Category Archives: Voting

The deadline for voter registration is extended for the EU Referendum

The deadline for voter registration is extended for the EU Referendum


What does the extension of the deadline for registration of voters onto the electoral roll in preparation for the EU Referendum tell us about the British Political Establishment? 


The first point to make is that the mere fact that they wanted to extend the deadline shows the extent to which the British Political Establishment is desperate about the increasing possibility that the overall UK vote will be for Brexit. They think that the people who have left it until the last minute to register are not the sort of people who will vote for Brexit – bear that optimistic point in mind! 


Less encouragingly the date for the deadline for registration is actually written into the electoral legislation and the fact that there could even be an Establishment fix, in which the law under which the election is conducted could be changed whilst the referendum is actually ongoing, is the most appalling indicator of just how far the British/EUish Establishment will go to the fix the outcome of this Referendum. 


What this means is that those of us who are in favour of Brexit really must be on our guard for an Establishment fix. For instance, we do need volunteers to go to the opening of the postal ballots and check that there are no shenanigans and that the boxes are then sealed and have remained sealed when the count begins. 


Even that does not offer a full guarantee, as was demonstrated by someone I knew at university who became a senior Labour Party activist. He was amused to tell me that on one occasion when the local party had selected a candidate who the central party thought was unsuitable. They had managed to get the election re-run. So he was sent to oversee the election with, as he put it:- “with two ballot boxes, one for people to vote in and the other with the right result in”! 


There is also another implication to be drawn from the sudden change in law. This is the very fact that there really is such a thing as a British Political Class which can and will collude where its interests are threatened. We saw this very clearly in the Scottish Independence Referendum where there were also shocking levels of misbehaviour and improper and undemocratic manipulation. 

One good example that came out at the time was this one I did a blog article. You can find the link here >>> http://robintilbrook.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/proof-of-media-collusion-at-heart-of.html


SHOULD WE HAVE PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION?

SHOULD WE HAVE PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION?

There are arguments put up by the, mostly self-interested, defenders of “first past the post”. First past the post is the current system for electing Members of the House of Commons, under which the candidate who gets the most votes wins the seat. These are not to be on the basis that it is a fair system, or even that it is a democratic system, but rather that it is the system of voting which has traditionally produced a strong government. This is said to be unlike many European countries which have proportional representation; Italy being the example often quoted.

There are increasing difficulties with this defence of first past the post. One is that it is not very historic. Before the Second World War there were often coalitions and, in any case, the current party alignment cannot sensibly be considered as going back before the re-establishment of the Conservative Party in 1922 over the issue of Irish Independence.

The defence also suffers from the difficulty that our Nation’s social conditions have now changed and a smaller proportion of the electorate is voting. Even during General Elections the results frequently show no more than about 60% turnout of the registered electorate. This is a registered electorate which probably only represents 80% of those who are eligible to be registered as electors.

Also the support for parties other than Labour and the Conservatives across Great Britain has been steadily increasing. This is not only in the striking cases of the nationalist votes in Scotland and Wales, but also in England.

Also the two main post-war Establishment parties, the Conservative and Labour Parties, have ceased in any meaningful way to be mass membership parties. In the late 1950’s the Conservatives had over 2½ million paid up members and Labour had nearly 2 million, whereas the Conservatives now have perhaps 100,000 paying members (if you allow for all their various concessions) and Labour may now have 150,000 paid up members. The Parties themselves are therefore no longer either representative of, or even in touch with significant strands of public opinion. Indeed both parties are now more representative of what the commentator and journalist Peter Oborn called the elitist “Political Class” rather than of any strand of democratic populism.

In these circumstances it is not perhaps surprising even if regrettable that the leaderships of both of these increasingly unrepresentative parties are anxious to hang on to the increasingly undemocratic first past the post.

To illustrate how undemocratic the system is, it is worth considering that Tony Blair won his last landslide majority in the House of Commons in 2005 with the votes of just 21.6% of the electorate.

David Cameron, despite the current unequal size of some constituencies favouring Labour, has won his parliamentary majority with the votes of just over 26% of the electorate.

