PR and extremists

[ewx]

A few people have expressed the objection to PR that it might lead to BNP MPs (I think twelve is the figure currently being bandied around). Rather than repeat my responses to that each time someone says it:

1. Some of the BNP votes may be protest votes. The BNP vote might very well turn out to be less in a situation where they might actually get seats.
2. FPTP doesn’t actually possess some magical anti-BNP property. It just happens not to give them any MPs because of the way their support is currently spread. That situation isn’t guaranteed to persist.
3. Choosing an electoral system to disadvantage a specific party is fundamentally dishonest. There are lots of better reasons people say they like FPTP, even if they aren’t persuasive to me. (I know this is the Internet and so everyone who disagrees is assumed to be arguing in bad faith, but let’s ignore that for a moment.)
4. A handful of ineffectual extremist MPs publicly making idiots of themselves is a reasonable price for a fair voting system (whatever you think a fair voting system looks like). I think that as well as being predisposed to ineffectiveness, the other parties would tend to cooperate to deny them any real power (because supporting them would be electoral poison).

Arguably we already have some extremists (of various kinds) in Parliament already, you just don’t find out they’re an extremist until they make a politically unwise outburst.

Is this academic, since the most we’ll get is a referendum on AV (which is electoral reform but isn’t PR)? Maybe, but I think that even a lost referendum would keep the electoral reform debate open in the medium term, so (if extremist support remains near current levels) the point will remain relevant.

I need a politics userpic.

Comments

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

Personally I'm in favour of preference voting, with proportionality being less critical.

The focus on the BNP is ridiculous, they are a fringe party with no influence. What's more worrying is the mainstream parties making xenophobe noises in the hope of picking up BNP voters.

What's more worrying

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Yeah. And they've been doing that for years anyway. Perhaps actual BNP MPs would demonstrate there's an irreducible minority you just can't seduce short of actually becoming a nazi party. Hey, I can dream...

[gerald_duck]

And yet, in France, where they have proportional representation, the FN does have influence. A decade ago, it was quite a problematic level of influence for several years.