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Comment by flurdy | Hacker News Reader

The two biggest political parties in the UK by a country mile will loose power if PR is introduced. So I can't see it happen as they will never back it.

Tories managed to successfully seem to offer the people the pretend choice with the complete FUD that was the AV referendum, which means any other referendum is not likely for many years.

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This begs the question: if a two party system is entrenched via FPTP/WTA plurality voting system and unlikely to ever relinquish such power, what recourse is there to change the political system? Elections won't do it because election results are shepparded by the voting system. That poses as a fundamental flaw in such democracies. The architechts of the US constitution viewed simple elections as the only vector needed to institutionalize peaceful revolution on a routine basis. When that recourse is denied, what options are left?

If right to recall would have passed then people could have threatened their MPs to support a bill or face recall.

No. It does not beg that question. http://begthequestion.info

Its worth drawing a parallel to the Scottish Independence referendum, where David Cameron veto'd the obvious and sensible choice that 85% supported (Devo Max) and gambled the union on a direct in-out choice, which he thought would settle the matter decisively. If Scotland does leave, history will blame him personally.

Similarly, he's in charge of coming up with the EU options, when he wants us to stay in. Hopefully he won't muck that one up too badly.

In short, referendusm are political tools, not necessarily the voice of the nation.

To be fair, the SNP would have used a vote for Devo Max (and a decisive vote against the status quo) as a rallying point to call for a straight yes-no ballot afterwards anyway: as you said, referendums are political tools.

If Scotland does leave, Cameron will deserve the blame for the "don't let the Scots have any influence" strategy that won him this week's Westminster election, but the independence question seemed fair enough, especially with oblique hints that more devolution would be forthcoming anyway.

I have a horrible feeling the EU options will hinge more on the "no" campaigners being far more motivated to vote than those satisfied with the status quo, particularly on the assumption that the "pro EU" side will appear to have enough of a lead in telephone polls and goodwill from major political parties to be just fine.

The ballot would have had yes and no on it, if 85% voted for a third option in between then it would take some serious political wizardry to parlay that into a an immediate follow-on yes-no referendum.

It's straightforward enough: you point out that the Scots have "almost unanimously rejected the status quo" and announce that following such a "clear mandate for change", supporters of independence, whose loyalties may have been swayed by the need to ensure at least some more political representation, must now be given a simple yes-no question. That's a rather easier trick to pull off than turning a referendum defeat into an unprecedented boost in Westminster seats months later. Pulling off a Yes vote might still be tricky, but just imagine a campaign for a "Yes" vote if it were happening, off the back of a resounding Devo Max win rather than a "No" win, maybe against the backdrop of a Conservative Westminster government pushing through Trident renewal and threatening to drag Scotland out of the EU with English referendum votes...

The only real difference is that a Labour party which opted to weight behind the Devo Max campaign rather being backed into sharing a "No" platform with the "Westminster parties" might not have lost so many votes to the SNP. That might have entered Cameron's political calculus too.

The biggest hope in that respect is probably that the rumours of Tory attempts at redrawing boundaries to keep Labour out goes through. They attempted it this period, but where stopped by the Lib Dems. If that happens it may align Labour with the smaller parties in this question.

Couple that with continued huge over-representation of the SNP, which certainly will rub many English voters the wrong way, and maybe.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the impression redrawing the boundaries wasn't some diabolical plot but rather the boundaries were set independently and intended to equal up consituency sizes? The fact that this doesn't favour Labour should be beside the point?

Correct - the Boundary Commissions (there's one for each nation) are independent and come up with the new boundaries, based on simple mathematical principles. Parliament then votes them through.

In 2012/2013 Labour managed to defeat the government in the vote. The boundary changes would undoubtedly have favoured the Tories, but that's because the Tories are more popular, not because of some nefarious plan.

There is basically no way of redrawing those boundaries that is apolitical. It may not be a "diabolical plot" but constituency size is not all of it. How you alter that inherently alters vote distribution in a FPTP system, and as such it is a major problem.

Even if you supposedly makes it fairer by evening out constituency sizes, and even if the people doing it are trying to be fair, the net effect due to the electoral system can very easily be to disenfranchise the voters even more.

You need to boundaries to be created by a well-known, impartial algorithm rather than a person. And you pay a committee of academic programmers from other countries, with no political ties to the country where it's intended to be used, to design the algorithm. And you use the same algorithm forever rather than changing it from year to year.

That solves the gerrymandering problem. Of course, it doesn't solve the problem of getting whichever party currently benefits from gerrymandering to agree to switch to the neutral algorithm.

I think any attempt to "fix" the boundaries in Scotland to attempt to reduce the number of SNP MPs would create a very strong backlash that would almost certainly lead to a new drive to independence.

I didn't imply they'd try that in Scotland. Scotland is basically irrelevant for the Tories today - they won't ever win many seats there any more. In that scenario a strong SNP is good for the Tories, because if it prevents Labour from getting an overall majority on occasion, it puts Labour in the uneasy position of having to consider a coalition with SNP.

But the over-representation of SNP - a party they've vilified, and that actively fights Tory policies, and that drags up the whole "Scottish MP's voting on English issues" deal may very well make more Tory voters sympathetic to a system that'd reduce the SNP influence.

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