Election

[Alexander Rowe]

Share of the vote -


Labour 36.3%
Tories 33.2%



Seats -


Labour 353
Tories 196



Does anyone think its time for a change to Proportional Representation ? Does anyone know if it works well in other countries ?

[mike.mckenzie]

Italy uses PR and has one of the most unstable democratic systems in Europe. The Governments are formed by wide ranging coalitions, open to corruption and extreme parties from the left and right and have a history of collapsing, sometimes only a few months into office.

Best off sticking the way we are.

[Drutt]

Let's not forget that the Scottish Parliament uses PR.

I'm strongly in favour of PR. It would help prevent landslide victories and therefore can temper the power of the government in place. Parties would be unlikely to have a large enough majority to force through unpopular decisions and legislation (Iraq, top-up fees, foundation hospitals, ID cards, constant erosion of our civil liberties perhaps?) but the other side of the coin is that a government is likely to get less done simply because it doesn't have a majority great enough to push legislation through.

IMO, the prospect of less legislation (and House of Commons debates that go on and on and on), is worth it just to get an appropriately representative parliament in place.

Labour got 36.3% of the votes, yet got 57.7% of the seats. The FPTP system doesn't appear to be adequately representing our views. I'll be amused if the Tories start murmurings about how PR would be a good thing.

[jjc]

Share of the vote -


Labour 36.3%
Tories 33.2%



Seats -


Labour 353
Tories 196



Does anyone think its time for a change to Proportional Representation ? Does anyone know if it works well in other countries ?
I voted LibDem and it's been time to change to a PR system for a very long time!

[Rheghead]

The only problems that I can see with PR is that the far right would have a small but audible voice in parliament and at some point, local constituents will not get the MP that truly represents their voting profile.

[jjc]

...the far right would have a small but audible voice in parliament...
Much as I disagree with those on the extremes of the political spectrum, we cannot exclude them from our democractic system.

FPTP clearly produces parliaments which do not properly reflect the desires of the electorate. PR would be an improvement.

If it turns out that a more representative parliament includes MPs from parties such as the BNP or Veritas then that's democracy in action.

If you find that unpalatable then you stand against them and make your argument to the electorate - you don't rig the system.

[flaxton]

I'm deeply opposed to PR. I see no reason why tiny, insignificant parties should be able to control the rest simply because they have the missing 15% of the votes. In 2003 the Conservatives and the SNP took more votes, so why aren’t they in government with Labour? At least that would be proportional.

I understand that SMDP isn’t proportional either, but at least it leads to strong, stable government.

By the way, as less than 50% of the electors voted in ’03, doesn’t that mean there shouldn’t be any MPs, since the majority voted for “nobody”? :-)

[golach]

I would love to see PR...but only if it was compulsary to vote...then we would have true result

[FoosumBrute]

Next time you see Screaming Lord Thurso, ask him this:

If the LibDems as so keen on Proportional Representation, why is it only Labour and LibDems who hold ministerial positions in the Scottish Parliament ?

Hypocrits.

[Mr P Cannop]

Next time you see Screaming Lord Thurso, ask him this:

If the LibDems as so keen on Proportional Representation, why is it only Labour and LibDems who hold ministerial positions in the Scottish Parliament ?

Hypocrits.

FoosumBrute

why don't you ask him that ??

[kenimac1]

Flaxton hit the nail on the head. More than 50% voted for nobody surely shows the true views of the people towards the Holyrood Folly!

[FoosumBrute]

.... and here's another example from today's BBC News online of the LibDems "principled" stand on Proportional Representation :

"The leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats will refuse to form a coalition at Holyrood unless ministers are appointed from his party."

Coalition ? Coalition ? Surely there's no room for coalition if you believe in fighting for proportional representation.

Maybe a question this time for Mr Jamie "I was partly responsible for the parliament building mis-management" Stone ?

[The Pepsi Challenge]

Ach, I'm gonna leave it to Noam Chomsky to do the talking. I agree with him, and it makes for insightive reading. Enjoy.


Malkin: Many people in this country became politically
active, some of them for the first time, during this year’s presidential
campaign. A lot of them are now expressing despair
and disappointment about the election results. What are your
thoughts about the recent election?

Chomsky: Well, such despair is common, but it is the
result of a misunderstanding. For one thing, elections tell us
virtually nothing about the country. George W. Bush got about
•• percent of the electorate. John Kerry got about •• percent.
?at leaves •• percent of Americans who didn’t vote. ?e voting
patterns were almost the same as in ••••: same “red” states,
same “blue” states. ?ere was only a slight shift that tipped
the election in Bush’s favor. Apparently the wealthier part of
the population — which tends to vote more in line with its
class interests — came out in somewhat greater numbers this
time. If the voting patterns had shifted slightly in the oppo-
site direction and Kerry were in the White
House, it would also tell us nothing about
the country.

