UKH

In our local council elections and I *think* this is the first time ever I have not voted Labour.

Plaid Cymru, since you asked.

What was it that changed your mind to vote Plaid Cymru and not Labour ? Just wondering.

I like Plaid Cymru, they are popular in the Rhymney Valley.

L

I do fear for Labour at the up coming election.

I'm sure there must be many natural Labour voters put off by their ineffective opposition and Brexit fence sitting.

It might be the first time I don't vote Labour though I will carefully consider the options nearer the time. Part of me wants to believe my current poor perception of Labour is due to media bias but when I see the centre-left people my views align with, being pushed out I suspect my concerns have some foundation...

Good on you.

I had a long conversation at the weekend with a Daily Mirror journalist. We both agreed that it's important to vote for parties even when they have little chance of winning seats. My constituency is a Lab/Con marginal with my current preferred option, the LibDems, lagging. Not only does that keep your integrity. But also the pressure of shrinking majorities does influence the direction of policy. More to the point, increasing vote share amongst challenger parties encourages more voters to join the trend at the next poll. That is how change is achieved.

In a word, JC. Particularly his dishonesty and feebleness over the original Brexit vote, and his incompetence and dithering ever since. His consistent inability to land blows on two of the most vulnerable Tory governments we've ever had has been breathtaking.

We will be voting Plaid too in an election , instead of Tory, which sort of evens things out (to Plaids gain)!

We are in a Plaid seat though and I have been quite impressed by Jonathan Edwards when I have met him, briefly.

Whenever the next general election comes, I think the prediction polls could be pointless, anything could happen.

Plaid are also spearheading a Welsh Independence mission down by us, and many places else where, the momentum is building up for independence, especially now as we generate and sell a lot of energy from renewables and continuing to send a lot of water to England.

I saw a huge project above Llandovery for hydro power on Sunday utilising water from Llyn Brianne. There's a lot going on in Wales, I'm not sure where the funding is coming from though for some of the projects.

L

My vote will be purely tactical in a GE, what ever is most likely to dislodge my sitting Tory MP. That means labour in my constituency. I just have to hope that it also represents a remain vote. And there's also a real chance here (forest of Dean) that the Brexit party will take a big bite out of the Tory vote, big enough for Labour to stand a chance - I almost feel like campaigning for the Brexit party.

Probably the EU...

After voting Plaid in a number of elections over the last 10 years (mainly local I think) my dad says he won't be voting for them next time around as they are going a bit nationalist again. Personally I'd hate Wales to go back down that track.

I'm... You've lost me there. How can Plaid NOT be nationalistic?

That'll be why the Calder Valley still has a Tory MP. Integrity my #"*+.

I’ll be voting for the party which I consider to offer the most balanced policies for the good of the UK. If you want me to vote Labour, which I have several times in the past, then pick a leader and produce a manifesto I can vote for and don’t criticise my integrity if your party falls woefully short.

That hydro scheme by us is private funded, been in planning for many, many years and eventually got the go ahead. If I remember rightly it should begin to go into profit after 10-15 years, that is with subsidies on electricity produced. 

A lot of money being paid annually to the lucky landowners though! Allegedly.

In a first past the post system this does not work, under this system your Lib Dem vote is a waste. However much you wish it to be influential it just isn’t. Once the MP in your constituency is elected then your vote goes down the drain. 

Proportional representation is a shortcut to what you want to achieve isn’t it?

Last time my constituency was a close run thing between SNP and Labour with SNP coming out on top. No-one else anything like close.  A forecast I stumbled over while looking that up suggests that SNP will win again but with a huge majority. Seems like i’d might as well stay at home...

Depends what you want your vote to say. Please don’t stay at home though.

Vote because it matters that you vote.

I say that as someone who has never been represented by an MP I've voted for.

It might keep your sense of integrity, but under FPTP, voting for anyone other than the runner-up is the same as voting for the winner. Simple as that.

As such, it makes more sense to vote for your  least worse option of the two favourites (if they are so by a good margin of course), except if your least worse option is the favourite by a large margin, in which case you should vote for your actual favourite.

I have the same issue voting for Plaid. I don't like the idea of trying to get Wales to break away from the union (much like I would rather Scotland didn't but that is their choice), as I believe the country is better off together (and in the EU).

