What if we had proportional representation ?

[AutismHelp1980]

If reform didn’t exist then looking right now the Tories would have more votes (adding reform’s to their’s) than the Labour Party but as we are FPTP it’s likely Labour will have still won, but they didn’t have the most votes?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/results

If Reform had not fielded a candidate in our area, the Lib Dems would have unseated the Conservative candidate.

Exactly, there's little point trying to translate these votes to how it would be under a different system.

My parents and sister voted Lib Dem to get their Tory candidates out - they'd have voted labour if it had been a choice between them and Lib Dem.

People want a local MP. Would we still have that with PR? Or would it become even more London centric?

Same here

Exactly, in a PR system the votes would most likely be different.

Was quite surprised to note that in my (true blue) constituency, Lib. Dem. and Labour combined (about 13,000 and 11,000 respectively) got 7,000ish more votes than the Tory winning candidate. Feels unfair that more people didn’t want a Tory win, than did, yet here we are with FPTP.

I really hope we do get some version of PR in the next Labour manifesto though I'm not hopeful. I feel like both the Welsh & Scottish governments have shown that it really doesn't lead to unstable fragmented government.

PR confuses me

WHO are you voting for?

If all the votes have to be tallied up and all the constituencies represented, then who sits in the HoC?

Would there be a pool of likely candidates who are called up if their party gets enough votes?

Preferential choices?

What?

Me too.

I'd have voted differently with PR.

I live in the SW which was always likely to swing majority Lib Dem and I didn't want the Tories back.

I'm not sure your thinking takes into account a good percent of the voters this election voted tactically. In a PR situation, Labour would attract more votes in areas like mine.

There's many different versions but the one we have in Wales we get two votes. One is for our constituency Senedd member, the other for the regional list which is proportional. You can (& I often do) vote for different parties for each. Parties still need a reasonably large vote to get in but it's much more proportional than first past the post

I'm very happy because with the new Westminster boundaries I actually got to vote for the candidate I wanted most and see them win for the first time ever (& I'm old!)

That's probably the case in the majority of seats, more people will have voted for someone other than the winner. Getting over 50% isn't that common. So most people could say "in my seat, more people didn't want labour/lib dem/tory/reform/green, but that's what we've got".

In my seat, Labour won. But more people wanted either Tory or Reform.

PR would allow a lot of parties to fracture, you could see the labour left and SWP becoming one and they would get seats. The right of the tories could (Hello Suella) could join Reform and yes they would get more seats. But the stinker is that manifestos would go out of the window when, at the end of the process, they look for parties to build a coalition with.

Wow, no need to be so aggressive and crude. FPTP is clearly not representative given Britain now has a multi-party system.

Reform getting 14% of the vote but only 4 MPs is the most compelling argument for FPTP I’ve ever seen.

Yes, and they all start blaming each other

("Yes I know we said we wouldn't raise tuition fees, but the nasty Tories made us")

Where I am, the loss for Conservatives is far more than the gain for Reform, so I don't think it's that neat of a transfer.

Much of Reform, including Nigel Farage, is made up of former Tories who moved outside of the Conservitives line, many farther right or to the extremes of authortarian or libertarian, but not all Consservative voters moved that way. Many of those fed up won't have voted at all or gone for more central parties, or Independents.

I'm mixed on Proportional Representation, partially my own lack of understanding how it would work practically with all the conflicting information out there, but I am looking forward to the traditional post-General Election 'This is what we got' vs 'This is what we voted for/would have with PR' data and images.

@SoupDragon Thankfully "very safe tory seat" has stopped meaning what it did! Two of those in Suffolk now have Labour MPs for the first time ever, one has Green. All of them have only ever been tory, and with huge majorities until now!

But that really hasn't happened in Scotland or Wales.

I wish we did have PR. I think if we did then there would probably be a Labour/Lib Dem coalition.

Parties campaign in a different way and people vote differently depending on the system so you can't take yesterdays vote and translate it to a different voting system.

The Scottish parliament has PR, introduced to create concensus politics and prevent one party having a majority. What has happened? The SNP has been in power for 14 years and pushed through a controversial progressive agenda.

And, as my daughter who has just sat her History GCSE pointed out last night, Hitler won in Germany under a PR system.

With more greens too I suspect. And then a conservative / reform opposition

Labour had a lower number of total votes than last time. 21%of the electorate voted for them , so 80% either didn’t want them or are too apathetic to care .
Hardly a resounding mandate.
But of course they don’t want to go anywhere near PR.
I think the UK and Belarus are the only countries left on the world with this outmoded system.

I thought 35% voted for them? I may be mistaken but that was what o thought the BBC were saying.