On a different note: The British electoral system and its failure

In the aftermath of the recent UK general election, I wrote this piece about the failure of the British electoral system and how to fix it. It's not on infrastructure, but on something that may be just as important (to the British at least):

As I sit here writing this, the future of the Parliament is unclear. Conservative minority, Lib/Lab, Lib/Con (or ConDem), and a myriad of other possibilities for the future composition of Parliament have been dissected ad nauseam, and the consensus is that there is none. A Lib/Con coalition would mean an utter rejection of Gordon Brown and New Labour, while Lib/Lab would signal the possibility of electoral reform at the cost of the public trust. A number of sensible arguments could be made for and against such outcomes, and while I have bias towards one of them, that’s not the point of this column. The question that I currently ponder is: “How could this kind of result come about in a fairer, proportional manner, reflective of the British electorate?”

I won’t conceal it; I’m a Liberal Democrat at heart. The flip-flop of the same two parties across of the floor of the Commons has been repeated for far too long and it’s time for something different. That line could easily come out of a Nick Clegg speech, but it’s the feeling that a sizeable number of people have. Had we used a proportional system, this predicament would probably have happened anyway. Even under the simplest form, a percentage of votes to seats, the Conservatives would only have 235 seats (and to that end Labour at 189 and the Lib Dems at 150) and Clegg would have to choose between the lesser of two evils. It would at least be a more accurate picture of the country, something that definitely did not come across Thursday night.

It seems in a sense undemocratic that a party, in this case the Lib Dems, can increase their vote share while losing five seats, yet Labour can lose 91 seats and still have four times as many MPs. This argument is one that has been at the core of the Liberal Democrat campaign for decades, and is one with which many voters would agree from all parties. But let’s be honest, electoral reform may not happen under any of these scenarios. There must be some way, though, of achieving it before the next election, as this may be the only time for change.

To find the ideal system that may very well appeal to all parties in the coming days, I searched the world’s most reputable source of knowledge: Wikipedia. Even as a long-time advocate of proportional representation, the sheer number of methods is quite staggering. But there was one system that I noticed seemed to have something to work with, even for the Tories. Mixed member proportional representation, also known as the additional member system, is not something new to the UK. Used in the Scottish and Welsh devolved assemblies and the London Assembly, it attempts to combine our (rather archaic) first-past-the-post with proportional representation. In doing so, it keeps the FPTP that the Tories would like to retain, while adding a proportional step that the Lib Dems and the voting public would like to see implemented.

There’s one problem with this seemingly ideal system, however. If we want to keep the Commons the way it is, at 650 or so seats, then adding party seats would probably cause a Health and Safety Violation for the sheer number of MPs in the lower chamber. What’s the solution? It’s actually quite simple: replace the House of Lords with the party seats. If we kept the same number of seats in the Commons and Lords, then there would actually be fewer people in Parliament but far more representative of the UK as a whole. Had the vote shares been exactly the same for constituency and party results, then the party votes would be 257 for the Conservatives, 207 for Labour, 164 for the Lib Dems, and 22 for UKIP under the Sainte-Laguë method (used in New Zealand and Germany).

While the MMP system has its flaws, mainly its complexity and having two votes per person, it’s better than the mess we have now. Of course, this would mean a radical change in Westminster, but isn’t that what we’ve wanted for quite a long time?