P.R. (2)

The basic idea behind proportional representation is simple enough - the number of MPs a party has should reflect the number of votes they got. At the last election (2005) Labour got 36% of the votes cast, the Conservatives 33% and the LibDems 22%. Under ideal PR conditions then Labour should have got 36% of the MPs, Conservatives 33% and LibDems 22% - in reality Labour ended up with 55%, Conservatives with 30% and LibDems with 10%. You can see why the LibDems are so in favour of PR! We've looked at how ATV works, and seen that this is not really PR, just an arguably fairer method of First Past the Post (FPTP). Indeed PR cannot really work with any system which produces just one MP per constituency - what we need to have is bigger constituencies returning several MPs, and then we can consider (gulp!) STV - the Single Transferable Vote - which is far from easy to explain, but I'll try next time.