Proportional Representation defences

So at this vote for a change rally, they didn't have any truck with all the (apparently) usual objections to proprtional representation. Basically it goes like this.

It will break up the big parties!

Yeah that's a good thing. These two big parties don't give us enough choice.

But smaller parties will never agree on anything! They'll spend all their time arguing!

Within the big parties this is exactly what happens already. Oona King and Peter Mandelson are in the same party, and they are worlds apart in their beliefs and stuff. The difference with smaller parties working together will be that the arguing will just be out in the open instead of behind closed doors.

Coalitions of smaller parties won't be as strong!

Pfft. "Strong". First, the parties we have know aren't strong, they just try to put on a brave face. Second, even if they were, big strong governments aren't that awesome. What's awesome is when the government represents the people.

Some smaller parties are bad, though! What if the BNP get MPs!

That would suck, but unfortunately that's democracy. There aren't actually that many racists in the country, but there are a few, and frankly, if 1% of this country want BNP MPs, then 1% of parliament ought to be BNP MPs. Hopefully everyone will quickly see how impractical and dishonest they are, and not vote for them any more.

It will never happen. We just don't do big change in this country!

Nuts to that. We gave votes to women, we lowered the voting age, we cut off the King's damn head when he got tyrannical, we fought and won a war against fascism, and we made a national free health service without a great lot of fuss like they have in America about it. This kind of progressive change is practically a British tradition. You just have to keep working towards it, that's all.

Vote For A Change

So I went to this vote for a change rally a couple a months ago and I found out about proportional representation. It was totally convincing, so I thought I'd write this down so I can link to it instead of keep telling everyone about it.

Here's the problem. It's way simple - this is how I explained it to my five-year-old daughter.

You have to choose two people to represent your year on the school council. There's Alice, Bob and Charlie. You and all the girls in your class vote for Alice, but all the boys in your class vote for Bob - and there's a couple more boys than girls in your class, so Bob is the one chosen by your class.

All the girls in the other class vote for Alice too, but all the boys vote for Charlie. There are more boys than girls in that class too, so that class has now chosen Charlie.

So now Bob and Charlie are on the school council, voting for all kinds of trouser-wearing, boy-type stuff, even though way more people in your year voted for Alice.

Even without a five-year-old's acute radar for unfairness, you can tell that isn't right.

I know it's not a perfect analogy, but it works, I think. In real life, it goes like this - I vote for the Lib Dems - quite a few of us do - but mostly people around here vote Tory, so they win where I live. At this point, my vote is thrown away. I tried, I failed, I'm out of the game.

So with a proportional representation system, like they have in Scotland (so I'm told), that wouldn't be the end of the story. My vote would be kept, and counted up with the totals from the rest of the country. If the Lib Dems don't get any MPs for specific places, but they end up getting 20% of the votes across the whole country, we add a bunch of Lib Dem MPs to parliament until they make up 20% of it. They don't represent any particular constituency - they just represent people like me.

Doesn't that sound better? Not much different, but a bit better. That's good, right?

Oh, FINE, yes, there are some down sides. Well, there aren't really, but people think there are. This post is long enough thought, so I'll come to that later.