It is therefore obvious that the “first past the post system” has a tendency to clothe the Establishment party with the votes of only about a quarter of the registered electorate with the parliamentary appearance of being a democratic majority.

Consider also in the recent General Election the numbers of votes required to elect a Liberal Democrat, a Green, SNP, UKIP, Conservative or Labour.

Here are the figures:-

Party 
Votes per seat 
Conservatives 
34,244 
Labour 
40,290 
SNP 
25,972 
Lib Dem 
301,986 
DUP 
23,032 
Sinn Ffein 
44,058 
Plaid Cymru 
60,564 
SDLP 
33,269 
UUP 
57,467 
Ukip 
3,881,129 
Green 
1,157,613 

This is a voting system whose democratic credentials are increasingly threadbare.

It is in these circumstances that parties like the English Democrats, and, indeed, all of those who care for the health of our county’s democracy and for the ideal that the political system should deliver policies which are in accordance with the majority of our Nation, are calling for proportional representation.

There are a variety of systems of proportional representation, the details of which could easily run to the contents of a full (and tedious) text book. Suffice to say that almost all of them deliver results which would be much more representative of the political will of the People of our Nation. As most European political systems show, when not tested to destruction by EU idiocies, (such as poor suffering Greece), proportional representation produces reasonably stable governments which are a better reflection of their country’s national will than our current electoral system.

Robin Tilbrook

Chairman

English Democrats

Is There A Simple Way To Choose Between Voting Systems?

The fact that there are so many voting systems in use around the world implies that the choice of system is more likely to rest on cultural values and context rather than on some scientifically developed, or socially accepted, theory.

Read more on Is There A Simple Way To Choose Between Voting Systems?…

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The Low, Low Standards Of The “NO” To AV Campaign

For democracy to be seen to done in an election the candidate chosen must get more than 50% of the vote. If this does not happen you get the situation that we in the UK are familiar with. Candidates and governments are elected with less, sometimes much less than half of the votes cast. To get around this the French use the “run-off” system in their Presidential elections. In this, if the leading candidate does not have more than 50% of the vote, the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated and the voters are called back to vote again. This continues until one candidate gets more than half the votes. Such a system ensures that a minority President, or government, cannot be elected. It is democratic and it is fair. But, with its multiple rounds of voting, it is arduous and time consuming.

Read more on The Low, Low Standards Of The “NO” To AV Campaign…

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Why I Can’t Vote

Got you! Now I wouldn’t want you to think that this is some form of political protest on my part. No! The reason why I can’t vote is they won’t let me.

I have lived in England for nearly 36 years and I am married to an Englishman. I have worked and paid tax for nearly 25 years. My big problem is that I am not an English subject. In order to become one I need to take a ‘Test of Britishness” (I took at cost of £35- and fortunately passed 1st time) and then pay nearly £700 and complete a massive form to allow me to participate in a citizenship ceremony thus allowing me to apply for a passport, (£140) and then I can vote.

England has a special relationship with America but it is not that special. When I came to live in England as a young bride I was making my home and future here. I am ethnically English and can trace my ancestry to well before the Act of Union in 1707. Living in England felt right. I loved tea and cricket.

I didn’t really give it much more thought than that. I was busy bringing up three sons and working as a teacher; first in leafy suburbs and then in a tough ‘inner city’ school. I even did voluntary work when I was a young Mum working in Community Health as a Chair and then moving on to Chairing a Strategic Health Authority Ethics Committee. I did my bit to contribute. (and still do)

As I became interested in local issues I was sure that as a tax-paying resident I would be allowed to vote. No way! However if I had been Irish then it would have been no problem. Explain that to me please?

The irony is that if I had married a Frenchman and/or lived in France I could have had my passport immediately. I could even have had my identity altered to make me completely French. And of course as a taxpayer and resident I would have been eligible for a vote. (even if I was not French!) Great to see that our Gallic neighbours understand the rights of people living in a democracy.

So although I won’t be voting at the General Election in May it won’t be because I don’t want to but because narrow minded politicians give citizenship to anyone who can pay and fail to understand the maxim: No Taxation Without Representation! Seems to me that was an issue before; haven’t they learned anything in 200+ years?

So I feel very upset that

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