Voting labour is a vote for things being exactly the same in the vallies and a bit of a dead duck. The usual local LibDem candidate is a sexist pig with some very worrying opinions as voiced in the pub, so can't see me voting for him either. Hopefully there is a green candidate next time.

The flaw in your argument is that this tactical voting will continue to cause the large margins that make voting for smaller parties seem pointless. It's self re-inforcing.

Edit: for example in Brighton Green went from 5th at 2.6% in 1997 to close 3rd at 21.9% in 2005, to winning with 31.3% in 2010.

If every voter had decided to vote tactically (exclusively for Lab or Con) then Green could never have got an MP.

I'm instinctively and have historically been inclined to agree but actually I don't. Our current mess, hard to describe as anything but revolutionary, stems from action at the ballot box not returning MPs but shaping the policy of the Conservatives.

That's not to say I don't think we need electoral reform or that until we achieve it prudence may occasionally require tactical voting but our votes, even in very safe seats, are never entirely wasted.

Yes but what is the path to PR?

No majority government brought to power under the existing system is motivated to kill the golden FPTP goose. Labour with the loss of Scotland may be approaching a position where it cannot again realistically hope for majority rule but in reality the gerymandered seats as they stand still deliver then a huge advantage over potential coalition partners the electorate would not be inclined to confer so I don't expect to see them getting on board any time soon.

jk

There's no denying your logic on a short-term tactical level, but I can't decide which of Labour or the Tories is least worst. They are both dreadful options today. I'd rather register my desire for change, which is a more strategic choice.

More to the point, I stand by my view that the only way to break the two party monopoly is to vote for alternatives. Historians of the Labour party's rise would endorse this view.

I'm very much in favour of PR. But it will only stand a chance of being implemented if a third  (and/or fourth) party gains enough seats to deny a majority to either of the big two on a consistent basis. Another reason for like-minded people to vote LibDem (or Green).

Which is similar to what happened with the LibDems in the last coalition and their STV proposal. They got royally shafted by the Tories, who managed to convince much of the electorate that they were too stupid to understand it, so voted against it to the benefit of ... the Tory party.

I am not really sure the Tory Party has benefited even with a struggling minority govt. You can say its in power, but its dropping all of its traditional values and it will pay a price at some stage. Probably having to renegotiate in the future with a minority party to keep in power.

But that is coalition politics for you which is creeping in here in the UK despite the FPTP system ( which is locked in obvious stalemate).Looks to me just like a form of PR where this type of political stagnation occurs.

It won the next election.

Well it has been limping on pretty badly and you can hardly say its been a pillar of unified strength in governmant in its current regenerated version 2 format.

The point was that an opportunity for electoral reform was probably the biggest demand of the LibDems in the coalition, for which they were duty bound to support all sorts of unpalatable policies in return. After being stuffed by their coalition 'partners', said partners apparently suffered no drop in electoral support as they went on to win the next election.

I don't think that the depths the Tories have plumbed since then can really be said to have been a result of that, but the LibDems' huge drop in support until very recently almost certainly was.

In the '80s it was a pretty toxic anti-English party, since then it's rebranded itself as 'the party of Wales' and been at pains not to be seen as nationalist (even more so than the SNP who always had independence atits heart, I think?). Now there seems to be an increasing nationalism in Wales again and Plaid may once again end up being the party for that. 

Good luck with that. Craig Whittaker must be thinking he's in a safe seat.

Up against that clueless youth Josh Fenton Glyn he has reason to feel more comfortable. Any decent Labour candidate with an actual brain would give him a much better fight.

Are you going out on stump with your chosen cerebral candidate?

I’m not sure that would help as most people imagine I’m a Tory!

You really should give it a go. On the doorstep people are very responsive to people who look like them.

On the morning after the 97 election I ran up to Stoodley Pike where I met Christine McCafferty, the newly elected Labour MP. Someone had put a red flag on the monument. It was a surreal moment.

Yes, so why vote for the favourite nationally in a marginal lab/con constituency ? Because this is what you do when you vote for Lib Dem in such a constituency, you are voting to reinforce the majority of the favourite nationally, which makes it less likely that Lib Dem hold the balance of power, thus less likely to get PR.

No, no, read again my post, you can vote for something else than labour/con tactically and get results if the runner up has no chance against the leader, as a vote for the favourite would be an excess vote.

