In case people missed this little asterisk on the British election results, a full 5% — in raw numbers just under 1.5 million Britons — voted for the United Kingdom Independence Party and the British National Party. These parties are the spiritual descendants of Sir Oswald Mosley’s pro-Nazi movement and try to maintain a polite veneer of supposedly being non-racist enough to meet the qualifications of parties to run in British elections.
This poses a BIG problem for electoral reform in Britain.
One thing that is a must for either the Conservative or Labour parties to come to power in a coalition government is to get the support of the Liberal Democrats. There is simply no other possible coalition formula that doesn’t include them, and the Lib-Dem bottom line is going to include some form of proportional representation or electoral arrangement that enables them to reflect with parliamentary seats a closer measure of the votes they actually get.
Many “list” systems of straight proportional representation systems that nations use also have a minimum proportion necessary for a party to receive any seats at all. If I recall correctly, Germany has a 5% minimum threshold. If Britain went to a system like that, an electoral alliance between the BNP, UKIP and other far-right groups looks like they could easily attain a 5% threshold, inasmuch as they just did it standing on their own.
What the Lib-Dems and the Labour Party might want to agree on as a method of keeping the Nazis out of parliament while still instilling fairness to the system would be a French type of system, where there are two rounds of elections with every party able to participate. What happens in effect in France is that after the first round, whoever came out on the left with the best chance of winning and whoever on the right has the best chance of winning goes on to the second round, with the other parties that they can align themselves with dropping out of the race.
This latter type of election is similar to what some Labour Party cabinet members were already suggesting de facto, when in the last days before the election they openly promoted “strategic voting,” urging their own members to vote Liberal Democratic where that party was the best chance of beating the Conservative candidates and imploring Liberal Democratic voters to vote Labour where their candidates, likewise, were in a better position against the Conservatives.
No matter how you configure election rules, somebody will get and advantage and somebody will lose an advantage. When California used, for a couple of elections, an open primary system, I was the hands down primary winner against the leadership of my own party, the Peace and Freedom Party. I set the all-time high vote record for the PFP primary for any candidate for any office in any election in history. Partially as a result, PFP’s leadership teamed up with the Democrats and Republicans to challenge the open primary in court. They got rid of the Open Primary, which was immensely popular with California’s voters, but they are stuck with the fact that I will now always hold the high primary vote record as long as we have a closed primary.
