A terrible result for Britain. Five more years of blaming the poor for the selfishness of the rich. Five more years of driving sick and vulnerable people to suicide and starvation. Five more years of food banks. Five more years of in-work poverty. Five more years of a radical re-distribution of wealth from the masses to the wealthy.

Fuck everyone who voted Conservative. Fuck you all.

Democracy would be great if not for the people, eh Jamie?

The people!

The people, motivated by fear, by ignorance and by selfishness! The people, misled by the right-wing dominance of the press! The people, somehow blind to five years of lies and failure!

Gotta say I don't like it either. I feel for you, Jamie!

I thought this was a fair and balanced article
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21650113-despite-risk-europe-coalition-led-david-cameron-should-have-second-term-who

It's well written but its hardly impartial, Brankl. It openly states that the publication's starting point is a love of free market capitalism and a very limited state.

Jamie, why else would people vote, if not for their own interests? And although the tabloids have a right-wing bias, the broadcast media has a left-wing bias. I respect the right of citizens to vote the way they want to, even if I disagree. I'd warrant that I'm more put out by the result than you are, but that's democracy.

@Chumbles: Oh I don't know, maybe for the people's interests? Is the concept of voting for the party that you consider best for everyone so odd to you?

"Fair and balanced" is Fox News' tag line. I wonder if Brankl was being funny.

I understand why you want to vote for a person rather than a party. But you can do both!

Read up on Germany's system. They elect local representatives and also vote for a party, and extra members are added based on that to make it proportional.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation

In a world where most people don't know who their local MP/Congressperson is, and in places like the UK many seats are won by much less than 50% (i.e. the majority of people voted against them) it's very hard to make the case that FPTP really represents the local people, and even then is representing people's geography really more important than representing their views?

At the risk of getting involved, the problem with the German system is out produces many coalition governments which tend to be difficult to make work. I'm not sure Germanys system is the best. Just my humble (American) opinion

It* (not out; damn phone)

One of the few political systems that can handle something like that is the Mexican system, but they also have an independently chosen president who has quite a bit of power.

@Apathetec; right, coalition governments are tricky, but they can work if people are willing to be comparative, and "act like adults" in the words of Nick Clegg. And I think it's a small price to pay to include a larger number of views in the government, thus representing the people more.

Just from looking at the results maps, I have a question for the Britons.

It seems that in 2010, the Liberal Democrats did reasonably well in Scotland. But this time around, the SNP really took identity politics beyond the LibDem ideology and cleaned up. Were the LibDems really just a protest vote all along without much of a true constituency other than idealist ideologues?

That was an awesome, 80s-style labour rant, Jamie! Thank you!

See, I think the british system does represent the people better than if you just made it proportional based on party vote from the entire country (or even the mixed proportional representation). It seems to me that a person is better represented when his vote is 1 out of 100,000 (avg England constituency) in electing his representative than he is when is vote is one out of 64 million (uk population) in electing his rep. (or somewhere inbetween those numbers for the mixed proportion representation)

Adding in those extra members only serves to further dilute ones voting power. The smaller the constituency (or district) the more say the individual voter has. So it seems to me that the people are best represented by having this voting power in smaller constituencies rather than diluting it across the entire country.

So, the Tories got 39% of the vote and control of the government? Am I reading this right? What a sham

Right wing parties as a whole got less that 50%, whilst the parties openly opposed to austerity saw their share increase. And yet this country is about to lurch to the right.

Would you rather someone with a smaller percent of the vote control the government?

@apathetec; you're missing the point. It's not about the one MP. That one MP doesn't make the laws, the 650 MPs as a whole make the laws at Westminster. Their views are a more important and more distinct different than geography.

I can twist the issue in the other direction: in a FPTP system, only about 40-something percent of the people are represented, it's only in safe seats where the number of people who want that candidate is greater than those who don't want them.

But in a PR system representing the whole country, every major party gets a seat, so unless someone is supporting a very, very small party (that's most likely either redundant or extremist), they're getting represented! So instead of a 40% chance, it's more like a 99% chance of representation.

