The UK’s First Past The Post voting system is like Eastenders or Coronation Street viewed on a black and white TV. #GE2015 #Politics

We live in an age of video on demand, with hundreds of TV channels available through satellite and cable. We are a society awash with choice, every niche is catered for and available immediately. Somehow we manage to navigate this plethora of content and come out the other side entertained, and often better educated.

This age of immediacy and range of choice has permeated into all walks of life; music, fashion, education, food, even healthcare; and for the first time in the UK on Thursday 6th May, politics.

Gone are the days of the two main parties with the odd protest vote or constituency in the West Country electing a Lib Dem. Based on percentage of vote, we now have six ‘mainstream’ parties; Conservatives, Labour, UKIP, Lib Dems, SNP, and Green.

Yet our voting system is designed to do all it can to ensure that we have a majority government made up of the two main parties. A few of decades ago, First Past The Post (FPTP), the UK’s current voting system, worked well. It has many positives; clear rapid results being declared following Election Day, majority governments able to write legislation without need for compromise, a contactable local representative and ‘stable democracy’.

But, a little like our flickering old black and white TV with a coat hanger for an aerial, while it is solid and tried and tested, it does not give us what we want; a platform that is up to this modern age of choice.

Democracy is defined as “a system of government in which all the people of a state or polity … are involved in making decisions about its affairs, typically by voting to elect representatives to a parliament or similar assembly”.

Unfortunately, this is technically not the case in the UK. On the 6th of May, 63% of the electorate voted against austerity. Yet we have a Conservative government that believes it has a ‘clear mandate’ for continuing its policy of cuts and lowering taxation. 3.5 million people voted for UKIP and they have one MP, 1.5 million voted SNP and they have 56 MPs! The Liberal Democrats secured nearly double the number of votes of the SNP yet only have 8 seats. Simply, this is fundamentally undemocratic.

Across the country, voters in ‘safe seats’ (constituencies with large majorities) are disenfranchised. There is no point in them turning up to poll as they know it is a wasted vote. Could it be that voter apathy is actually in the interests of the two main parties?

It is time for something new, or more to the point, new to the UK. That something new is actually the most common form of voting across the world: Proportional Representation (PR).

PR has its flaws as well as it’s positives. Many believe that it creates indecisive decision making as overall majorities are difficult to gain for one party. This means that parties have to form coalitions, think through and debate policy (almost like grown ups). Rather than indecisions, it often results in more robust, better thought through legislation. This is proven in many countries across the globe, such as Australia, Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland and New Zealand. Germany, has consistently made coalitions work, resulting in arguably the strongest economy in Europe.

PR means that you will not have an elected local representative. Now for those of you who have met your local MP, you may not feel this is actually all that negative. However, if you are one of the lucky few that does have a strong local MP who doesn’t just appear two weeks before the General Election and does hold regular, productive, surgeries, this is a real loss. However, PR can be adapted to ensure that you do have a local representative through a system called Single Transferable Vote (STV PR), which allows for named candidates but a much larger constituency. The upside here, is that you can speak to a representative from a party of your choosing in your area (if multiple parties are represented), meaning that you can talk to someone who you feel better understands or empathises with your position.

Finally, this leads to the last major negative levelled at PR… It is all a little complicated. The UK had the chance to change its voting system in a referendum four years ago, to a compromised version of FPTP called Alternative Vote, not full PR. Still, the system was a subtle step in the right direction.

What was most saddening about the referendum’s “No” campaign, was the two main parties’ reliance on this last argument against change to the voting system. The Labour and Conservative Parties ran a strategy based on the fact that ‘the UK electorate was far too unintelligent to understand something so complex’ no matter the benefit to democracy and voter engagement. So remember… the next time that your 7 year old child switches Dot Cotton or Ken Barlow off of your Sky+ Box in order to watch ‘The Lego Movie’ via Netflix on their iPad… we might be too ‘stupid’ to put more than one ‘X’ in a box. The future generations will not be so easily convinced.

Until then, it is likely that little will change while FPTP remains in the interests of the two main parties.