We have a form of it down here and have a bye election this weekend in a seat held by the ruling party that has an overall majority by that one seat. Since they got the overall majority they have not had to rely on any of the lesser parties for support so have been pretty ruthless in carrying out their policies. The upcoming election has their candidate against the leader of a lower party who, if he wins can then allocate the seat to one of his "list" MPs which means the current ruling party will have to negotiate with one other party to get legislation enacted. The current prime minister is an ex-money dealer with Wall Street background and was high flyer in the financial world. For my money he is not a good minister as he has brokered more free trade agreements with China, Korea and India in the last twelve months than previous governments did over the last fifty years. Most of these consisted of farming,dairy foodstuff and crops which to me represented selling the family assets, much as Thatcher did in the '80s. All done of course when they had the overall control of parliamentary decision making.
Well that's a kick in the nads, you feel it doesn't work? I presumed it would mean, in the simplest terms, the most popular party would get a proportional amount of seats and they would then have the ability to put things in places without having their hands tied by the opposition. I'm really not very politically savvy. I feel no shame in admitting that.
Hope this explains it better: Proportional representation electoral system New Zealand’s House of Representatives is elected using the mixed member proportional representation (MMP) voting system. Each elector has two votes — one for a local member of Parliament and one for a preferred political party. Political parties are represented in Parliament in proportion to the share of votes each party won in the party vote in the general election.
I'm familiairish with the voting process and the implementation in terms of spread of seats. Just not as to how it actually works, or whether it doesn't. From a textbookish opinion it seems the best way to me but as you say... Maybe not.
It appears to be a Hobson's Choice, vote for the candidate and the party = no problem, don't like the candidate but want the party vote for a loserl but give the vote to the party of choice. Pretty much works in a small populated country but doubt it will ever work in Britain where the North South divide is mirrored here by rural/city divide.
The answer to British politics is simply to legally abolish party whips. You saw it most clearly in the Maastricht debate of 1992. when Tory M.P.'s were blackmailed on the floor of the House of Commons to vote for John Major's compromise. Grown men were standing there in full view of the t.v. cameras with tears streaming down their faces, being forced to vote against their convictions - and the requirements of their constituencies - or have their wives told about their mistresses. It was blatant blackmail - but that's how the modern party system works. Get rid of the Whips and you'll have a more honest politics. But how the hell can any party leader organize a policy without them? That's the question.
PR governments almost always struggle to get their programmes through. So things get fudged which means no ones ever happy, not the electorate who voted for them, nor those that didn't.
Haven;t seen it yet but watching it on catch up over the weekend! My gaffer has just been saying Paxman was tremendous with him!!
Pulled no punches with either of them, made mincemeat of lying cameron and had to ask milliband if he was ok when he was done with him
Not a fan of Cameron by any stretch but let's face it, how many politicians can you count that have kept their promises after their term in charge? My hope is that either, ideally both, will be assassinated in the meantime and replaced with armoured robots before the vote. Whatever anybody thinks, no vote is going to 'save' this country, this is purely damage limitation at this point, until this entire farce is revolutionised, there's no way this tired old set of ****s will dig us out of this mess.
hardly any one of the current politicians nowadays are worth a vote - all of them are self serving lying hypocrites that'd sell their own mothers to further their own agenda - our government is a 'two headed coin' and the face is ugly on both sides- system is broken
Have you seen the face of the main opposition to Lab/Con as well? He looks like he's been retrieved from a yard that stocks human spare parts. I'm hoping UKIP win to be honest, let's face it, if there's going to be a revolution it's more likely to happen with that dumb **** at the wheel than the other two prats.
The thing is thats how we have the coalition, people want change but there are not enough, people voted for the lib dems thinking they would get in and it turned out to be a wasted vote because "no change in vat straight up to 20%" plastic fyass got in
The problems lay much deeper than the parties making the decisions though mate. For the dumb, of which unfortunately there are many millions, they seem to think that immigration control will solve all the problems in this country. For others, they seem to think saving the NHS from privatisation will save this country. For others, they seem to think that stopping Zero Hours contracts will save the country. It's obvious that these three things, plus a multitude of more things need done, yet the general public of the country are time and time again, only prepared to give 4 years until they decide if things are a failure or a success. It could take Louis Van Gaal 4 years to turn United around, FFS, we're not talking about a football club here. I'm not saying give Cameron 20 years, I'm saying the current system needs changed, people shouldn't be voting in new leaders at opposite ends of a spectrum every 4-8 years.
Well then maybe they should all work together and put ideas to the vote and let the country decide or would that be too easy and logical
If only that was true mate - there is no opposite end of the spectrum they all sing from the same sheet
