Your problem isn't the voting system. It's the Tories and everyone who is still willing to vote for them.

Seat map of the United Kingdom House of Commons if the 2019 Election was held under the German electoral system. The number of constitutencies won by a party was halved and rounded down to the nearest whole number. Despite SNP, DUP, and Sinn Fein not making the 5% threshold, they sill get full proportional representation, as they won more than 3 constituencies. Parties for ethnic minorities (I considered Plaid Cymru as such) also get full proportional representation, regardless of how many votes or constituencies they got. The reason the parliament has 800 seats is because according to their vote share, the DUP would win 3 seats, but as they won 4 constituencies, all other parties need extra levelling members to make the seat distribution proportional.

Tools: https://parliamentdiagram.toolforge.org/parlitest.php, https://app.flourish.studio/visualisation/12472140/edit

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_election

What if i could fart rainbows?

Do you mean Tories in general, so conservative? Or the modern party that goes against all its values and ruins the country and is more socialist than Labour?

[removed]

Part of the problem is the voting system. Because it allows a party to have an absolute majority in parliament despite only having a simple majority in the popular vote. So despite the fact that they have less than 50% of the popular vote they (more or less) get to push 100% of their policy goals.

In a system of proportional representation a party with a simple majority would need to form coalitions and make compromises to that at least some policy goals of the coalition partner are on the agenda.

How can the modern Conservative party go against 'all its values and ruins the country' if those values are determined by the Conservative party? Thirteen years of Tory mismanagement have brought the UK to its knees. Everybody is sick of their failures. Their Boomer base is dying out and everyone under 50 despises them. Our entire political system is seem as abject and corrupt. Embracing the German system might be a way of at least keeping the Union together

Labour and the Conservative parties (as well as the Lib Dems) are defacto coalition blocs. They are parties that caucus under one umbrella, its even in their names, the Conservative and Unionist Party is at the almagamation of the old Scottish Unionist party and the English Conservative Party, the Lib Dems from the Liberal and Social Democratic parties while Labour still have numerous Labour Coop members who sit in parliament including former Prime Minister Brown who was not technically Labour.

Change the voting system and you will have 4 or 5 new parties.

Though you will have the same electorate.

What would the most likely collation be? Trying to work out if Labour-Lib Dem would have a majority or if they would need the SNP as well, possibly other smaller parties?

Really? Was Tony Blair just a fever dream?

I think the biggest problem with a first past the post system is that votes outside of the "swing constituencies" matter very little.

If you're a Conservative voter in Liverpool or a Labour supporter in rural southern England your vote is pretty much meaningless.

If you are a CDU or SDP voter in Germany (for example) you can only guess at how much manifesto you get implemented and what gets negotiated away in coalition. Some countries (hello Belgium), forming a government is a major issue.

It think the political culture of the voting public is far more important than the voting system. I think the increasing intransigence and unrealistic nonsense is more to do with where modern politics is in the US and UK than the voting system.

Well yes you can only guess how much gets implemented. But who says that exactly one manifesto of a random party is the optimal thing to implement?

In the end there is no objective right or wrong voting system.

Tony Blair left power 15 years ago but still lives in your head rent-free. Besides, given the choice between having the UK at 2005 living standards or those of Tory 2023, you'd struggle to find anyone who would choose Richi's austerity model.

You ignore 2008, the UK didn't really recover from it, but to attribute it to Torie alone is delusional, as Gordon Brown didn't help either.

I would support the statement that nobody would support Rishi, but not because of his "austerity policies."

No idea what you're talking about, and neither does historical record. Gordon Brown was the only world leader calling the others to action in the financial crisis of 2008. Not Obama, who had only been in office for a week, nor Merkel, but Brown. It sounds mad to say it now, but even Putin followed Brown's call to action. I'm no fan of the guy, but he acted when action was needed. For more information of why the 2008 global financial crash happened, watch 'The Big Short (2015), the events of which all happened on George W's watch.

Labour and lib would need the SNP.

I'm biased, but I like the German voting system.

Proportional representation seems fair to me, and the 5%-threshold keeps super-extremist parties out of parliaments. I really like it.

I was so confused until I remembered that in the UK, the word “majority” means what we call a “plurality” in the US. I take it that absolute majority means more than half in this context, which is what we Americans just call a majority, while simple majority means the most, which Americans call a plurality.

My mistake. I probably translated the terms a little too directly from German to English. But you are right, that’s what I meant.

Based on the title this feels like it actually needs two images compared side by side.

I think you misunderstood the comment. In political science both "absolute majority" and "simple majority" are what you would commonly refer to as "majority".

The difference is that a simple majority is defined as 50%+1 vote of all votes cast, whereas an absolute majority is 50%+1 vote of all possible votes

Edited: I re-read the comment, he used the wrong term, and should've said plurality instead of simple majority. I hope this now makes sense now.

I don't think the result would look anything like this. All that graph is doing transposing the results under the current UK system to the German methodology.

If the UK were to implement the German system I expect the results to look rather different. A lot of the smaller parties (Greens, UKIP/Reform/whatevertheyrecalledthesedays) will have a much bigger share while the bigger parties will lose votes.

Simple reason being that many people at the moment will vote for the "lesser evil" (eg maybe Labour even though they would prefer Green) simply to avoid their vote being a "lost vote" and to keep the "large evil" (in this example the Tories) out. If they were to vote for a small party there's a possibility the "lesser evil" will lose against the "large evil", so they do some tactical voting.

With proportional representation tactical voting in this manner isn't really that necessary any more, so the smaller parties will likely gain significant votes.

[removed]

The Brexit Party decided not to contest Conservative seats because of FPTP, they were polling 10%-15% before that tactical decision and so the political situation would be very different with the German electoral system.

But „voting the lesser evil“ does happen in germany too.

Yes, but to a lesser extent.

BXP were nowhere fucking near 10-15% at the time of the 2019 election. They got 2%. That tactical decision is not why their polling collapsed. Their polling collapsed because the Conservatives turned into them.

Here is a list of polls

> at the time of the 2019 election.

The moment the campaign period started their polling plummeted. I knew this already. BXP didn't collapse because they only stood in Labour/Lib Dem seats, they collapsed because their entire rhetoric was co-opted and internalised by the Tories.

Your assessment of the entire situation is way off. BXP were never going to get 15%.