.

I saw too many years of a hung council in Liverpool to have any faith in coalition government.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

But if there is no majority in the country for one particular party (as is the case in the UK at the moment, where only 36% of voters voted for the current government) then why shouldn't the number of MPs reflect this? Surely democracy is undermined if the will of the people is not properly reflected in parliament?

And coalition government can work very well. It is the natural state of affairs in many countries around the world. The fact that the UK electoral system encourages dog-in-the-manger-ism in councils where there is a split vote doesn't mean that coalitions can't work if people grow up and decide to work with each other rather than against each other. Germany's economic miracle of the 60s-80s was, IIRC, largely achieved under coalition governments, for example.

[profundo-rosso.livejournal.com]

Surely, most political parties are themselves coalitions? Michael Howard and Ken Clarke are both members of the Conservative Party, just as Tony Blair and Glenda Jackson both belong to the PLP, but each holds quite contrasting views to the other.

And yes, sharikkamur, Hitler did indeed get the trains running on time. After all, you don't want the sidings jammed up with wagons full of jews and homosexuals, do you?

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

I think the distinction I'm trying to make is that in a political party the members very often have stronger loyalty to their party than to anything else, including their electorate. This was one reason why the voters of Bethnal Green ditched Oona King - she ignored their wishes and voted with party not electorate on the Iraq war.

To my mind a coalition is a rather looser and more fluid gathering than a political party, and one which allows greater freedom of expression and the possibility that the electorate's wishes might be better reflected. But you're right that this isn't in the dictionary definition.