Do you want Proportional Representation?

[Darth Vader]

No problem. I agree with you. I think it's unfair that politicians are using the figures to say it's a vote against PR.

[esme]

No problem. I agree with you. I think it's unfair that politicians are using the figures to say it's a vote against PR.

 

so are you going to sign the petition when it goes live again ?

 

I'm going to, but it's going to need a lot of signatures to stop the nay saying MP's from blocking it

[happyhippy]

I'd rather PR were about, but

 

Warning - strong language. In bits.

[chem1st]

In this last election it took:

33,339 voters to elect a Labour MP

35,021 voters to elect a Tory

119,398 voters to elect a Lib Dem

 

21207 for a Democratic Unionist Party

34388 for a Sinn Fein

36990 for Social Democratic and Labour Party

42762 for Alliance party

55131 for a Plaid Cymru

81898 for a SNP

285616 for a Green

 

6 parties got no seats and had higher than the 21207 needed for a Democratic Unionist Party member. 3 of them getting more than 100000 votes, with two of than getting more than half a million votes, the highest being UKIP with 917832 and no seats.

[Grandad.Malky]

I think he was being sarcastic...

 

Maybe but in that case he used the wrong smiley.

[DragonofAna]

21207 for a Democratic Unionist Party

34388 for a Sinn Fein

36990 for Social Democratic and Labour Party

42762 for Alliance party

55131 for a Plaid Cymru

81898 for a SNP

285616 for a Green

 

6 parties got no seats and had higher than the 21207 needed for a Democratic Unionist Party member. 3 of them getting more than 100000 votes, with two of than getting more than half a million votes, the highest being UKIP with 917832 and no seats.

 

Not sure where you got these figures from. Am I looking at the wrong election results or something?

Something wrong when UKIP get almost a million votes and those million voters have no-one to represent them, whilst the DUP get a poxy 168000 votes and have 8 seats.

[Eater Sundae]

Some interesting information on how many votes it needs to elect an MP.

 

Following on from this, does anyone know if there is a site that tells us the size of the electorate for each constituency? When hearing the results, some counts seem to have a lot more votes than others. I realise that the turnouts will vary, but it still seems a big range. I know that the boundaries are regularly tweaked to try and keep them equal. I am curious to know how well they do it.

 

Edit:

 

I think I've found it:

 

http://www.boundarycommissionforengland.org.uk/

 

It seems that the largest constituency in England is the Isle of Wight CC at 110228

The second largest is East Ham BC at 87809

 

The smallest two appear to be Wirral South CC and Wirral West CC at 56200 and 55152 respectively.

 

So, the largest constituency (in terms of electorate) is nearly twice as big as the smallest. This seems to be pretty undemocratic, and I've not even looked at Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

[Anna B]

I definately want to see PR and have for a long time, but I'm not sure this is the right time to go for it.

 

We have a major economic crisis to deal with and PR will be a whole new way of doing things which few people in government have any knowledge or experience of.

 

A steep learning curve with the inevitable mistakes is not necessarily in the country's best interest at the moment.

[epiphany]

Interesting scenes outside Lib Dem meeting.

[tonkatoy]

The problem with PR is that it rewards fringe parties. At the election the BNP would have picked up 12 seats if we had PR. More frightening is that most people who voted BNP knew there was no chance of that candidate being elected. With PR they would know that they were actually electing someone and probably come out in far large numbers and the party contest every seat. It would easily mean 30 or more BNP MPs sitting in the Commons.