If there is abundant anger or growing frustration over the ability of the UK government to bungle and mismanage even the basic steps of a crisis, you could be forgiven for missing it entirely. Early estimates suggest that poor handling, needless delays, and a response halfway between callous and absent has added thousands of extra deaths to an unfortunately large tally.
Press coverage of the crisis has occasionally switched gear from PR to legitimate criticism, but not often. Many of the hardest-hitting news segments the cabinet have faced during the crisis have been puff pieces and re-introductions with medical staff. The scenes viewers have been forced to endure would be more suited to daytime TV than primetime news.
Overt grooming of government ministers isn’t a new or surprising press phenomenon. Even during a national crisis, it would be asking a lot to expect a drastic shift in tone and style. The surprise of the year so far is that there isn’t yet enough seething anger and desperation for change loud enough to cut through the noise.
First To Go
Of all the badly needed changes today, the most important and highest-priority shift has got to be to the way we vote.
What seems like a minor alteration in admin is, in reality, the difference between a functional change and a worthless placebo. Our current system, First Past The Post (FPTP) is quite simply unfit for purpose.
Even if there was a focused, well-directed, and well-managed campaign for change today, it’s vanishingly unlikely it could even conceivably have the impact necessary without making major electoral changes. Our most recent election, just 9 months ago, was packed full of daily coverage of government ministers being heckled and jeered at every campaign stop they made. There was clear and directed anger towards the current administration. It followed on from a series of concurrent disasters made in law, leadership, negotiations, and the press. The Prime Minister was reduced to hiding from the press on many occasions to avoid inconvenient and embarrassing questions. They went on to comfortably win the race.
The idea that the current makeup of the UK parliament is even somewhat representative of the country is a bizarre claim. More than 560 of the 650 seats are held by two parties who both focused their election platform around the slogan ‘at least we’re not the other guy’.
Even before bungling incompetence and deliberate inaction resulted in thousands of extra unnecessary deaths, parliament members and the public who voted for them felt some distance apart. The choices, in many areas, boiled down to choosing between malicious inaction and incompetent paralysis.
The opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, described in the press as a catastrophic failure of an election campaign—lost with three million more votes than Tony Blair had to secure his final victory in 2005. Despite holding more share of the popular vote than any opposition leader since, Corbyn has often been hailed as the party’s worst disaster of modern times.
In many respects the title is well-deserved. The UK is at the far end of a decade of Conservative leadership with little change in sight. Even voters desperate for change, clamouring for a home for their opposition vote have very few choices to turn to in a system effectively rigged to maintaining two parties.
Pros And Cons
Putting aside what FPTP achieves for the two parties already in power, it does have one advantage to the voting public too. FPTP is really, impossibly, stupidly simple in both design and implementation. Even at scale, it’s easy to cast and count a huge number of votes when the only tally to count is an X in a box. More importantly, it’s trivially simple to understand well enough to use with even the briefest of introductions. Most votes will win.
Neither of these are features to be thrown away lightly. Having a method of voting which can be understood completely by every person regardless of education, culture, life-experience or language barrier is critically important. It’s only in the drastic shortcomings of FPTP which makes replacing it necessary.
If the results of a countrywide election are to be representative of the population’s interest and intent, a more complex solution is required by necessity.
The single largest drawback of FPTP is ‘spoiler effect’. In UK elections tactical voting is a widely advertised and much overused ‘feature’ of general elections. More than a quarter of votes cast at the last election were for candidates who the voter didn’t necessarily want to elect.
Spoiler effect comes into play where a voters’ preferred candidate has little realistic chance of winning the race. Many voters, in these circumstances, choose a more popular candidate they only moderately dislike over one they truly can’t stand.
Many UK elections are as much about keeping a candidate you can’t stand out of higher office as nominating one you agree with to it. The effect is about balancing the lesser of two evils and choosing the least-worst realistic option.
Over enough time and many disheartening elections, the result is a gradual funnelling of political views into two opposing camps. Each camp with its own brand of mainstream views tailored to shift the largest number of votes away from the other. The rise of a challenging third party with new viewpoints can only ever remove votes away from the party they are closest to politically and allow an easier election victory for the ‘other side of the aisle’.
Options For Change
FPTP is a genuine improvement and positive iteration over systems that only allowed wealthy male landowners to cast a vote. Compared to modern ways to cast a ballot, however, it’s the single worst way to decide elections we could reasonably come up with.
There is no shortage of good alternatives already used worldwide. Many better options are routinely used for local council and devolved parliamentary elections throughout the UK.
A 2011 referendum proposed switching UK elections to an Alternative Vote (AV) system. AV improves FPTP by allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference rather than choosing a single preferred candidate.
Prime Minister David Cameron labelled the proposed changes, used already throughout the UK, as: “crazy, obscure, [and] undemocratic”. Perhaps he was right and the system was too obscure and complex for the average voter to understand. The proposed changes were soundly defeated at the ballot box in May, paving the way for a future referendum on membership of the EU a few years later.
In truth, there are far better changes we can make than to swap FPTP for AV. Single Transferable Vote (STV) is slightly more complex again but its principle feature allows votes for candidates over and above those needed to win to go to a voters next choice candidate.
The difference is an important one. In STV it’s almost impossible to waste a vote on any candidate, even one guaranteed to win by a landslide. ‘Tactical voting’ is all but eliminated and a truly representative poll of the nation’s preferences are taken at every election cycle.
Mixed Member Proportional Representation, used in Scottish elections for the past two decades, allows voters to choose both local candidates and preferred political party. Party ballots are counted and weighted to elect candidates from a nominated list, ensuring minority parties with a reasonable representation in votes are represented in the make-up of parliament.
Each step change we take to more advanced and more representative ways to vote allows for more diverse opinions and viewpoints to be expressed at the ballot box. They all have their own drawbacks and pitfuls but none as severe as drastically limiting the available viewpoints and options at every election cycle.
Every step further from FPTP means parties paying more attention to voter desires and the intent of the voting public. One of a handful of reasons, perhaps, there’s no desire for change from the two parties in power.
Deliberately Difficult
Some of the criticisms around changing the way we vote focus on the increased likelihood of coalition governments or hung parliaments. These ‘bugs’ in alternative systems are the entire point of the feature.
Modern parliaments are designed for cooperation and coalition governments. An effective electoral system makes it difficult by design for any one party to rule with an overall majority.
A government made up of multiple representatives across multiple parties is the ideal gold-standard we should be looking to achieve rather than working to avoid. Each of these systems and related alternatives work to create a parliament which more closely represents voter intent rather than ‘the winning side.’
Much like the building itself, the way we elect to the UK parliament is outdated, old-fashioned, and highly ineffective. It was designed for a different time and exists in dire need of an update.
Many problems in modern politics come from how closely it resembles sport. FPTP almost always results in a winning and losing side — whether that’s a feature or a bug largely depends on whether you’re one of the two main players or a distantly placed ‘also ran’.
It could also be argued there is little real value to backing the ‘winning’ team if the overall game is achieving almost nothing at all. Rather than electing winners and demoting losers, how about a working government instead?
