Charles Brandl
Modern British Politics
March 29, 2004
To Reform or Not to Reform?
That is the question
The issue of electoral reform in Britain has been a controversial issue for many years. Research and statistical analysis has deemed that Britain’s first past the post democratic electoral system is rather highly democratic. This has lead to a strong push for reform from many political pressure groups, including the Liberal Democrats and the Electoral Reform Society. When examining the system, it is evident that there are many flaws. However, without the help from stronger political parties in the system, reform does not seem possible for many years.
The current system for electing MP’s is very simple to understand. There are 659 separate constituencies across the UK each electing one single Member of Parliament. The candidate who gets the most votes wins. The problem with this is that obtaining the most votes in an election with many political parties, varying in size and number, does not mean that the candidate has earned the majority of the votes. After the members have been individually elected, the party with the most seats in Parliament, regardless of whether or not it has a majority across the country, normally becomes the next government.
There are some advantages to this system. The first past the post system is relatively simple and easy to understand. It is inexpensive to operate and produces a result quickly. Each constituency elects one representative who can identify with his or her area. In this respect, a strong link is created between the MP and their constituency. Another positive aspect of the system is that it tends to create a two party system. This is beneficial because this leads to a single party government, making it much more of a unified effort to pass legislation and deal with the political problems of the time. This also eliminates a party from relying on another party for aid. All in all, the system has obviously been working out in the past. The UK is said to have one of the strongest governing bodies in the world.
However, despite the government’s strength throughout history, an electoral reform can possibly lead to the creation of a more democratic electoral process. There are numerous weaknesses to the FPTP system that have created this issue. For example, only one MP is elected in each constituency, so all the voters who did not vote for him or her are not represented. Their votes do not help elect anybody and so are wasted, they could have stayed at home and the result would not have been altered. This issue is not any different from elections taking place in other countries across the world; however, in Great Britain the numbers are more drastic. The 1997 election is a good example of this. In this election, 14.7 million voters cast ineffective votes, which comes out to 48.2% of the voters had casted votes that did not matter. This occurs because of the distinct division in the political parties for certain areas. Some areas of the UK will only vote conservative, year after year, and the same goes for areas that always vote Labour. Another disadvantage of the present system is that there is a lack of choice given to the voters. For the most part, voters tend to align themselves with a political party. The candidates are selected by a small number of party members, and voters can only choose between parties. If the candidate selected for your party has views with which a voter disagrees, the voter is left with no alternative choice within that party. In turn, this leads to people casting negative votes, i.e. voting against the candidate they dislike most rather than for the candidate they would rather have representing their views. It is obvious that the system has problems creating democratic results.
