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We apologise for the inconvenience. CapX Exclusive. Sign up to our popular email briefing to get the most interesting stories from CapX and the wider web delivered direct to your inbox. Share Thanks to our fractured politics, a party could win a majority with just 30 per cent of the vote Four-party politics makes accurate forecasting extremely tricky As things stand, the red-blue postwar duopoly is under serious threat.
Custom amount. Recurring Payment One off Monthly. First name. Last name. Email address. This efficiency is so engrained that even a Hung Parliament in required only a five-day process before a Coalition Agreement had been drawn up and signed following cross-party talks although admittedly the confidence and supply arrangement between the DUP and the Conservative government following the Hung Parliament in the general election took 2 weeks to negotiate.
The north-eastern constituency of Houghton and Sunderland South has for the past six elections been first to declare its results, and usually does so in under an hour. This is not a trivial advantage; although extreme examples, supporters of FPTP point out that Belgium took days to form a government following an election in June and it is not unusual for coalition negotiations to continue for several weeks and even months. In a July report on the timing of election counts, the Electoral Commission stated:.
Elections can result in swift changes in government, traditionally overnight. When a formal election campaign begins, debate in the public domain about when votes are going to be counted should be unnecessary.
Voters should be able to focus on what the election is about. Broadcasters should be able to plan well in advance how they will communicate the election results. Perhaps the most commonly cited advantage of FPTP is that governments elected under this system are normally stable and cohesive and able to serve a full term.
Still, with a clear working majority to pass their legislation, the system often produces strong governments at Westminster with a firm mandate and a good prospect of serving a substantial term now five years, although this will be reviewed in , allowing for proper planning and policy implementation.
These coalition governments have several advantages: they represent over half the electorate, they tend to make consensus-based decisions, and they do not allow a single party to implement extreme policies without wider support. In addition, FPTP breeds apathy, which leads to lower levels of voter registration and turnout. People who aren't registered to vote, or who don't vote, tend to be young, to live in rented accommodation, and to be less affluent FPTP also favours a right-wing agenda in other, more subtle, ways.
Research shows that PR systems tend to produce societies with lower levels of inequality, higher levels of public spending, and a fairer distribution of public goods. It's not hard to see how this comes about. Although PR systems do produce right-of-centre governments, these governments tend to be broadly-based and to operate with a degree of consensus. Because of this, they find it difficult to launch attacks on the welfare state such as we regularly see from Conservative governments in the UK.
Some people support FPTP because they look forward to the day when the Labour Party wins an overall majority in Parliament on a minority of the vote, and introduces a socialist programme. The problem here is that with an FPTP system, the Tories will eventually win again - and will dismantle all the gains of the Labour years.
Tory governments have sold off council houses built under Labour; they are dismantling the NHS; and their attacks on the welfare state have reversed Labour's reductions in child poverty and seen thousands of families relying on food banks. Broad-based governments elected under proportional representation could introduce Labour's programme of reforms, most of which is extremely popular with the electorate. We all lose out, as politics fails to properly represent the country.
On the 9th and 10th November, the House of Lords will be hosting their fifth hereditary peer by-election this year. The House of Lords Act led to the removal of all but 90 hereditary Join our email list to get up to date analysis of the broken system sitting at the heart of the political system. Skip to content Menu Search. Ireland ERS Cymru. Who loses? Systematically ignored Given the increasing geographical concentration of votes, voters of different parties suffered from First Past the Post in different parts of the UK.
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