Hold your nose

I haven’t blogged much about politics over the last month, partly because I only write once a week now and partly because I was in danger of repeating myself. I cannot, however, avoid last week’s elections, which were spectacular for a number of reasons.

I thought long and hard before marking my ballot paper. I was conflicted in that the party that I wanted to vote for, that was closest to representing my views, had no chance of winning the seat, yet the party that I definitely didn’t want to win had a chance. In the end, I held my nose and voted for the party most likely to unseat the incumbent. 

So called tactical voting is a product of our awful first past the post system. I know that I am not the only one who went down this route but it is undemocratic. How can democracy be based upon voting for someone you didn’t want?

In the end Labour had a landslide, taking 67% of the seats with 34% of the votes. Again, how can this be democratic when two thirds of the electorate chose to not vote for the government?

In my own constituency of North Northumberland, Labour won with 36.6% of the vote. Anyone who voted Labour had a vote that counted whereas for the 31,000 people who voted for other parties, they may well have stayed at home. Their votes simply did not count towards the national picture.

Every vote should count, everyone should be able to vote for the candidate that they want and parliament should reflect how people voted. This is why we need Proportional Representation. 

Having said all that, the Labour, Liberal Democrats and Green parties played the systems beautifully. Each party focussed primarily on seats that they could win resulting in the completely skewed national picture. The new Prime Minister’s vote share dropped but that did not matter. Reform, however, got 0.8% of the seats (5) with 14.3% of the vote, 2% more than the Liberal Democrats which ended up with 72 seats.

The mother of parliaments has been elected undemocratically.