The pair say they will vote tactically to support a move to proportional representation.

Actor Steve Coogan and presenter Carol Vorderman have backed Liberal Democrat pledges to reform how the UK’s general elections are run.

  • @jonne
    7•9 months ago

    Didn’t they play this game when Nick Clegg ran the party? After which they gave up on it as soon as they entered into a coalition with the Tories?

    • @Syldon@feddit.ukEnglish
      10•9 months ago

      LD have been asking for PR voting at least since the 70’s. They have never took it away from their manifesto AFAIK. They could not get Cameron to accept it. There is a huge difference between negotiation and removal. @theinspectorst@feddit.uk answered this properly https://feddit.uk/comment/2961968

      Labour and Conservative are happy with FPTP because it is easy to bribe the small amount of people in the swing vote areas. The rest of the country gets ignored. Smaller parties cannot compete in the funds to do this.

    • HeartyBeast
      9•9 months ago

      No, they actually got a vote through for a referendum for the UK to adopt the AV+ alternative vote system system. It’s flawed, but I thought it was an improvement on first past the post and voted for it. Not enough other people agreed

      • ChrisOPEnglish
        3•9 months ago

        Unfortunately the Tories pushed hard against it “being too complicated” and “would result in more hung parliaments” and people bought that bullshit, and we ended up with another Tory government nobody wanted at the next election, which almost certainly wouldn’t have happened under AV.

    • theinspectorst
      6•9 months ago

      The Coalition agreed on a referendum on AV as a compromise. The Lib Dems’ (and most electoral reform campaigners’) preferred voting system is Single Transferrable Vote, which is effectively AV but with multi-member constituencies instead of single-member. STV is used in the Republic of Ireland and delivers proportional results whilst maintaining the existence of geographic constituency links - generally considered two desirable features of a voting system (along with preferentialism, a feature AV and STV both have).

      If we could have made the switch to AV then it would have been only a short step from there to STV a few years later. But the Tories campaigned heavily against it, and Labour were highly divided on electoral reform so were officially neutral but in practice a majority of Labour MPs backed the ‘no’ campaign. So the referendum failed.

      • Kenneth John Bardsley
        2•9 months ago

        @theinspectorst @i_am_not_a_robot @Syldon @jonne
        Exactly, which is why I voted for it in 2011. It deserved to succeed, but the degree of apathy was high. People didn’t bother to get off their backsides to vote, and it was lost. A great pity in many ways. It was a Lib-Dem red line for joining the coalition, together with the raising of the income tax threshold. The Tories now pretend that was their idea. It wasn’t.

        • @FarceOfWill
          2•9 months ago

          Having larger constituencies of five mps keeps the link and also makes the mps compete with each other to provide support. The current system can lead to people who need help due to bad laws being forced to go to their MP, the minister who introduced it and is responsible for that law. They won’t get help it’ll be too embarrassing.

          Also I see elsewhere someone complaining of lists of MPs. We already have that in safe seats! They just put one name of the list in each constituency. Have five MPs in each area is an inporvement.

          • theinspectorst
            3•9 months ago

            STV has one person one vote, in a constituency, with the added benefit of allowing voters to express their vote in a preferential ranking and delivering a proportional outcome. That is what I wish for.

            • Simon Lucy
              1•9 months ago

              @theinspectorst @i_am_not_a_robot @Syldon @jonne @PamCrossland

              Well not if there are multiple outcomes.
              In the London Mayoral elections sufficient put their first choice as Lord Bucket and their second the future mayor. This was after a specific campaign to save Lord Bucket’s deposit and ‘defeat’ the right wing candidate.

              That’s perfectly fine, but two outcomes so not a single vote.

              • Pam C
                1•9 months ago

                @simon_lucy @theinspectorst @i_am_not_a_robot @Syldon @jonne It’s called transferable for a reason. You get one vote, but if your candidate gets knocked out, it’s transfered until their next choice candidate until one candidate has 50%+1 . The transferable vote allows you to choose your preferences so we don’t continue with the ridiculous situation where somebody can get elected with only 20-30% of the vote, as happens in some places.

          • Pam C
            1•9 months ago

            @simon_lucy @theinspectorst @i_am_not_a_robot @Syldon @jonne This is why I said a modified form. For example, from the top of my head, either first place candidate gets first choice of sub-constituency, 2nd, gets second choice, etc. Or the winner gets a sub-constituency in the area where most voted for them, 2nd, is their first of the first seond best, etc.

            It could be done if people would only put their heads together.

          • @OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml
            1•9 months ago

            Randomised voting.

            Keep the constituencies exactly as they are, and each election everyone votes the way they do now.

            Then instead of counting the votes, we shuffle them and pick a random vote and do what it says.

