When Dimitra mentioned on Friday night that we hadn’t voted I had almost forgotten. Of course I knew that I never went to the polling station and ticked the box next to one of the local candidates. But we had become so absorbed by the elections and everything that followed that it felt like we had voted.
I was slightly disappointed with the election result. I had hoped for the Liberal Democrates to win a dozen seats or more; not to see them actually lose a handful. Especially since they see their popular vote increased by gain one per cent. And that’s not even the most ridiculous part of the electoral system: the party won 23% of the votes, but will occupy less than 9% of the seats in the House of Commons.
Still, I am mostly happy. These elections have ‘change’ written all over them. For a start, none of the parties won an absolute majority, not even in parliamentary seats, and thus two or more parties will have to form a coalition, a rare occurance in British parliamentary history. With the Lib Dems a likely participant in a government of a yet undefined colour, electoral reform may be possible; 62% of people have said they favour ‘a more proportional system of voting’.
It is interesting then to see many people calling Nick Clegg a betrayer for even daring to speak with conservative leader David Cameron. One of the consequences of a system of proportional representation is that parties are unlikely to win an absolute majority and thus two or more parties will have to agree on a coalition government. If Clegg had not started negotitions with the conservatives, it would have been selling out his party’s principles.
The idea of a government made up of two (or more!) parties seems to be a rather scary idea to many Brits. Before we know the country will end up like Greece. Actually, in the Greek electoral system the biggest party gets 40 bonus seats, to make sure they will have an absolute majority in parliament. On the other hand, in the Nordic countries, Germany and the Netherlands, governments have been coalitions for decades. Lack of stability is not an often heard criticism of these countries.
A political system that is likely to result in coalition governments would also make campaigns more about why your own ideas are supposedly good rather than why the others’ are bad. There will be fewer personal attacks and fewer scaremongering; fewer if you vote them thens because if you vote us, you may end up getting them too. And that them may be the party you hirtherto saw as your main rival, as is the case in the current talks between conservatives and Lib Dems. (A lot of dislike for conservatives, to put it mildly, can be traced back to Margaret Thatcher; whatever you think of her, she would never have been able to act so ruthlessly in a coalition government.)
Democracy isn’t ideal, as many have pointed out, but it works quite well and certainly better than any known alternative. One of its strongest principles is the idea that people together make a better decision than one person on their own. This too works for parties in a government; it can work even in the UK.
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