Of course, I'm twisting the issue myself, but I trust you get the picture.

I hate how a party with 36.9% of the vote gets about 50% of MPs while a party with 12.6% of the vote gets a small fraction of a percentage of the seats. Most of you hate UKIP and will thus write that off, so I'll give you this: the Green Party gets 3.8% of the vote and also just a small fraction of a percentage of seats. Even the Lib Dems got screwed: 7.9% of the vote but only a bit over a percentage of the seats.

Does the FPTP system have advantages? Yes. Does the PR system have flaws? Yes, but some of those are negated by a mixed member system, as in Germany. I think that the benefits are more important, of representing different people's different views.

In the US, we have two views. What are they? Ask me and it's statists with red ties and statists with blue ties. Ask a liberal (i.e. most people on the internet) and it's conservatives with red ties and conservatives with blue ties. Ask a conservative (i.e. most people here in the non-urban south) and it's liberals with red ties and liberals with blue ties. What we all can agree on is that very few of them represent us, the people. A more PR-ish system can have more views represented, and that would be a great thing, don't you think?

@ Thucy

I'm surprised you never commented on your hero Russell Brand's enthusiastic support of the Labour party.

Frankly I find all this post election whining by the political enthusiasts of the parties that failed to be a little pathetic. The Conservatives won a clear majority using our democratic system. Our democratic system won an even clearer majority when the people were asked if they wanted it changed afew years ago. The Tories clearly won using the system the people clearly wanted. You can't get much more democratic than that.

Do you remember the mass protests when hundreds of thousands marched through London to demand a change to PR? No, because they didn't bloody happen. We have the system the people want which gave power to the representatives people wanted. How anyone can call that a sham is beyond me

I don't think it's a sham, just a shame.

@steephie

Brilliantly put.

@Octavious

From me, this isn't whining by an enthusiast of a failed party. For one thing I'm not a resident nor citizen of the UK, although my interests in music and sports sometimes makes me look like one. I would probably support the Tories over Labour on account of their lower spending and presumably lower interest in political correctness. I might be erroneous on the latter, but the point remains: I'm not a Labour, LibDem, UKIP, or Green enthusiast merely exposing sour grapes. I'm staunchly anti-first-past-the-post, regardless of the country or how the last election went.

As xkcd's Black Hat put it, I don't have many principles, but I stick to them.

Why is it a shame? The people have got what they wanted. We have the best government for clearing up the economic damage and we will finally get that "we voted for a trading block" anti-EU argument off our backs. Despite the ridiculous scaremongering from the lefties the Conservatives will neither kill the NHS nor murder all the badgers.

@ Leinad

You're not really who I had in mind. You've been relatively solid in what you've been saying about the elections. But the fundamental point remains that the people were asked if they wanted first past the post and the ones who cared voted overwhelmingly in favour of it. Nobody was taken by surprise by the numbers of votes compared to the number of seats. No one had wool pulled over their eyes. There was no skulduggery of any kind. The people got what they wanted using the system they wanted.

I have to repeat: democracy has triumphed, the citizens of the UK have voted and, without corruption, suppression and with one of the most transparent of electoral processes in the world, the next government has been elected. I'm centre left, and so am not happy about the result, but I think trying to tinker with the rules is because you don't like the result is childish.

@Jamie
"A terrible result for Britain. Five more years of blaming the poor for the selfishness of the rich. Five more years of driving sick and vulnerable people to suicide and starvation. Five more years of food banks. Five more years of in-work poverty. Five more years of a radical re-distribution of wealth from the masses to the wealthy.

Fuck everyone who voted Conservative. Fuck you all. "

I agree with most of that Jamie, but not the last paragraph. Viagra is prohibitively expensive for such a priapic feat.

@ Octavious: "We have the best government for clearing up the economic damage"

Liar.

In 5 years George Osborne created more debt than every Labour chancellor in history, PUT TOGETHER. The UK's national debt GREW by over 25% in the last five years despite Osborne's rhetoric about "paying off our debts".