I must admit that when it comes to proportional representation, by elections are a fly in the ointment. Yes, it is easy to define a system of PR that would work for a single seat, such as the Single Transferable Vote, but it would be impossible to reflect the outcome on a proportional national picture. A constituency in England can only elect one candidate and this would be out of all proportion to a truly representative parliament.
What I mean is that if party A gets 10% of the national vote and party B gets 40% then you would expect party A to have 10% of the seats in parliament and party B, 40%. In a by-election party A could win and get 100% of the seat. You couldn’t then recalculate the rest of the seat in parliament to reflect the national picture, which may well have changed anyway from the last general election.
No, we must accept that a truly proportionate parliament can only come from a general election. Proportionality requires the whole rather than a part.
What happened then in the Batley and Spen by election? The result is well known now, a hold for Labour, yet there were sixteen candidates standing. Only five however would trouble the national picture. Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats got a high enough percentage of votes to have affected the national picture, had this been a general election, whilst it is not clear whether the other two, the Workers and the Yorkshire would stand in more than this seat.
It would appear that the Labour vote was split by the Workers but this is just a guess. Nobody knows what would have actually happened if the candidate didn’t stand.
By elections are notoriously difficult to relate to the national picture. After all the general election is, in effect, 650 by elections but there is no doubt that molehills will be turned into mountains and each party will find some way to explain how it was a great day for them. Labour has already claimed that it is the start of its fightback while the Conservatives claim they didn’t lose as they hadn’t won it in the first place! There was a swing away from both parties.
Most worrying though turnout was less than half at 47.49%. Who knows what would happen if everyone had turned out.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 
I see the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system as just barely qualifying as democratic rule within the democracy spectrum, though it seems to serve corporate interests well. I believe it is basically why powerful money interests generally resist attempts at changing from FPTP to proportional representation electoral systems of governance, the latter which dilutes corporate lobbyist influence.
American and Canadian governances typically maintain thinly veiled yet strong ties to large corporations, as though elected heads are meant to represent big money interests over those of the working citizenry and poor. Accordingly, major political decisions will normally foremost reflect what is in big business’s best interests. And don’t expect to hear this fact readily reported by the mainstream news-media, which is concentratedly corporate owned.
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“Now you’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you, Buddy? It’s the free market, and you’re part of it.” —the morbidly greedy bank-financier Gordon Gekko to his young stockbroker protégé Bud Fox (Wall Street, 1987)
Absolutely. It is the worst in that it creates a sense of democracy but is nothing of the sort.
Indeed. In Canada, even the political parties allow themselves greater democracy when they elect a new leader. Yet we, the electorate, cannot handle that much democracy when we choose our governments.