Right before the election there were
extensive studies released about voters’
attitudes and intent. It turns out that only
about •• percent of them were voting for
what the studies’ designers called “agenda,
policies, programs, and ideas.” ?e rest were
voting for imagery.

U.S. elections are run by marketing
professionals, the same people who sell
toothpaste and cars. ?ey don’t believe in
actual free markets or the nonsense taught
in school about informed consumer choice.
If they did, •• ads would say, “Here are the
models we are putting out next year. Here
are their characteristics.” But they don’t
do that, because their model is the same
as the next company’s model. So what they
do is show you an actress or a football player or a car going
up a sheer cliff. ?ey try to create an image that will trick you
into buying their product.

?ese marketers also construct imagery to try to influence
elections. ?ey train Bush to project a certain image: An average
guy just like you. A guy you’d like to meet in a bar. Someone
who has your interests at heart, who’ll protect you from
danger. Kerry is trained to project a different image: someone
who cares about the economy and about people’s health, a war
hero, and so on. Most people vote for an image, but the image
typically has almost no resemblance to reality. People tend to
vote for the candidate they believe shares their values. ?ey
are almost always wrong. Working-class Bush voters believed
that Bush supported their interests, when the Republican Party
platform was mostly about redirecting wealth to the top.
If you ask people why they don’t vote based on issues,
they’ll say, “I don’t know where the candidates stand on the
issues.” Which is the truth. ?e election is designed to keep
you from understanding the candidates’ positions on the issues.
To figure out, say, what their healthcare proposals are
would require a major research project. You aren’t supposed
to know. ?e advertising industry wants you to focus on what
they call “qualities.” And when you do discover the candidates’
positions on the issues, you understand why.

Right before the election, two of the best public-opinion
organizations in the world came out with major studies of
popular attitudes and beliefs. ?e results are so far to the
left of either political party that the press can’t even report it.
Huge majorities think that their tax dollars ought to go first for
healthcare, education, and Social Security — not the military.
An overwhelming majority oppose the use of military force
unless we are under attack or under imminent threat of attack.
A majority of Americans are in favor of signing the Kyoto Protocol
on Climate Change and subjecting the U.S. to the International
Criminal Court. ?e large majority think that the ••,
not the United States, ought to take the lead on international
crises. In fact, the majority even support
giving up the U.S.’s veto power in the ••
Security Council, so that the U.S. will have
to go along with the opinions of the majority.
I could go on, but these positions are so far
off the left end of the political spectrum
that you can understand why the advertising
industry has to keep issues out of the
election and focus on imagery.
?e way to overcome this situation is
to create real political parties. To have real
political parties, the people must participate
and make decisions, not just come together
once every four years to pull a lever. ?at is
not politics. It is the opposite of politics. If
you have mass popular organizations that
are functioning all the time — at local,
regional, and international levels — then
you have at least the basis for a democracy.
Such organizations existed here in the past.
?e unions were one example. And they exist right now in
other countries. Take Brazil, the second-largest country in
the hemisphere. ?ey actually have a real democratic system.
Voters aren’t forced to choose between two rich businessmen
who went to the same elite university and are members of the
same secret society and are funded by the same corporations.
Brazilians can vote for somebody like themselves, some impressive
figure who maybe doesn’t have a higher education — a
peasant or a steelworker perhaps. I mean, that is inconceivable
in the United States.

?e reason they can do it in Brazil is that they have mass
popular organizations. ?e Brazilian Landless Workers Movement
is probably the most important popular organization in
the world, and it’s functioning all the time, not just in an election
year. ?en there’s the Brazilian Worker’s Party, which has
all kinds of serious flaws, but nevertheless is a mass popular
organization working at every level. ?ere are professional associations
in Brazil that are politically active. ?ere are areas
in which the budget is popularly decided: in Pôrto Alegre, for
example. ?at is the basis of a democratic culture. If you don’t
have that, you can still have formal elections, but they’re not
meaningful.

And meaningless formal elections are indeed what the
elite want us to have in this country. It goes back to the Constitutional
Convention of ••••, where James Madison laid it out:
the power has to be in the hands of the wealth of the nation,
he said, people who understand the needs of property owners
and recognize that the first priority of government is to protect
the wealthy minority from the unwashed majority. To do this,
the elite must fragment the majority in some fashion. We have
had two-hundred-plus years of struggle about this because the
people don’t accept it, and they have gained many rights as a
result of that struggle. In fact, we have a legacy of freedom that
is in many ways unique. But it wasn’t granted from above. It
was won from below. And the battle continues.
?e wealthy and privileged are always fighting a bitter, un-
remitting class war. ?ey never stop for a minute. If one tactic
doesn’t work, they shift to another. And if the general population
lets itself become pessimistic and gives up — which is
what the elite want — then the upper class will be even more
free to do whatever is in its own best interest.