Brighton is a prime example. It’s a constituency where Tories had no chance but were second, thus allowing the green to safely climb whilst keeping the Tories out of reach.

I did some canvassing for the Lib Dem in Fife in my youth. I lost all faith in humanity very quickly when I realised that most people get their info from Sun/mirror/DM, and don’t even know the difference between an MSP and an MP.

It was an invaluable experience although a depressing one.

The wider issue is really politics in the uk even with fptp or a pr still has moved  now to coalitions whether he parties like it or not.Nobody at the moment is really able to put together a huge majority.The examples being should the Tories line up with the Brexit party or Labour with SNP.

Moving to PR will probably not solve the issue.

The parties just have to adapt and realise that the middle ground with broad coalitions is the way forward. It’s going to take a few years for this all  to “wash” through the system.

I think what you describe is actually what proponents of PR seek isn't it? Coalition building, pragmatism, evidence based (dare I say it) policy rather than increasingly extreme tribal positions whereby people define themselves as my team vs your team. Bring it on I say,

A new parliament building is needed. A semi circle with enough seats for all. There would be no opposing sides, just the audience all facing whoever was speaking etc. The current layout just promotes two party politics. 

Perhaps, every day upon entering the chamber, every mp picks a raffle ticket out of a tombola which assigns them their seat for that day. 

Indeed, The modern debating cambers for both the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly would be much better models. Sadly, our MPs seem wedded to the Palace of Westminster and all the outdated practices that go with it. 

I think you possibly miss my point 

PR is not the answer as you will still get locked politics. Until you get a party that dominates the centre ground. 

You only have to look at other countries with Pr to understand it’s not the golden grail. 

I'm not sure anyone is claiming PR to be a Holy Grail. What it does do, which our current FPTP systems fails to do, is delivers a degree of fairness to the system, by allowing appropriate representation for each voter. At the moment, our Parliament is not properly representative of the votes cast in General Elections. This is not so much of a problem when there are only two parties, but we are past that position and we have four active parties with MPs in England, and four active (but different) parties in Scotland and Wales, and a very different set of parties in Northern Ireland. As an example of the unfairness of the current system (albeit perhaps extreme), the Green party received the same number of votes as the DUP and Sinn Fein combined, and won just one seat, while the DUP and Sinn Fein won 17 seats. To my mind, that degree of inequality is indefensible. 

Plaid have never been anti-English. During the 80s, their leader was Dafydd Wigley. You will struggle to find a more gentle, likeable and well-respected politician on all sides of the commons. It’s true that they put independence on the back-burner for some time as it was not seen as a realistic option for many years but the current mess has brought it back into focus once again. 

A basic requirement of any democracy has to be that at the very least the country is not governed by a party a majority of people do not want.

FPTP doesn’t even achieve that. It really is a crazy system. Every other system have their flaws but FPTP is objectively one of the worst.

It would end up like beach towels at dawn! 

If the room is too small, perhaps a bit of internal building works and cull 100-200 MPs, those who then enjoy larger constituencies can cope with the extra work load by banning second jobs.  

Next stop, Lords reform.   

HoC STV so nowhere can elect a local representative without at least some level of support from the majority of local constituents.

HoL PR so even the smallest parties have a chance of representation.

Would agree. The UK keeps adding in mayors/esses, police commissioners etc.  When it should reform the existing democracy first. 

The lords needs a cull too. Perhaps 500, or the same number of MPs with pr. So like for like. Maybe a 20 year limit on how long you serve and retire at 75 regardless, it's a place of work, not day care for the aged. 

PR just leads to paralysis...I have lost count of the no of countries where you have endless elections because coalitions fail continuously  or after an election things get just pushed back and back whilst parties haggle over who does want.

That generates just as much inequality.

You only have to look at other countries to see that it reaaly gets you nowhere and would do little to solve current issues.

It completely depends on the type of PR. The AV system for example, is pretty much the same as the french system (the only difference is that it all happens in one round). And France mostly has stable majorities.

Even in other PR system, it’s wrong to say that nothing moves. Look at the Scottish system, even during the years of coalition we’ve seen very good progress and very good policy.

Fair points. But by way of counter argument, look at where Cameron’s majority landed us. Or consider the case of Belgium. 15 months without a government and the country ran smoother than before.