Achieving fair representation in the new UK Parliament

Now the election is over, we have a parliament with very unequal representation of voters, with some parties getting far more and some far less than their share of the vote would suggest. Rather than just banking the advantage, the new government should recognize the unfairness of the current system and apply a short term fix so that people are represented fairly. Call it handicaps, weightings, scaled votes, block votes, or some other name. But a fairer democracy would smell sweeter.

This chart should be self-explanatory, voting could be scaled according to the number of votes for that party and the number of MPs seated:

Some cut and paste from a recent blog about longer term fixes:

We have a new problem, well new for the UK, which is that we’ve gone from a 2 party system to having numerous significant parties. The number of seats each will get in parliament will bear little correlation to the proportion of the national vote they win. That’s because some parties are thinly spread across the whole country so will get very few seats indeed, whereas others are heavily concentrated in particular areas, so will get far more than their fair share. With each seat decided by whichever gets the largest vote in that area, it’s obvious why having widespread support is a disadvantage compared to representing purely local interests.

Option 1: block or scaled voting

I recently suggested a block vote mechanism to fix it:

Better representational democracy

to save you reading it, it allows continuation of the existing system, with greatly unrepresentative number of MPs, but then adjusts the weighting of the vote of each according to their party’s proportion of the national vote. So if a party gets 1% of the seats but won 15% of the vote, each of those MP’s votes would be worth 15 times as much as the vote of a party that received a fair number. If the party gets 5% of the seats with 1% of the vote, each of their’s would be scaled down to 0.2 x normal.

Option 2: split house

In a country with 650 seats, that is far more than is needed to provide both local representation and national. Suppose 250 seats were allocated to larger local constituencies, leaving 400 to be filled according to party support. 250 is easily enough to make sure that local issues can be raised. On the other hand, most people have no idea who their local MP is and don’t care anyway (I have never felt any need or desire to contact my local MP). All most people care about is which party is in control. This split system would fill 250 seats in the normal way and the voting mechanism would be unaffected. That would over-represent some parties and under-represent others. The 400 seats left would be divided up between all the parties to make the total proportions correct. Each party would simply fill their extra seats with the candidates they want. I think that balance would solve the problem nicely while retaining the advantage of the current system.

A variant of this would be to have two separate houses, one to debate regional issues and one for national. A dual vote would allow someone to pick a local candidate to represent their local area and a second vote for a party to represent them on national issues.

Option 3: various PR systems

There are hundreds of proportional representation systems and they all have particular merits and weaknesses. I don’t need to write on these since they are well covered elsewhere and I don’t favor any of the conventional solutions. The best that can be said for PR is that it isn’t quite as bad as the status quo.

Option 4: Administrative and Values houses

Pretty much everyone wants a health service that works, good defence, good infrastructure, sensible business regulation, clean water supply, healthy environment and so on. People disagree profoundly on many other issues, such as how much to spend and how to spend it in areas such as welfare, pensions, even education. So why not have 2 sets of MPs, one selected for competence in particular administrative areas and the other chosen to represent people’s value differences? I often feel that an MP from a party whose values I don’t support does a better job in a specific role than an alternative from the party I voted for.

I am out of ideas for further significant options, but there must be many other workable possibilities that would give us a better system than what we have now. UK democracy is broken, but not beyond repair and we really ought to fix it before serious trouble results from poor maintenance.

Future democracy: sensible proportional representation

With the current state of UK politics, I believe this is an idea whose time has come.

The UK government comprises members who won the most votes in their constituency. It is a simple system, but it favors parties whose votes are concentrated in certain regions. Parties whose support is spread evenly rarely reach a majority anywhere so they get very few seats even if they have a large voter share. Those with low support usually don’t get any seats at all, but if their support is mostly from a single area, they can win a seat. Whatever the merits of such a system, and there are some, it certainly isn’t ‘fair’ in terms of equal representation. With some constituencies bigger than others, some voters get far better representation of their views than others.

My suggestion is very simple. Firstly, each MP in parliament should have the value of their vote on each issue scaled to the national proportion of people who voted for that party. Secondly, so that all significant parties are represented, each party with more than 1% of the national vote should get at least one MP, even if none achieved a majority anywhere. So to take real examples, if the Green Party gets 2% of votes, but only one seat out of 600, then their MP should be given 12 votes. If the Labour Party, with 30%, gets 45% of the seats, then each of their MPs should only get two thirds of a vote each. If Conservative win 35% of the seats with 35% of the vote, they would get one vote each. That way, there would still be a good mix of MPs and each would still represent a constituency, but every voter would have equal representation, very unlike the current system. Minority parties would benefit greatly, and the big parties would have to suffer only getting the power they actually represent.

With such a system, it ought also to be possible to divide your vote, giving some of it to one party and some to another. That would immediately remove the problem where if the left or right vote is divided, that the MP the fewest people support can win the seat. They would still win that seat, but the voting power would still go to all the parties according to their actual support.

Naturally, some people would like this system and others would hate it. It is quite normal to want to keep an unfair advantage and upsetting when it is removed. But it is surely time to make democracy so that every voter has an equal say in the running of the country.