The First Past the Post System suits parties with significant socio-economic support nationally. Parties like Labour and the Conservatives gain an advantage from it as they win the largest majorities of seats for example in 1992 the Conservatives and Labour gained 93.2% of the seats even though they had only 76.3% of the vote between them. This happens because support for other parties such as the Liberals and SNP tend to be more thinly spread. This is one of the disadvantages of the First Past the Post System. With two parties usually gaining large proportions of the seats we end up with a Government and an opposition with no need for coalitions, some people see this as an advantage of the First Past the Post System others see this as a disadvantage of the system.
One of the main disadvantages with the First Past the Post System is that a party may have a large proportion of the votes but may have only a small amount of seats or possibly none at all. An example is that in Scotland in the 1997 General election the Conservatives had 17.5% of the votes but gained no seats whereas the Liberals had only 13% of the vote and got 10 seats. This usually happens because their support is spread throughout an area such as the Conservatives support in Scotland. The Proportional Representation system is one voting system that eliminates this problem.
It is also possible to win the election and become the government even though one of the other contenders got a larger share of the votes than you. This is exactly what happened in the 1951 General election, The Conservatives won the election with 48.0% of the vote yet Labour had 48.8% of the vote and lost. This does not seem fair but because the First Past the Post system works as it does these results are possible.
Another disadvantage of the First Past the Post system is that a party can win a seat by just one vote or by a small amount. With the First Past the Post System its winner takes all rewards so the loser who could have lost by one vote gains nothing. In theory this could happen in every constituency in Britain for one party and we could end up with a party who just won in every constituency and who only have a small proportion of the votes.
The winner does not even have to have a majority of the vote to win using the First Past the Post system unlike the Alternative vote system. This can lead to constituencies being won by small amounts. This happened in the Inverness, Nairn and Lochaber constituency where in the 1992 General election the Liberal Democrats won the constituency with only 26% of the vote. Labour trailed the liberal Democrats by a mere 0.9% but they did not gain anything for coming close second. And the other 74% of the voters votes did not count for anything. In fact their views are not really being represented because their vote was in effect wasted.
In my view it seems that the First Past the Post system does have some advantages but in actual fact these advantages are outnumbered by the disadvantages of the system. I don’t think it is fair that we can end up with a minority of people being represented by the person they chose and a majority being represented by some one that they didn’t chose.