Science, programming, life and everything

Well here we go, again not strictly in the remit of the blog, but nonetheless an important issue both to science policy and to society as a whole. The question I pose to you, good readers, is ‘is it time to change from first past the post, and move to proportional representation?’.

Having never really been that interested in UK politics before this general election, the Twitter trend #scivote has made me realise that politics does have a role to play in a scientists everyday life, and in my own constituency I made sure that I voted to make my #scivote count. However from watching and reading the results today it seems to me that there is a gross injustice in how the votes matter. Only weak constituencies are important in the grand scheme of things, voting against the holder of a stronghold usually is but a drop in the ocean of what is required. Swinging a constituency from one party to another requires such a large volume of votes that it is unlikely to happen, however in a area where every vote counts it can be down to 100s, or less, votes which can cause the swing from one party to another handing them another seat in the houses of parliament, and (as the BBC represented it) another slab in the road to number 10.

It is obvious that most of the rest of the world does nt understand how our politics works, with the Governor of Callifornia (Arnold Swarzenegger) calling David Cameron to congratulate him on his victory from the information from the exit polls, when not understanding that even the exit polls were showing that the Tories had not even made the majority required to stop a hung parliament. However I looked at this on the BBC website this morning, and seen that the Liberal Democrats with only 50 seats had approaching the same number of overall votes (I’m a physicist so 10M is close to 8M!) as labour and yet were 150 seats less! How is this both democratic, and bringing the peoples candidate to the job? it is this system which, in my opinion, leads to voter apathy, where people (sometimes rightly) feel that their vote is worthless, and so why bother voting.

Proportional representation however would ditch the ancient first past the post system, bringing in a government where the PM is elected by
the people, not just the people of the swing constituencies but by the people of the country. As my good friend pointed out, how then would the MPs be chosen for each constituency, to make up the total representation in the Houses Of Commons? Well to this I have no real answer, however I do feel that the voters have shown this year that now is a time for change, perhaps time to change the way government works in totality (removal of the unelected Houses of Lords as a start).