this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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14 parties in parliament is not at all bad going.
If the UK had PR the country would never have a stable enough Government to be able to do any kind of internally consistent planning or policy. Having a government that has the ability to take executive actions and pass legislation is kind of important, otherwise you get into a mess of every individual bill getting co-opted and twisted by wildly different competing interests, all of whom are required to get it over the line. The Cabinet would become functionally useless, since none of the Transport, Education, Health etc secretaries would have the power to enact anything.
The one time in recent history that we did have a hung parliament, the Lib Dems' participation in it was considered a massive betrayal that killed their support for a whole decade. This is what we'd be forced into every time under PR. (EDIT: oh wait I forgot the DUP, which was an even bigger shitshow of a tiny bunch of hatemongers suddenly arbitrarily getting to punch above their weight, ironically very undemocratically)
The system is working as designed, and it was designed to prefer stability over representation.
It's also misleading to suggest PR wouldn't also result in "mathematically majority of the country is going to end up with an unwanted prime minister", since it's always going to be the case regardless; the best you can do is some mathematical jiggery-pokery to force people to choose between two candidates they didn't want in the first place, so you can turn around and say hey look you got who you voted for. Now which country does that remind us of?