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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

There is not going to be a civil war, because the Brexit side is made of of delusional people led astray by Facebook and Farage and is predominantly elderly.

There is no clean, costless way out of the EU. There are "less damaging" ways, such as "Norway+", but those have been rejected. "No deal" is clearly going to be a disaster. The government commissioned its own planning which also found it would be a disaster. Job losses are ongoing and the currency has dived by about 25% since the start of the process. And for what?

> If voting doesn't work to change those in power - and right now it clearly doesn't - then what's left but violence?

Well, this has kind of been a problem of the UK for years with its non-preferential voting and unelected upper house. Maybe now we can fix it. But in the meantime I'm laughing at the idea that some sort of pensioner brigade is going to be out on the streets with the molotovs.

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The system over there does seem to be terribly unrepresentative; NZ managed to switch away from a FPTP system a bit over 20 years ago, which was a huge improvement (and vastly better than the Aussie system I'm currently living in - which is still better than a traditional FPTP approach).

Hopefully this mess will provide some impetus to improve on it.

I think probably not - this will be seen as "already decided recently", and pretty conclusively too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...

Fair enough, that was very recent. Perhaps a vote between a more representative system than AV vs FPTP would have been different but it does seem too early to bring it up again.

The reason why we have FPTP is to avoid these situations.

PR usually hands power to extremist minorities, it led to the far right gaining seats in govts in Europe in the past few years (Germany was PR in the 1920s too), and there is often massive uncertainty around the formation of govts (in 2010 Belgium took nearly two years to form a govt).

It is truly bizarre that this is always one of the things that people recommend when it is well understood it would have the opposite effect from intended. PR only "works" under a very limited number of conditions (which may apply in New Zealand but don't apply in most of Europe anymore and definitely do not apply in the UK).

That argument would apply equally well to discarding FPTP and retaining a monarch (or a dictator) at the top. A strong leader is definitely stable, so if that's the key metric an FPTP system is still not a winner.

PR certainly increases the power of minorities (but only in proportion to their support among voters) vs a FPTP system in which those voters are not represented at all; this can be both positive or negative (if NZ's system was implemented here in Australia, both the Greens and One Nation would have far more representation here, and the two major parties would be far weaker).

I'm not convinced that this is a bad thing. Where there is no representation people may justifiably resort to other means and that's hardly stable either. NZ's experience with MMP has been largely positive.

> It is truly bizarre that this is always one of the things that people recommend when it is well understood it would have the opposite effect from intended.

It may be that it's often recommended because this is not necessarily the case at all; however, I don't know the specifics of the UK setup and so whether it would be helpful _now_.

I think it's hard to argue that a less representative system is not also less democratic, so hopefully whatever is holding you back over there can be sorted out somewhere down the line.

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