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January 31, 2008
Greg Dyke on This Week
Watch it. Will be available online as well as repeated on digital tv and certainly on Friday on BBC Parliament. Greg fronts a film in which he argues for PR for the Commons. He makes some very good points. The responses from the This Week sofa:
Diane Abbott admits she is a "turkey" and won't vote for Christmas. And she attacks PR. She fails to answer Greg's great question on her seat being so safe that people don't bother turning out. Skewered on that one, Diane.
Michael Portillo blames the media. And the lack of a close election. Ironic that. FPTP is said by its supporters to give decent majorities and a firm result. Yet now they are claiming it needs a very competitive, close election to boost turnout. Not often that both coincide!
Posted by malcolmclark on January 31, 2008
Comments
There are many reasons why people don't turn out to cast a vote but the major one is the fact that in safe seats people are increasingly recognising that there is just no point in turning out because their vote will not make the slightest difference.
Politicians must be well aware of this but they will blame anything but the electoral system for low turnout and do anything but attack the main cause - the electoral system. They call for more postal votes, electronic voting etc, as if the main purpose of elections was to achieve a large turnout and ignoring the fact that around 70% of voters in safe seats are wasting their time in casting a vote.
I have quoted before a randomly selected example from the 1997 election. No apologies for quoting it again!
"Rother Valley: Lab 31,184; Con 7,699; LD 5342; Other 1,932. So 7699 plus 1 = 7700 voters were represented by the Labour winner. Every one of the remaining votes was represented by no-one: one Labour MP went to Westminster representing 7,700 voters, ie 17% of those who voted, or 11% of the total electorate. (Electorate 68584; voters 47157 = 67.3%)
In this case , if we generously exclude the Tory "yardstick" vote of 7699, the proportion of wasted votes is 67%. Moreover THE RESULT WOULD HAVE BEEN THE SAME IF 23,484 OF THE LABOUR VOTERS HAD STAYED AT HOME, or if all the people who abstained from voting had voted for the Tories: one Labour MP would have been elected."
So, in this typical case, without changing the electoral system what would have been the point of changing the mechanics of voting!
Posted by: Joe Patterson at February 1, 2008 11:11 AM
I'd like to put what I believe is an important point to Diane Abbot and other supporters of FPTP: If election results don't accurately reflect the parties' share of the vote, then the whole concept of elections is invalid, and there's scarecely any point in having elections at all.
Posted by: Nigel Baldwin at February 2, 2008 08:37 AM
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