Saturday 14 August 2010

Words From The Exit Wound... (Democracy?)

Been thinking a lot about politics (and becoming increasingly pissed off with the state of politics in Britain). There are many things about British politics that need to be questioned. To me, the biggest of these problems is the lack of a proper voting system. We still use an archaic system from a time period where the main political power resided with the un-elected house of Lords, namely, First Past the Post (FPP).

 The coalition government talk (incessantly) of the "new politics" they are bringing to Britain (something that seems to happen every election) yet they are reluctant to bring about a full-scale shift from the centuries-old voting system to a modern Proportionally representative system, instead opting to (possibly) change it to the Alternative vote system, which would actually make near enough no change to election results! Because of our unwillingness to follow our European comrades and adopt a more modern way of doing things, we are essentially stuck with a 3 party system that favours two parties over all. The worst part is, these parties are increasingly adopting the same views on all issues (a shameless attempt to increase votes by basically adopting the views of the Sun readership). Because of this, many views in the country are not represented (such as my personal Social-Democratic views.)

 People say this is good, we will have no extremist politicians and a more stable government. I say, look at germany (or any other modern european democracy). Despite still having extremist voters, none of these are represented in parliament, while a wide range of views are still taken on board (from socialist to liberal to conservative and several inbetween) and very stable government.

What I'm getting at is that we need to push for Proportional Representation if only to allow ourselves to continue to be called a democracy! Surely it is better for everyone to have a say in the country rather than the 35% - odds who vote for winning parties currently being the leaders of the 65%?

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