There was a by-election in Severn ward of Stroud Council recently. Congratulations to the winning Green candidate who took the seat from Labour - they collapsed from first to fourth place. That is not the only interesting feature of this by-election. The winning Green got just over a quarter of the votes cast. In recent elections, many winning candidates got in with a miniscule share of the vote. In Severn ward, compared to some elections, the Green did respectably well with just over a quarter of the votes. In other results I've seen, the winning candidate scraped in with only a fifth of the vote, meaning that four out of five voters did not vote for the winner.
Given the rise of multi-party politics in Britain, the first past the post system is generating results that are wildly out of kilter with the electorate's wishes. And the system also wipes out parties with significant vote shares while giving other parties absurdly large majorities based on a share of the vote which a few years ago would have seen that same party defeated heavily.
We need fair votes now more than ever before.
No comments:
Post a Comment