I strongly believe we need a new political system in the UK.

I think the problem is that awful racist / sexist parties like Reform aren't necessarily as "fringe" as I wish they were. Just look at the rise of the far right in France. So it might not be the case that they would gain only a handful of seats.

The previous referendum was absolute shite and the Lib Dems sold out their voters.

Effectively, despite the existence of minority parties, the maths of FPTP means there's really only ever two that will get enough seats to form a government. The US is an extreme example that's driven in part by the direct election of the president and the separation of the legislature from the executive, but Canada has similar problems to the UK. The parliamentary system allows for regional parties (as SNP in Scotland, Bloc Québécois in Québec) but in both countries, national third parties have struggled. Australia uses instant-runoff voting, but is still dominated by two parties.

There's multiple ways to structure a parliament to prevent the worst examples of proportional representation. What you don't want is a pure party list system (as for example Israel, which was particularly terrible until they raised the threshold). You can have a mixed system as Germany does; you can use multiple-member constituencies as Ireland does. (I would never suggest a pure party list for the UK because it has significant regional issues and loyalties.)

Completely agree!

That’s a ludicrous argument. Most people didn’t vote in that referendum as it was so poorly publicised and sadly, due to the dire political education in this country, most people didn’t really understand what they were voting for. We need a proper, informed discussion about it - not a knee jerk referendum which only designed to appease the LDs at the time.

Yes, but a fringe party with a handful of seats should never be a problem. More proportional systems would mean an end to the nonsense that we saw when Johnson gained an enormous majority with something pitiful like 34% of the total vote. It would make it far less likely that you'd have 5 years of completely unfettered chaos because a small proportion of the electorate chose to give a disproportionate mandate to a bunch of idiots to do whatever they wanted with.

If you have a more representative spread of elected candidates, you end up with more coalitions because it's the only way to form stable government, so you have a more accurate representation of the electorate, you should have more consensus, and you are far less prone to situations like 2019 where you have lunatics running the asylum because 34% of the vote grants 100% of the power.

For some reason the UK appears to be terrified of coalition politics, yet it's the norm across a good proportion of the democratic world. We're constantly fed the lie that it creates chaos, laughable when you look at Westminster, but unsurprising when we have two parties who crave FPTP precisely because it can grant them absolute power on flimsy mandates.

The grass isn’t always greener! I live in the Netherlands and every year there’s always a new single issue party crawling out of the woodwork. Governments rarely run to term because of some crisis and forming a government always takes months.

I’m not sure I do want it now. Wouldn’t this make it more likely parties like Reform would get seats?

The referendum was on a crappy version of PR, snd it wasn't campaigned for or explained properly. I agree we need PR, or a German style hybrid system, but I remember talking about this during my Politcs A Level, which I finished in 1991. I've lost count of the number of petitions I've signed on it since then. However, I do agree that it may be different now, when people are voting for smaller parties and we have such a mess.

We had a referendum on a new voting system in 2011.

Nobody wanted it then,

Looking around the world, I'm seeing the US facing a dysfunctional outcome, and the surging of extremists in places like France. VERY different political systems. All producing some bad politics and bad politicians.

Meanwhile, the UK is about to have a centre-left-ish government that is at least non-embarassing and not run by extremists on either side. On the other hand, we (like the Americans) also faced a terrible choice between two idiots back in 2019.

I am not sure that there is such a thing as a political system that makes it impossible (or even difficult) to have a bad outcome.

I do think that mandatory voting would be a good idea. It works well in Australia.

Yea, very worrying OP and @XDownwiththissortofthingX.

Just read the news than far right in France have got 40+% of votes to Macron's 20+% votes. Another vote next Sunday but still....

Even the country I live in the Far Right is in Government now, with a politician who has absolutely no experience apart from fulminating against Muslims. Who are part of my peace-loving wonderful family through marriage (divorced now though we get on like a house on fire, have a DS).

We're rapidly moving toward a US two party system, where it's a binary choice between Chocolate or Double Chocolate. Maybe not so frightening if you were looking at US politics 30 or 40 years ago, but look at where they are right now where you have one old, white, senile, conservative man, standing against another old, white, senile, conservative man who is a convicted felon and a danger to women.

My concern is that Starmer's government is going to prove entirely incapable of solving much of anything due to the financial black hole the UK is in, and in 5-10 years time we'll walk straight into Fascism with our eyes wide open because Farage, Badenoch, Braverman or some other will have had years to stand and hurl garbage and snipe from across the floor without having to prove they can walk the walk.

Reform's "contract" is utterly laughable, but Farage isn't going to have to deliver any of it so he can say whatever the hell he likes with no consequences. The problem is, he could still be doing that 10 years from now when people decide they want another change of government, and then they actually hand the keys to the asylum over to the loonies.

Yup.