Matt T

Reasonably interesting column by Roy Hattersley on PR in today's Guardian. Hattersly says he is coming around to the idea of PR if it will allow left-wing parties more representation in parliament, as this would change the centre of gravity within Labour. I think he's right, but it also may cause Labour to split into a number of parties and certainly the Blair wing would be somewhat more to the right than the party currently is. Also, the impact on the right-wing of British politics is not discussed.

However it did get me thinking about FPTP. Its supporters argue that it retains a close bond between the voter and his/her constituency MP which can be lost in PR. Yet this is basically nonsense, as many voters are represented by someone they didn't want to be elected. In fact since the last election 13,400,850 voters are now represented by a member of parliament they did not want (almost exactly 50% of those who voted). Now I know MPs are there to represent all their constituents, and probably do this job admirably. But that's often besides the point -- the voter does not want to represented by them.

Funnily enough, and what advocates of FPTP rarely tell you, is that his problem is much reduced under a PR system such as mulit-member STV system, or similar.

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A very strange story in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph Magazine (which sadly is not available online but here's the BBC's reporting at the time ). It was an extract from a book by a man who through dangerous driving killed three people on a motorway. He was found guility and sentenced to jail. But that wasn't the strange thing. THe strange thing was that a paper that is so firm on law and order allowed him the lead story in their magazine to write one of most self-serving articles I've seen. Bizarrely he tried to make out the Police and CPS were the onerous State against The Little Man, and only in a few paragraphs did you actually get reminded that many people had died due to his stupidty. For much of the article he was obsessed with the very idea of a middle class person gong to jail, and much of it was unintentionally hilarious (his barrister -- actually his third barrister as he rejected his first two as they had told him to plead guilty -- told him he was too arrogant, which he reported in a kind of 'Patronising? How clever of you to notice' way, while any courtroom is described 'a drab 1960s building' as if they should have tried him in the Ritz) . All in all he came out of it sounding an unpleasant man, and now he is writing a book about it.

posted by Matthew @ 6/02/2003 12:54:00 PM Comments: 0