this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
57 points (100.0% liked)

United Kingdom

4341 readers
181 users here now

General community for news/discussion in the UK.

Less serious posts should go in [email protected] or [email protected]
More serious politics should go in [email protected].

Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

The problem with that referendum was that unless you can confidently and clearly explain why a change is better than the status quo then people tend to stick with what they know.

The offer in that vote didn't clearly show an improvement to FPTP. The question wasn't "should we enact proportional representation or not?". The question wasn't "Of these five voting systems which would you prefer?"

The question was "At present, the UK uses the "first past the post" system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the "alternative vote" system be used instead?"

The alternative vote system doesn't really have any obviously huge advantages over FPTP. It doesn't offer proportional representation.

This short video explains it well:

https://youtu.be/3Y3jE3B8HsE

Obviously, any improvement is better than no improvement but people tend not to like change so you have to very clearly state what they will gain from changing. And that didn't happen.

This playlist has a few videos explaining voting systems if you'd like to learn more:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqs5ohhass_RN57KWlJKLOc5xdD9_ktRg

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago

That and it was the Brexit pre-cursor.

Would you like this dying child to get a ventilator, or an alternative voting system?

Turns out, you'll have neither.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago

Thanks for the additional info. I am generally not super knowledgeable on politics so I will go check out your links :)