Pirate Party UK sinks on maiden voyage

For all the PR . . .

. . . hand wringers, whining that the Liberals should get more seats due to the number of people voting for them, remember this :

The Labour party was only formally founded in 1900, prior to that the only 2 parties were the Liberals and Conservatives.

It took over 20 years for Labour to go from 3rd to 2nd largest party in a General Election.

It took nearly 25 years before Labour formed a government.

It took nearly 30 years for them to get a majority governemnt (with just 37% of the popular vote).

It's also interesting to note that the Liberal party was founded on what we would now consider a Conservative agenda - less state intervention; help those who want to help themselves etc etc. It's not until the great depression when they started down the more left wing route of more and more state intervention.

As for PR, do you really want an MP who cant garner more than 3rd place in an election ?? Or in the case of some of the other parties who would gain (BNP and Green, for example), would you want some also ran who you barely acknowledged on the voting slip ??

Ideologically, PR sounds like a nice idea, but it should not be full PR (as in we all vote, the votes are counted and then we divvy up all 650 MP's). Extending the constituency boundaries so there are, say, only 430 of them and then running a first past the post for 430 and PR for the other 220 would probably be as far as you'd really want to take it (going with the assumption that the 430 would be split broadly under the last election split of percentage seats gained, you'd have the Cons getting around 200 FPTP and 80 PR; Lab getting around 170 FPTP and 65 PR; Lib getting around 34 FPTP and 50 PR).

There's hope for him yet

>> The party's leader, Andrew Robinson - who picked up just 173 votes in Worcester - claimed his anti-copyright outfit had a "relatively successful" contest at the ballot box.

With statements like that, it is clear he has a bright future in politics.

Re: For all the PR...

EvilGav1: "It's also interesting to note that the Liberal party was founded on what we would now consider a Conservative agenda - less state intervention; help those who want to help themselves etc etc. It's not until the great depression when they started down the more left wing route of more and more state intervention."

The Liberal Democrats were founded in 1988. Economically they are generally centrist. I'm not sure that historical views are useful - Labour were historically left wing, but now they're more to the right than Lib Dems, I would say.

"Or in the case of some of the other parties who would gain (BNP and Green, for example), would you want some also ran who you barely acknowledged on the voting slip ??"

Well that happens under FPTP - we get Labour or Tory, who I don't acknowledge at all. It's called democracy - sometimes that means we have MPs that you personally didn't support. I don't have a problem with Green.

The issue of the BNP can be solved by simply having a 5% limit for any seats. Or, if you're supporting an unfair system to keep the BNP out, why not just ban the BNP instead?

There's nothing about FPTP that makes it harder for fascists - if there was a fascist candidate with strong local support but no national support, he'd do better in FPTP than under PR.

Note that part of the issue is that we have so many MPs. The reason only a seemingly small vote leads to an MP under full PR is that 650 is a large number. If you feel that 90,000 of the whole UK population isn't enough for representation by an MP, then the number of MPs should be reduced.

Still, we don't necessarily need PR to help the pirate party - even an improved non-PR system like Alternative Vote would allow people to vote woth the pirate party as 1st choice, without wasting votes, as they could still give 2nd choice etc to the other parties.