Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Labour were given an overall Parliamentary majority of 66,

Socialist Resistance no33  |  page 9

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

with less than one in five of the electorate voting for them. No wonder people are cynical

Respect has always been in favour of electoral reform and fair voting systems, but like the rest of the left it has never campaigned on the issue particularly between elections. This needs to change.

A party with less than 50 per cent of the vote should not be able to govern in its own right.

The full scandal of the FTP voting systems needs to be fully and routinely exposed and the arguments against it strengthened if the left is going to make the impact at the electoral level which it needs to make in this period. The arguments of the supporters of FPTP make no sense and need to be systematically exposed.

Some argue that it is necessary to avoid coalition governBut the only democratic way to avoid coalition government is to gain an overall majority al tne Dallol box. not give one of the two main parties large swathes of representation it did not win.

Others argue that it is necessary to keep the connection between the MP and his or her constituency.

But that is better done through proportional system and not by what is effectively the gerrymandering of the election to create a connection based an unfair system.

Yet others argue that it is necessary in order to keep the BNP out. This is an even worse argument. The way to beat the BNP is by confronting their politics and defeating them not rigging the election against small parties.

Giving the small parties their full representation in the current circumstances would lift the level of debate from the lowest common denominator imposed bv the main parties and make it hard for the far right to survive.