            In aggregate this is proportional across the country, and also means every voter remains important in the constituency, you never know if the person you piss off today might personally vote you out tomorrow.

            It also eliminates career politicians. Even in a safe seat you probably won’t win three terms.

            It’ll never get used anywhere but it’s fun to think about.

      • @teamonkey@lemm.eeEnglish
        1•9 months ago

        AV+ was not a PR method and only offered minor benefits above FPTP. It would still lead to a concentration of power between the two main parties, but it would increase the overall number of seats gained by a centrist party.

        AV+ suited the Tories (and Labour) only slightly less well than FPTP, but Lib Dems would have been a much bigger spare leg if it had gone through. For the Tories, it was a win-win result.

        In other words, the LDs allowed themselves to make another compromise, being tempted with another minor power grab, and in doing so allowed themselves to be outplayed again, and didn’t even gain us the minor democratic benefits AV+ had to offer.

        As for AV+ being a short leap to PR, I have doubts, even though I voted in favour of it. PR would be less beneficial than AV+ to the three main parties now, so why would the LDs try to push it through? Also the referendum would have been used as a weapon - “the people voted so we can’t change it” - just as has been done for election reform, the Scottish Referendum and Brexit since.

      • Simon Lucy
        1•9 months ago

        @theinspectorst @i_am_not_a_robot @Syldon @jonne

        Neither are proportional. If STV was used as multimember then constituencies would have around quarter of a million voters instead of 90k and parties would get list candidates, either regional, national or UK wide and they wouldn’t be elected by anyone.

        Things not talked about by PR promoters.

        • theinspectorst
          3•9 months ago

          The Republic of Ireland has 39 multi-member constituencies electing 160 members in total (so an average of four per constituency). That achieves almost perfectly proportional results. They have no party lists - each party nominates multiple candidates and you can (for example) choose to rank the individual candidates in whatever order you prefer.

          If you translate this into UK terms, it would be the equivalent of merging four neighbouring constituencies into one and then having that elect four MPs. There might be a handful of unusual cases where you choose to take a different approach for reasons of geographic common sense (for example, Orkney and Shetlands or the Isle of Wight would probably remain as they are) but for most parts of the country that hardly seems particularly egregious.

          • Simon Lucy
            1•9 months ago

            @theinspectorst @i_am_not_a_robot @Syldon @jonne

            You can’t translate it into UK terms, there’s around 4M voters in Ireland, 41M in the UK across 4 countries with greater disparity in density of populations and geographical size.

            The average size of constituencies is 73k, so you agree with me that the future size would be around 250k. How is that local representation to a National Parliament?

            There would have to be party lists to fudge it into a general proportional result across the Union.

    • @frazorth@feddit.uk
      2•9 months ago

      You must be young.

      The tactics that were played out with Brexit, all the false adverts and claims were first played out with the Voting Reform.

      There were things like

      This child needs a ventilator, not a different form of voting

      And

      This soldier needs a bullet proof vest, not a different form of voting

      They were literally claiming that if you voted for AV, then you are killing babies and our military.

      • theinspectorst
        4•9 months ago

        One of the most fascinating stats coming out of that period is that, with the Lib Dems having only 9% of the MPs in Parliament, Clegg still delivered 70% of the Lib Dem manifesto including all four of the ‘priority’ policies promoted on the front cover of the manifesto. They also achieved other good things that weren’t even in the manifesto, like Lynne Featherstone’s same-sex marriage legislation.

        Cameron by contrast, with 47% of the MPs, failed to deliver many of his signature manifesto promises such as abolishing the Human Rights Act, reducing net immigration to the tens of thousands, introducing the Snoopers Charter, etc.

        Objectively, Clegg’s 57 MPs were a pretty effective parliamentary unit, and yet it’s fascinating how the Tory media helped shape a narrative that it was the Lib Dems who were facilitating a Tory government and not the other way around. I remember in 2010 after the coalition agreement was first published, a lot of the discussion was about how successful the Lib Dems had been - it’s interesting how that perception evolved after five years of the media hammering voters with a different message.

      • @jonne
        2•9 months ago

        They held the balance of power and could’ve made it the core demand of entering the coalition. I do take the point that there was a referendum about it, I forgot that happened.

        • Kenneth John Bardsley
          2•9 months ago

          @jonne
          They were very much the Junior partner & wholly nonsensical & unrealistic expectations never help. They did a terrific job of holding back the worst excesses of the Tories for 5 years. We saw what happened when their restraining hand was no longer on the tiller. They were entitled to expect some respect & understanding & support from the electorate, but the electorate were too stupid and/or uninformed to realise what was actually happening & had actually happened in that 5 years.