Well, this is interesting isn’t it, we have a hung parliament in the UK, who’d have thought it?
So, we have a possibility for change from a two party sytem to a system of Proportional Representation. Now, I personally am a fan of P.R., I feel it will enable the political system to better represent the voting public.
The British two party system is a throwback to a previous era of politics in Britain, when there were only two main parties and no credible third. Of course, that’s no longer the case, so the system as it stands is not fit for purpose.
Proportional Representation will iron out one glaring issue with our current system which is that a party with 26% of the vote (the Liberal Democrats) only got less then 13% of the seats in the Commons, that’s hardly fair play. It would also make it harder to have one party take the country to war on a conviction, or wreck the economy with nobody in a position to stop them. Yes Messrs Blair and Brown, I’m looking at you two.
While we have a two party system, we swing between extremes; with P.R. we settle into something nearer the middle way, I think that’s better for everyone.
I think the two-party system is proving its limitations here in the US, where the two are at constant loggerheads and nothing gets done at the governmental level. Unfortunately, the third party prospects are hardly enlightened over here; they range from Libertarian (which is hard to distinguish from anarchism: no-government) to Tea Party, which is largely Libertarian anyway, so far as I can tell. What we need is a good “socialist” party on the left wing–as though that would ever happen! “Socialism” is, of course, a dirty word over here, but much misunderstood. Tea-Partiers are certainly happy enough to get their Social Security checks. “Progressive” is the latest polite was of saying what socialism means.