Malkin: It seems that, to the rest of the world, the propaganda
that manipulates U.S. public opinion has been transparent
for some time. Do you think the deceit is becoming more clear
to people within the United States? Given the revelation that
Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, the hiring of
Halliburton to clean up after the war, the Abu Ghraib torture
scandal, and this week’s reports of a U.S. soldier executing an
unarmed Iraqi, do you think people in the United States are
waking up to the deception?

Chomsky: I don’t want to be impolite, but the list you have
just given is itself a type of sophisticated propaganda. Take
the marine who killed an unarmed man in a Fallujah mosque.
Compared with everything else that’s going on in Fallujah, is
that an atrocity? It isn’t even a minor footnote. ?e atrocity is
what you read on the front page of the New York Times, where
you’ll see a picture of Iraqi patients and doctors lying on the
floor, manacled, and U.S. soldiers standing guard over them.
?e front-page story tells us proudly that American soldiers
broke into Fallujah General Hospital, forced patients out of
their beds, and made them lie on the floor in handcuffs. ?at
is a war crime. ?e Geneva Conventions, which are the foundation
of modern humanitarian laws, say that hospitals must
be protected at all times, by all sides, in a war.
But of course the Times doesn’t describe that hospital invasion
as a war crime. ?e Times says it was an achievement,
because Fallujah General Hospital was a propaganda center
for the insurgents. Why? Because it was producing inflated
casualty reports. How do we know that the reports were in-
flated? Because our leader told us so, and if our leader says
something, it is automatically true for the front page of the
greatest newspaper in the world.
But suppose they were reporting inflated casualty figures.
Why is that propaganda for the insurgents? It means the U.S.
is winning, right? But it also breaks the first rule of wartime
propaganda, which is never to let the public see what is happening
to the other side. We don’t embed reporters with the
Iraqis. We embed them with U.S. forces, just as the Russians
did with their reporters in Afghanistan, so that they’ll report
the war from our side.
?e story about the marine who shot a wounded, unarmed
soldier is just a distraction. ?e reason they’re going after him
is because he is vulnerable and expendable. Whoever he is, he
is not somebody like us: nice, educated people wearing ties and
sitting in air-conditioned offices. He is probably some kid from
a disadvantaged background who has people shooting at him
from all sides. So he lost control, and we can criticize him for
that, because he is not like us. But how about criticizing the
higher-ups who sent him to Iraq? ?ey are the criminals.
After World War ••, at the Nuremberg war-crimes tribunal,
they didn’t go after the soldiers. ?ey went after the German
foreign minister. He was hanged. But after the My Lai massacre
in Vietnam, the soldiers became the scapegoats. Semieducated,
half-crazed ••s who didn’t know who was going
to shoot at them next carried out a massacre. ?at much is
true. But My Lai was a tiny footnote to a major mass-murder
operation called “Operation Wheeler/Wallowa,” which was a
search-and-destroy mission organized by nice people like us:
educated Harvard graduates in air-conditioned offices. ?e
real criminals are immune. Instead they go after some minor
person about whom we can say, “He was a bad apple, not like
us.”
In fact, the whole invasion of Fallujah was very much like
what happened in Srebrenica, Bosnia, which the U.S. has called
a horrendous war crime. In ••••, Srebrenica was a ••-protected
“safe area,” and Bosnian Muslims used it as a base from which
to attack Bosnian Serb villages. Finally the Serb forces retaliated.
All of the women and children and the elderly were driven
out of Srebrenica. ?e men were forced to stay, and the Serbs
killed them.
What did we do in Fallujah? Women and children were
driven out, mostly by bombing. Men were forced back in to be
killed. Srebrenica is described as genocide. What about Fallujah?
It’s not described as genocide in the U.S. press, though
in other countries it is. I was just reading an Italian newspaper
report about this. Nobel Peace Prize winners Lech Walesa of
Poland, Adolfo Esquivel of Argentina, Rigoberta Menchú of
Guatemala, Bishop Belo of East Timor, and many others have
publicly said that the invasion of Fallujah was genocide. If so,
then our president is a war criminal and is subject to the death
penalty under U.S. law. ?e War Crimes Act of ••••, passed
by a Republican Congress, states that grave breaches of the
Geneva Conventions are war