Since reaching voting age I have voted in 15 general elections, starting in October 1959, and in one parliamentary by-election.  In not a single one did my chosen candidate win. In every case I was living in the constituency of a Tory safe seat. My vote and the votes of thousands of others counted for nothing.

2017 General Election

Take the 2017 general election.  In this Bromley and Chislehurst constituency a donkey could win the day provided its label is Tory.  Bob Neill again won with 25,175 votes, a majority of 9,590.  All he needed in order to win was 15,586, one more vote than the second place Labour candidate. Thus, it can be said that 9,589 of his votes were unnecessary; he would have won without them and so 9,589 people who voted for him were wasting their votes.  If we add together these unnecessary Tory votes and all the votes for the other parties it comes to over 31,000 voters in this constituency who made no difference to the result.  That is 66 per cent of those who voted.  Nation-wide, the Electoral Reform Society has calculated, there were over 22 million voters in this position:  They took the trouble to cast their votes, but made no difference to the outcome. conclusion.

Small wonder that so many people decide not to bother.  If you live in a safe seat, the outcome is usually a forgone

 

Proportional representation

Am I sincerely concerned for the 9,589 voters who thought they were helping Bob Neill to win, when in fact he had already got enough votes to be home and dry?  On the one hand these readers of the Daily Wail and the Daily Torygraph have no need of my sympathy. On the other hand, as a matter of principle, I consider that they should have had opportunity to reflect, by means of the franchise, more than their basic Tory-ism.  Like me, they deserve a more subtle system. For example, I voted Labour, but I would have liked to be able to reflect my wish that, if the Labour candidate did not win, then my second choice, the Green candidate should win. It is high time such a transferable vote system replaced the decrepit first-past-the-post (FPTP)system

 

Sir John Lubbock, a distinguished Chislehurst resident, saw all this back in the 19th century when there was not only more limited suffrage, but also a rigid two-party system, and visualized a more pluralist, democratic system.  In1884 he founded the Proportional Representation Society, which is now called the Electoral Reform Society. There are various forms of PR, giving smaller parties a chance and getting closer to a position in which every vote counts.

Shame on the British people that when they had the opportunity to replace first-past-the-post with an alternative voting system, in the 2011 referendum, they voted to stick with the present rotten system.