Political Insight

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 21 May 2007 14:12:17

Following the Welsh Assembly elections while we were we have found that our main political party is in some disarray.

Our main government and council elections are decided on a "first past the post" basis. Therefore only one party represents each local area. This has been the favoured voting method for over 100 years. However for the Assembly and Scottish Parliament we have the proportional respresentation system, as do other countries. Therefore you vote for the person you like most in your area and then rank the parties in order of your personal preferance.

The latter system is most loved by those parties that wouldn't otherwise be able to get many seats in the Assembly. This applies to both the Conservative and Lib-Dem parties. However it also means that if you do badly in the main voting you still have the secondary votes to fall back on and gain seats that way.

What is causing problems now is that the Labour Party are the biggest party but not an overall majority. They are upset because the Lib-Dems pulled out of coalition talks last week and decided to talk to the Conservatives and Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalists) instead. Labour are somewhat niffed about this state of affairs.

The Labour leader appeared on the Politics Show yesterday complaining that the Lib-Dems were not playing fairly but not talking to him. He is annoyed that the other 3 parties are discussing the proposition of a "Rainbow Coalition" that would allow them to form a majority government. He points out that his party won the largest share of the vote, around 40%. Yet he's now saying that a second vote maybe needed to let the public decide whether or not Labour should be allowed to govern. Alternatively he thinks that Lib-Dem members should be able to force their representatives into a pact with Labour.

This is wonderful. After the last election he was moaning that people who were standing for constituencies were getting in on the regional lists if they didn't succeed on the main vote. While this favoured the other parties he was annoyed by it, now he's quiet about it.

Throughout the interview he sounded like a schoolboy who'd had his toys taken away from him because they actually belonged to someone else. Whatever he argued just made him sound worse and worse.

Personally I'd like to see the back of Labour and let the other parties try. If nothing else it would allow us to see if we can be governed more effectively by a broad coalition then one dominant party.