Re: Proportional representation

The strength you laud is not necessarily a virtue. We had a decade of strong government under Mrs Thatcher, and another decade of strong government under Blair. Both were highly authoritarian, both took decisions that were massively damaging, and which might have been prevented or mitigated by the need to compromise with a coalition partner. Britain is shifting to a multi-party system in which the electorate have more choices than the technocracy of old. If there were a general election tomorrow, the current system could hand the far right an absolute majority of seats on just a little above 30 per cent of the vote, an epochal catastrophe that must be prevented. Germany's post war economic miracle was founded on a proportional voting system that encouraged consensus building over confrontation. The same was true of the Republic of Ireland's comfortably conservative and consensual society. As a result of this consensus, industrial relations in the 1970s, for example, were vastly better in both countries than in Britain over the same time period. The current winner-takes-all system is particularly suited to neoliberalism, in which socially destructive policies need to be imposed from above by authoritarian governments representing a minority and other groups within civil society must be broken. For those of us who believe in a more pluralistic model of society, in which real freedom can flourish due to the greater autonomy of groups which stand between the state and the individual, proportional representation is essential.