
David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election - jjar
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results
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MattJ100
Relevant to some here (and really every internet user), Cameron started his
election campaign with a pledge to "ban encryption" if he was re-elected:

    
    
      - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30778424
    
      - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/01/david_camerons_.html
    
      - http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/16/obama-sides-with-cameron-in-encryption-fight/

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jblok
I for one, will fight passionately against this, if he has the stupidity to
bring it up again.

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thret
This makes no sense to me.

Ulster Unionist Party had 114,935 votes and got two seats. UKIP had 3,841,346
votes and got one seat. Conservative had 11,207,547 votes and received 326
seats.

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luxpir
It's broked. The party in power rarely see it as broked. Ergo, no proportional
representation.

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mechazawa
It still does not make any sense though. How is it possible that the amount of
seats a party get seem so pseudo random?

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mseebach
It's not random at all, it's just that the national vote doesn't factor at all
(only the vote in each seat does).

It has the (often overlooked, IMO) benefit of a strong 1:1 connection between
constituent and MP: even if you didn't vote for the MP, a majority of your
neighbours did, and the MP is still your representative in parliament.
Organising locally to boot out your MP is much, much simpler than organising
nationally to shift balances of power. That has got to be a factor in keeping
MPs (more) honest.

In PR, you can be in the deeply problematic situation that you like candidate
A and dislike candidate B from party X, but you vote for A actually ends up
going to B - in effect, you can only really vote for a party, not a particular
candidate. This is a significant shift of power to the parties as they
generally control (or heavily influences) who runs where and how the ranking
that controls "spill-over" votes will end up. Parties are often run opaquely,
through back-room deals and patronage, not terribly democratically.

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ZeroGravitas
The existence of "safe seats" in the current FPTP system, into which parties
can (and do) parachute their key players makes your take on FPTP too
optimistic. See my comments elsewhere for links about voting systems, already
in use in the UK, that seek to balance local representation and
proportionality. PR (and FPTP for that matter) can encompass a variety of
actual voting systems with important differences between them.

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mseebach
I did not mean to imply that FPTP is flawless, it certainly is not - merely
that it has some benefits and PR has some drawbacks that often get overlooked
in the pursuit of "numerical fairness".

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staticelf
As a Swede without any insight into UK politics other than recent surveillance
reports and internet censorships from the UK I can only say that this is
disappointing for me.

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Ntrails
It may be a shock, but surveillance played approximately zero part in these
elections. They were fought primarily on the economy, with side orders of
social security etc.

I get that you consider those to be important, but they were waaaaaaaay down
the list in importance.

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yarper
I posted on HN a while ago saying that there was no chance of this happening.
Obviously it did and I was wrong, but I still don't think it's a big win for
the conservatives.

Two or three things happened that undermined the competition and swung it imo;

1) SNP won big in Scotland

Although the SNP has pretty much pulled the policy sheet from labour and added
a few Scotland specific things in, the vast majority of seats they took were
from labour. Fears of the SNP deciding politics in Westminster also diminished
labour support in England. For example, I vote labour but am pro-union so
could never support the SNP directly or indirectly. Therefore I can't vote
labour.

In a sense they were damaged by their own success, their whole plan was hinged
on being the kingmaker for labour which actually instead of hooking onto
labour support, actually cut labour support (drastically).

2) The crushing of libdems.

The lib dems lost 50 or so seats, a crushing defeat but a big loss was
expected. The thing is, most of those seats flipped conservative, so we voted
to punish libdems and the conservative party profited the most from it.

3) UKIP leveler

At the outset, Labour was set to be split by the SNP, and the conservatives
split by UKIP. While the first happened (SNP won a lot of seats), the latter
did not. UKIP did not make a lot of headway (for good reason probably). FPTP
while it does have its flaws, does tend to keep "hated" parties out. Given the
choice between conservative and UKIP most people vote conservative
(tactically).

tl;dr scotland voted conservative, and we hated libdems more than tories

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fulafel
Interesting that Liberal Democrats still have larger % of votes than Green
Party after all that happened.

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madaxe_again
Many here voted lib dem in a bid to keep the Tories out, but would rather have
voted green. We're a Tory seat for the first time in decades. Ho hum.

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yarper
This also happened in my constituency

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adamc
As an American, I wonder what the dominance of SNP in Scotland will mean.

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GordonS
What's the significance of being an American in your wondering?

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aaardvark
"As an American" has apparently become a euphemism for "I know nothing about
the subject, so explain this to me like you would to a small child".

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adamc
It means I read the papers but make no special claims to regional
understanding. Sheesh.

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aaardvark
Just a joke, lighten up.

