Great Britain has had an interesting history of party politics. At the turn of the century the Labour party that had forever been building up steam due to industrialization and the plight of the worker lost after only one term (similar to if Obama called an election right now and lost miserably), Margaret Thatcher ruled over the countries from '79-90 (a more Conservative and polarizing figure that Reagan), and their MPs are elected without a majority and usually not even close to one.
Today in Britain the three major parties are the Labour Party, the party of Gordon Brown, the Conservative Party, the right wing, and the Liberal Democrats, which is ironically a centrist party. The way MPs are elected is a first past the post majority election, just as in the states. But, where our mainly two party system does okay in this situation (one party getting a majority always makes everyone feel better) in Great Britain this is rarely the case. In the last election for example the Labour Party got the most votes with about 35.2%. But, voter turn-out was about 61.4% (only about 54% of Americans voted in the 2008 election.) Meaning of the population of Britain not even a third of the people voted for the present government.
So, is it to be argued that the system is faulty? The Brits think so. Their options are to stay with the present system of first past the post like in America where whatever percentage of the vote in the district you get, is how many MPs you get. If you had 10 MPs for that district and you got 40% of the vote you would be 4 MPs. Their second choice was the Proportional system. This would re-divide up the electorate. The third system is the AV system. When voters voted on this system they would rank their choices 1-3. After the first counting, the bottom one would be knocked out. Then the second choice of those knocked out would be counted into the total votes for the two parties still in the system. Then whoever won wins. Then their fourth choice was the Run-off system. This is like the French system where every candidate can run and then the top two have a run-off. Kind of like a primary. However, you can get the disastrous outcome that was the French 2002 Presidential election. The left side wasn't organised so Chirac (the left candidate) and Le Pen got the top two in the first run-off. The Catch? Le Pen is basically fascist. His party denies the Holocaust. In order to avoid the apocalyptic event of him being elected liberals had to turn out to vote for Chirac, candidate of the main opposing party, so he would beat Le Pen, comparing him to Hitler is not that much of a stretch. In the run-off election Le Pen got 17.9% of the vote, one percentage more than when everyone was voting between 16 candidates.
So, as you can see the choices are not great. Our class decided to vote. We did our first choice and our second choice. If we counted it in the first past the post way (the present system and the American system) AV would win. But, if counted by the AV system first past the post won. There was talk of AV and Proportional forming a coalition government.
But, don't scoff at our mother country. We got our system from them and while we don't have a royal family to formally execute royal prerogative we do have our own problems. The Bush Era begun when he won against Gore without receiving the majority of the vote, Florida or not. The idea is, governments are not an exact representation of the people in their district. Therefor it is our responsibility to remind our elected officials of our opinions and needs. If you don't write letters or emails or protest or turn out to vote or however you choose to exercise your opinion you aren't really reaching your full potential as a voter. UK voters don't really appreciate this. Many times their elected MPs are even from their district. But, that is where the US differs and for a reason.
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