Gerrymandering has
destroyed much of the legitimacy of the American electoral system.
In Great Britain,
the winner-take-all rule and a multi-party system have done much the same
thing.
Queen Elizabeth II presides
over a patchwork of political strongholds that put the lie to any common sense notion
of democracy.
Probably you heard
that the British Conservative Party won control of Parliament in a national
election last week, sending 331 MPs to fill more than half of the 650 seats in
the House of Commons that represents Britain, Scotland and Ireland.
Probably you didn’t
hear this:
In Great Britain,
the Parliamentary candidate who gets the most votes in any district—a majority
is not needed—wins the seat. If several candidates split the vote, a smallish
minority of votes may be enough to win. Ballots with multiple candidates are
common in Britain.
The Conservatives
got only 37% of all votes cast. That’s not what would be called a mandate in
any political system. The Conservative Party is strong in southern England, and
weak elsewhere, including London. The Conservatives hold one seat in Scotland,
and none in Ireland.
The Labour Party won
31% of the national vote. Its base is in London, the Midlands and England’s
North regions. Like the Tories, Labour has one MP from Scotland.
The Scottish
National Party is the powerhouse in Scotland. Although it took only 5% of the overall
vote, the SNP won 56 of the 59 seats representing Scotland. It isn’t even on
the charts anywhere else.
The UK Independence
Party is a right-wing populist group that opposes British membership in the
European Union and has no geographic stronghold. The UKIP received almost 4
million votes—more than twice as many as the SNP—but elected only one candidate
to Parliament.
It what sense does Great Britain have a beneficent
representative democracy? How often is the public good effectively served in
the continuing turmoil of regional and political combat?
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
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