They held a national election in the heartland of parliamentary democracy yesterday.
A lot of people turned up.
Some of them weren’t allowed to vote because polling stations were understaffed.
One party, the Conservatives, appears to have won a lot more seats than either of the other two major parties.
Another party, Labour, appears to have overwhelmingly lost its parliamentary majority in a powerful message of rejection from the electorate.
Under the British constitution the losers are entitled to form a government if they can scratch together enough support from other parties. Which means, under the constitution, the winners become the losers.
The Brits call it a parliamentary democracy.
We’d call it a parliamentary debacle.
I’d call it a Monty Python sketch.
What a load of hypocritical nonsense!
Losers hanging on to power by scraping together support from other parties is called a COALITION. We’ve had one in Australia since 1922. You’ve become too used to the two-sided domination of parliament which is the exact antithesis of a true Parliamentary democracy.
I say bring on dozens of smaller parties or independent members that represent people’s real and varied interests and let them hammer out deals to exercise power and get rid of the posturing failures that dominate “Government” v “Opposition” politics in this country. People don’t think or behave in binary.
In 19th century British politics up to around the time of Chamberlain (Joseph that is) “parties” were a small core of supporters of a particular faction. They very rarely had an outright majority. They always had to persuade members by the power of real argument to garner the support needed to pass a bill. That was when there was genuine parliamentary debate, not the sideshows we get in parliament nowadays.
“Under the British constitution the losers are entitled to form a government if they can scratch together enough support from other parties.”
Looks like Crikey Editorial has been up all night.
The winner is whoever can get a majority on the floor of the House. Like, ummm, everywhere else…
Sleep on it. Then write another editorial.
This is perhaps the most ridiculous piece of psephological analysis I’ve seen since I stopped reading Dennis Shanahan. The purpose of an electoral system is to translate votes into seats. Now, as woefully the UK system performs this task, the likely result of this election is that Labour plus the LDP will have a combined total of seats greater than that of the Tories. This would therefore allow those two parties, if they decided to join in a coalition agreement, to choose the Prime Minister because they have the most seats in parliament.
This situation, rather than being the debacle you claim it to be, would actually be the clam compliance with the constitutional arrangements that allow the incumbent Prime Minister first chance to compile a coalition when the election result is unclear. If the Tories have “won” the election, as your editorial claims (as much as a party can win an election with less than 40% of the vote), then they can test Brown’s claims to the Prime Ministership by a vote of confidence. If they can’t, then they can sook amongst themselves while having their fantastical, unconstitutional grievances given undeserved life by media organisations and journalists who seem to think that elections are sporting contests rather than the expression of the will of a diverse and multi faceted nation.
Also, given that the Tories appear unlikely to have a majority of seats and only got (according to estimates) 37% of the vote, versus 28% and 23% for Labour and the LDP respectively (equalling 51% of the vote, which is a bigger number than 37%, just as a Labour-LDP coalition looks like having a bigger number of seats than the Tories), I’m not at all sure where the “win” for the Tories comes from. It’s shameful and bizarre that a publication that regularly prints the likes of Charles Richardson and Possum Comitatus can end up submitting such Barnaby Joyce-esque innumerate rubbish for an editorial.
What an odd comment?! Oz is different? here we call it preferences!
Our default Regime here in SA, didn’t get the majority of votes-yet there they are.
(In fact there are remarkable similarities. There are a fair few folks over there that were not able to vote. What a coincidence……….., that happened in SA, and we are still trying to do something about it).
ANGRA: totally agree.
SD: I agree, a likely L & LD coupling.