A coalition of chaos propped up by terrorist sympathisers

No it's not different at all, FPTP and PR can both serve up this kind of muddle. FPTP is better at delivering the kind of decisive mandate in the house when there is a clear publc mood for it - Thatcher, Blair, in a few months probably Starmer - and though I disliked and opposed many of their policies the Tory-Lib Dem gummint was at least stable.

What's followed and the whole May/Boris/Truss/Rizzle Kicks farce is no better than what PR would have don.

Hated UKIP with every fibre of my being but it was clearly wrong when UKIP needed 3.86m votes for the one MP it had elected to the Commons (cf ~26k per SNP MP, 34k per Tory, 40k for every Labourite and almost 300k for every LibDem.)

Other countries make PR work more or less well and it's not clear to me over the last few decades that our system has outperformed that in the round. Against FPTP is that so many millions of votes are basically meaningless and tactical voting hides the electorate's actual views (I voted LibDem just to get Chris Patten out when I lived in Bath - needn't have bothered as his LibDem replacement, Don Foster, promptly joined a Tory-led gummint!).

At least we're not as f**ked as the US when it comes to democracy, their system is gerrymandered to the hilt (by both parties) and more or less openly corrupt.

As someone far wiser than me said, democracy is the worst possible way to run a country, apart from all the other ways.

Posted By: Old Man, Apr 29, 17:50:06