To feel increasingly alienated by Tory voters?

[BarmyBrunhilde]

I am in despair as to where our country is at. With the cost of living crisis looming (and already beginning), this winter is going to be brutal and likely life ending for so many in the UK, and the current aspiring leadership of the Tory party seem to be more interested in litigating culture wars and appeasing NIMBY pensioners in the Home countries than actually addressing any of the serious problems in the UK.

I've never been a Tory voter, but I've always been able to get along with people who have different views (provided they aren't racist/homophobic etc). But how anyone could see all the misery and deprivation on the horizon, look at the prospective leaders and frontbenchers with their complete lack of sultions, and continue with supporting them is genuinely beyond me. I find myself slowly being consumed by bitterness and rage against people for their views, and it frightens me. Am I alone in this?

Three things here:

1. It was actually 13,966,451 million people who voted Conservative in the 2019 General Election.

2. The entirety of the UK population does NOT have the right to vote. No country does that!

No, the UK electorate is 47,567,800 million voters. The percentage of the total UK electorate who voted Conservative in 2019 was 29%.

But only 67.3% of the total UK electorate voted in the 2019 General Election which means the Conservative vote share was 43%.

In context, the term "majority" simply means "the greater number". No party will get a majority of the total electorate in a multi party state. We'd need to be a two party state like the United States and I don't think that'd be a popular suggestion.

As above, fewer people voted for Labour, Lib Dems, SNP and so on.

"Of the people, by the people, for the people" - Abraham Lincoln

Democracy basically means the people cast their votes as they see fit. That's power of the people. FPTP is not undemocratic since the electorate consent to the system. It is just one form democracy takes amongst others.

3. As for your last comment vis a vis Belarus, the Polish and Spanish Senates still use FPTP.

Outside of Europe, the United States, Canada and India are three examples of countries using FPTP.

Are Unions stronger in other European countries @XingMing ?

Were there any laws introduced in the UK during this timespan that diluted their influence further ?

Unions in Germany are better integrated into corporate decision-making in that there tend to be union board representatives speaking for the work force in companies over a certain size (don't ask for details of how big, but the labour force has a voice and is consulted). I don't know a lot about French unions or Spanish or Italian.

I don't think the union voice is stronger in Europe @BirmaBrite but the workforce is listened to for its ideas and trusted not to rock the boat without good reason. UK labour relations have always tended to be contentious and confrontational.

True. It was 13.9. I was mistaken on that.
i know not everyone can vote, but a government with an 80 seat majority chosen by so small a segment of the population is not representative. That is why proportional representation is much more democratic, as it actually reflects what each vote stands for.
we are the only country in Europe apart from Belarus to depend entirely on FPTP. Other countries may have some element of it, but this is tempered by other voting systems.

People moan about the government in every country, regardless of what voting system is used. It'd be the same politicians involved regardless. The major parties are coalition parties, it's just that the coalitions are within the party instead giving each segment of the party different names.

Yanbu. How anyone with school age children could consider voting Tory is mystery. They are actively and directly damaging their children's future lives on numerous fronts.

True, but when you have so many people whose votes don’t count because of the system, then political apathy is encouraged and that is a huge problem in this country. I think it would be much healthier to adopt a system of PR as they do in Ireland, where every vote makes a difference. At the very least I’d like to see mandatory voting.

People's votes do count. just because your chosen party doesn't win in your seat, doesn't mean your vote doesn't count. It counts exactly the same as everyone else's vote. It is up to the parties to have enough appeal in different areas to win. The Tories have a broader appeal, in that enough people grudgingly vote for them in enough seats for them to win. A lot more people enthusiastically vote for Labour but they tend to be concentrated in certain areas .

Labour need to stop being concerned about being on the right side of history and concentrate on being on the right side of now. There's no point at all in looking to the past and saying how much better things would've been, or in looking to the future and claiming that demographics are on their side. It's never going to be the future.

Op I feel so sorry for you and people who think like you..
I had my very hard times in the middle of a labour government and it was horrific. I'm ashamed to say I voted them in and they shat on me

We need to move beyond this thinking
.
What we need is a New political model that may have an MP at the top but then gets professional in to change things.

You're confusing democracy with the concept of fairness. Democracy itself does not mean it equates to fairness - see the Lincoln quote.

Both FPTP and PR systems are democratic since the electorate consent to them. They're just different practices of democracy.

The UK does not depend entirely on FPTP as regional elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all use differing forms of PR. At local level, London also has devolved powers and not dependent on FPTP either.

In practice, it is erroneous to assert that the UK is the only country in Europe to depend on FPTP excepting Belarus. Indeed, the UK is heads and shoulders above Belarus in the democracy stakes, so that kind of assertion seems more like exaggeration reliant on ignoring the aforementioned inconvenient facts.

