How First Past The Post Harms the Tories

Due to the unfairness of the First Past the Post voting system, the biggest losers in Scotland have been the Conservatives.

During the 2010 election, the Conservatives polled 18% of vote in Scotland but gained less than 2% of the seats. Without a fairer distribution of the votes in Scotland, the Conservatives will never be able to gain their fair Scottish representation.

Here is some Scottish Election data from the last two general Elections, 2005, 2010. Spot the (several sets of) unfairness:

Below, is the result table from 2010 General Election for Scotland. Again, spot the unfairness.

Notice the massive unfair seat allocation.  Particularly see the benefit to Labour and the grossly unfair penalisation of the Conservatives. In 2010, Lib-Dems actually got roughly the correct vote/seat ratio. If you divvied up the seats according to vote share Labour should have got 24 -25 seats, each of the other parties should then have got about 11 seats each

In Scotland, using the First Past the Post voting system, the Conservatives (and the SNP) are punished in exactly the same way that other minority parties are punished across the the UK. The people of Scotland end up with an unrepresentative grouping at Westminster, which strongly leans away from what a sizeable voting minority wish for, leaving these minorities with reduced  representation, or as with the Conservatives, with trivial representation.

Scotland may not  be a Tory heartland under any voting system, but under First Past the Post the Conservatives are guaranteed an insignificant representation.

There used to be a phrase used to define those Conservative who rejected the old class base system. A phrase used to define Conservatives who sought to promote the best interests of the whole of the UK. They used to be called One Nation Tories.

So how can these "One Nation Tories" today still support First Past The Post, especially when it harms their cause so badly as shown above?

By supporting FPTP the Conservative simply entrench themselves in their English heartland and so fail to be a One Nation party. Conservative party supporters need to look to the long term, not just the petty gains to be made in the short term by staying with an outdated and unfair voting system.

Vote for AV on Thursday.

David Laws and Fair Expenses

Billothewisp offers his humble apologies to the Great and Good, the divine leaders and reporters of the truth who preside over the us, the Plebeian riff-raff that pollute this poisoned and betrayed little England.

But Billothewisp wishes to go against the grain on the current outrage against David Laws.

In recent history we have all been confronted by the crimes of the corrupt members of our ruling elite .

You may remember, within the ranks of the cognoscenti there have been “accidental” claims for non existent mortgages, claims for the rental of porno movies (no doubt for educational reasons) and the flip-flopping of houses for considerable gain..

If I remember correctly some of our Great and Good are facing criminal charges over these travesties.

Now David Laws has been forced to resign over paying £40,000 in rent to his boyfriend.

Admittedly, on the surface that looks pretty bad. Especially when we have all been conditioned to provide a knee jerk reaction to such claims by the crooked goings on in the last parliament.

But look a little deeper. This claim for £40,000 spans eight years. So that is about £400 (ish) a month.

Try renting a bedsit in London for £400 a month. You will probably fail .

So, David laws is homosexual (who cares?). He pays his lover a fair rent for staying in London. What is wrong with that?

You know. Seriously!

I don't even really like the Liberal Democrats.

But we supposedly live in a (wishful thinking here) libertarian Democracy.

If David laws chooses to be homosexual that is his decision and none of our business. If he chooses to pay his lover a fair market rate rent rather than living in a crummy bedsit, then that is his decision and not yours or mine.

Further more, by sacking David Laws for a non-crime we lose a capable administrator, all be it a Liberal-Democrat one (but then again, we all have our faults)

We need to make sure that our justified outrage at criminals lining their pockets does not turn into a witch hunt against everyone who simply does not fit the mould.