May 9, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
10:18
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| In the wake of the general election, a lot of people seem to be very angry at the results, and they don't seem to be angry that so many people voted for the Conservatives. | |
| They seem to be angry that the voting system, the first past-the-post system, seems to be unfair. | |
| Take this example from the Facebook page, Another Angry Voice, and I don't want to give anyone the impression I don't like this page. | |
| I think it's a very good page. | |
| I've been following it for quite some time. | |
| And the chappie running it is very good. | |
| So if he ever sees this video, contact me. | |
| I think it'd be interesting for us to talk. | |
| Anyway, I have to take exception to these stats, because what this is doing is putting the cart way before the horse. | |
| For example, they say for every Conservative MP, 34,000 votes were cast, whereas for every Green Party or UKIP MP, over a million votes were cast. | |
| And it's like, well, yes, that's exactly how it should be. | |
| That's not incongruous with a democratic system at all. | |
| It's rather silly to take an overall number of constituencies that a party ended up winning and dividing it by the number of votes it took to win those constituencies. | |
| It's not like the UK Independence Party had almost 4 million votes for one constituency. | |
| This was 4 million votes over 650 constituencies, which meant that they didn't win any of them except one, because their votes simply weren't enough. | |
| And it's not like the Conservatives had 34,000 votes in the constituency, the Lib Dems had 300,000, and the Conservatives for some reason won. | |
| Honestly, this is reminding me remarkably of the feminist wage gap myth. | |
| Again, I just want to stress that I'm not doing this because I dislike this page or anything like that. | |
| So, another angry voice begins with, if the votes of the two most adversely affected parties, UKIP and Green Party, are combined, they picked over 5 million votes in 2015, 16.4% of the total, but only got two seats, 0.3% of the total. | |
| Anyone who tries to claim that this is a fair representation of the wishes of the public must be utterly delusional. | |
| Well, I'm afraid we really have to disagree, because I don't think you understand what a democratic system is. | |
| Yes, there will be people who vote for parties that do not achieve power. | |
| This is a fact of life. | |
| Some people in a democratic system will lose. | |
| To put this into perspective, our shockingly disproportionate system rewarded the Tory Party with one MP for every 34,000 votes cast in their favour. | |
| And the Lib Dems got one MP for every 300,000 votes in their favour, and the Green MP just got one MP in return for well over a million votes, and so on and so on. | |
| Who on earth would even try to defend a voting system that requires one party to achieve 113 times as many votes per MP as another party? | |
| This is a profoundly stupid statement. | |
| It does not require another party to achieve 113 times as many votes to gain an MP. | |
| At all. | |
| This is so asinine. | |
| I'm actually really annoyed that another angry voice would take this position. | |
| I can't believe I have to explain this to another angry voice, but I'm going to. | |
| Because I'm actually, I'm genuinely pissed off that they would think to do this, right? | |
| The UK is broken up into 650 parliamentary constituencies, and each one of which is represented by one member of parliament in the House of Commons. | |
| It's important to remember this, because when you say I'm going to vote for the Conservatives, you are not voting for the Conservatives as a party. | |
| You are voting for the individual representative of that party in your constituency. | |
| The person you vote for in your constituency to be your Member of Parliament does not have to be part of a party. | |
| They could be an independent and indeed there are independents. | |
| In fact, maybe it would be a good idea if we had more independents. | |
| The constituencies are meant to represent numbers of people, not areas of land. | |
| This is why they have average numbers of about 72,000 in England, 69,000 in Scotland, 66,000 in Northern Ireland, and 56,000 in Wales. | |
| Remarkably consistent amounts, especially when compared to the size of these constituencies. | |
| The largest one being 12,000 square kilometres and the smallest one being 7.35 square kilometres. | |
| Given that the population of England is about 84% of the UK's population, England is actually underrepresented in the number of constituencies that it has. | |
| It should actually have 546. | |
| But that's just an aside. | |
| I think it's important to remember that the devil is in the details. | |
| So let's take a look at four constituencies. | |
| Let's go for Chippenham, Bristol South, Norfolk North and Swindon North, my constituency. | |
| It's fairly straightforward to see that in First Past the Post, in each one of these separate elections, because that's what they are, the person with the most votes wins the seat in Parliament. | |
| In Chippenham, it's the Conservatives. | |
| In Bristol South it was Labour. | |
| In Norfolk North it was the Liberal Democrats. | |
| And in Swindon North it was the Conservatives again. | |
| This is a perfectly fair way to do things. | |
| The candidate for each constituency who wins the most votes wins the seat because each seat is a constituency and the person who has been chosen by the members of each constituency should have that seat in Parliament. | |
| This also completely and adequately explains why the UK Independence Party can gain almost 4 million votes in aggregate nationwide and yet win only one seat. | |
| Yes, the UK Independence Party polled consistently as the third most popular party in Britain, but in no one constituency other than the Clacton I think it was, did they actually win a majority in that constituency? | |
| And if they are not the majority in that constituency, what democratic legitimacy would they have to be voted into Parliament there? | |
| I don't even really know how else you expect this system to work. | |
| I mean take the example of Norfolk North. | |
| The UK Independence Party far outstripped the Liberal Democrats. | |
| So would Norman Lamb have to sacrifice his seat in exchange for Michael Baker despite the fact that Norman Lamb won far more votes in his constituency than Michael Baker? | |
| What would happen? | |
| The thing is, judging this by a vote share is silly. | |
| It's really silly. | |
| You are not voting for a party in the UK elections. | |
| You are not voting as a country for parties either. | |
| You aren't saying well I'm going to have the Conservative Party. | |
| That's on my ballot and everyone in the country votes in the same single election. | |
| What you see is the aggregate of 650 different elections across the country. | |
| And out of those minor constituency elections, 331 of them voted a Conservative candidate to become their Member of Parliament. | |
| That means to represent that constituency in Westminster. | |
| This is why the Scottish National Party can have a relatively low vote share, but win lots of seats. | |
| They're obviously going to win all of the Scottish seats, despite nationally having a very small percentage of the overall vote. | |
| But that doesn't matter because you're doing it by individual constituencies. | |
| And the Scottish constituencies wanted the Scottish National Party to represent them. | |
| They wanted the Scottish National Party candidates to represent them. | |
| And that's what they got. | |
| I don't like that the Conservatives got a majority. | |
| I don't like that anyone votes for the Conservatives. | |
| But there is no getting around the fact that most people did. | |
| In each individual constituency, the majority of people voted Conservative in the ones that they won. | |
| That is completely fair. | |
| That so many people voted for UKIP does not mean that UKIP were hard done by. | |
| It just means that in each individual constituency, UKIP didn't get the majority of the votes. | |
| That is the nature of a democratic process. | |
| You vote for one person. | |
| Now, we could discuss alternative voting methods and whatnot, but I'm not really interested in doing that. | |
| I'm interested in addressing your claim that for some reason this wasn't fair. | |
| And it absolutely was. | |
| People who vote for candidates who don't win are not getting screwed. | |
| You are looking at this from back to front. | |
| You are saying, well, they got a large percentage of the vote. | |
| And because they got a large percentage of that vote, they deserve more representation, even though that's not how the voting works. | |
| The votes are cast individually, in secret, and you do not know in advance who is going to take the majority. | |
| That's the point. | |
| And then whoever takes the majority wins the seat. | |
| Looking at the situation from a perspective of votes per elected MP is asinine. | |
| It doesn't give you a realistic and accurate representation of the situation on the ground in each constituency. |
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