The Democracy Matrix ranks the UK at 17th globally and 14th Europe. We are classed as a Working Democracy.

Belarus, on the other hand, is ranked 155th globally and is classed as a Moderate Autocracy.

So, your assertion by implication and inference that the UK is undemocratic like Belarus based on nothing more than using a democratic system such as FPTP simply falls flat on its face.

There is no comparison between the UK and Belarus here. Spurious correlations are easily made and pretty common, but are not inherently valid in themselves.

I've wondered this, is it because of poor management or our general adversarial way of doing things.. them n us, divorce, HoC's.. always confrontational.

Certainly in Sweden, employees seemed to have significantly more rights than anything i experienced working in the UK.

Or is it our obsession with class?

And yet the Republic of Ireland is just ONE place above the United Kingdom in the Democracy Matrix.

Just 0.006 points separates them.

The turnout in the Republic of Ireland GE was 62.9% in 2020 whereas it was 67.3% in the UK GE in 2019.

Voter apathy is clearly NOT solved by PR either, especially as there is other explanations for it than apathy with the electoral system of choice.

PR systems have their weaknesses just like FPTP systems do. There is no one size fits all as we can see around the world.

Just 22 countries have mandatory voting and roughly half of these don't even enforce it. Part of democracy is people can choose to vote or not rather than being compelled to do so by law.

This is not a systemic bias though, it’s a feature of a first past the post voting system.

One of the most egregious outliers of recent years was the UKIP return per vote. The party that wins tends to require fewer votes per MP than the parties who lose, but that’s a winner / loser bias, not a Tory / others one.

I think people object to FPTP if their preferred party isn't winning. I think people also think it gives the conservatives an advantage. I wonder how MN posters would have felt about PR in 2015 when UKIP got 3.8 million votes which was 12.6 % of the vote share, the third largest goes share, and translated into over 80 seats when they ended up with one.

If the table you posted had included UKIP they would have been at the top of the list for highest number of votes per elected MP.

It is absolutely representative. Each constituency returns the MP who received the most votes in that constituency.

I think that very few of those complaining now were also complaining when Tony Blair had a larger majority on a smaller vote share.

Yes, and a feature of democracy is that there is usually some individual or group who don't get the government they voted for.

Shetland has been held by the Lib Dems since 1999 yet the SNP govern them as did Labour before them.

Does this mean it's undemocratic since Shetland didn't vote for the SNP by majority?

Of course not.

The same holds true for UK wide General Elections in which either the Conservatives or Labour win.

Getting a government you or your constituency didn't vote for in FPTP and PR is a feature of democracy.

Each person has one vote equal to all others. That is democratic.

"Nimby pensioners". So much ageism on Mumsnet.

“I also personally don't think trans women should be considered men in law…”

And yet this is exactly what is happening by stealth - aided and abetted by some political parties - and still you think I’m ‘exaggerating’ and that it’s all just a storm on a teacup about ‘pronouns and toilets’?

Just ask the poor woman who was raped on a uk hospital ward and the hospital denied there was a male who could’ve done it because they’d willingly logged his gender as female and accepted him as such. Wow - what a great loophole for predators to get access to females in various states of extreme vulnerability. But yeah… it’s just the usual terfy exaggeration and something most people don’t give a shit about eh?

…Until you’re the vulnerable woman in hospital and people wave away your concerns…

Some votes are worth more than others under FPTP - that’s the problem. Under PR votes are much more equivalent. The doc posted above from the Electoral Reform system makes the difference quite clear. Yes, PR allowed UKIP a disproportionate number of MEPs in the European Parliament, but it was fairly done. So yes we’d see more of the smaller parties, but we should do. The Greens would see more MPs too.
There were a lot of complaints about FPTP under Labour and rightly so. It’s high time we adopted PR imho.

@DownNative you can’t compare PR and FTTP as the same forms of democracy - of course you won’t always get the government you want (that’s obvious) but a PR system gives you a much better chance of getting a truly representative government. FTTP is a terrible voting system and would never be adopted by any newly established democracy.

Absolutely.

I don’t agree. Under PR the votes for a minority party that can carry the balance between forming a coalition or not are given disproportionate weight, as their party gets to hold far more influence than their vote share should.

well we had the sorry spectacle of May bunging public money to the DUP for their support to make up her government, so FPTP certainly doesn’t protect us from that.
by and large however coalition governments can work quite well and it would break the wretched two party system here, which has not worked well forva long time.

@Pinkandwhitestripes totally agree. The flip/flop governments we have in the UK do not work. Functioning democracies in N Europe all seem to make PR work and manage the smaller parties. There’s no argument for FPTP.