No, still disagree. I support a move towards PR, but not your argument - it is flawed. Candidate A gets 25% of the votes, more than the rest. 75% of voters voted against him, but they didn't vote unified for anyone else either. Candidate B gets 19% of the votes, so 81% voted against him. The suggestion that we should move towards mediocrity is not one I support. I support AV because it is a move towards the better system and would eventually give the lib dems the power to get single transferable vote in place.

The power for a group of people to have an anyone but him vote as well as their vote is not a good justification for AV. First past the post does elect the favoured candidate of the region. However it does also waste the votes of others, the advantage of AV is that while the regional votes would be unrepresentative at times, the overall smoothing effect would lead to a more proportional govenment. It's a rubbish comprimise, as Nick Clegg was right to say - because it really is, but it would be an unstoppable move towards a decent system.

It's not really an argument, it's a mathematical fact: The least popular candidate can win.

To make the point clearer consider this slight adjustment: Candidate A is a Neo-Nazi that wants to declare war and commit genocide. Candidates B, C, D and E are all from fairly run of the mill parties ranging from left to right, but who disagree about parking fines, and who all vehemently appose party A. Even if 81% of the people did vote against B, most of them would still rather have B than A. Hence, the least popular candidate won, and a minority of Neo-Nazis have managed to oppose the will of majority, simply because the majority were split on the issue of parking fines.

If you think that's justified, then I'd point out that this is precisely why at every other level of democracy a majority rule is required to do anything (hence why we currently have a coalition).

No, it doesn't. That's the point. That's why we just had a referendum.

EDIT: The 'first past the post' refers to the election of MPs, not to which party actually has the majority in parliament.

Last time i was in Britain 2006 especially in London and well also outer areas i thought the Brtish people have been pretty much eradicated from the face of this earth. A huge crime by the well NON British government or they would not do a genocide against the British people. So who cares about the politics if the Brits have been physical exterminated ?

We've reached the hitler point - we're done.

Oh yeah, my bad. It's been a long day. :P

That's a very cheap shot. The point of using Neo-Nazis in the example was to demonstrate clearly how the spread of votes can fail to correlate with the opinions of the voters. I did not liken you or anybody else to Hitler.

If you want to end here then so be it.

I know, my point was that we're now just arguing our points, that we believe, we're not going to change views. We've heard it all, so this will just degenerate into "the hitler point" argument.

I apologise. It was a cheap shot. However I don't think there's any more to say.

For me personally, AV doesn't seem worth it.

It dos improve the standing of smaller parties.
However, most of the smaller parties that I have experienced are various flavours of nut-jobs. NOT people I want involved in runing the country.
By increasing the chances of smaller parties, it decreases the power of the larger parties, making hung parliaments more likely.
I'm more in favour of a strong majority government.
As it stands, there's basically conservative or labour.
These tend to counterbalance each other pretty well.
If the current gov makes a balls up of it, they will be replaced in a couple of years.
The 2 party system actually works well here.
The lib dems (& other minor parties) just give a veneer of wider democracy for the benefit of those that don't believe in the 2 party system.

That's a common mistake that people make. You don't have any more choice than we do, it's just that you've got more labels for the choices than we have.

If you look at our parties, sure we have two, but within them you see a lot more disagreement than you typically would see in a party under the parliamentary system. Ultimately you get a similar spread of ideas in terms of elected officials. I don't think that one can seriously consider people that run and have no chance at all of picking up a seat, we've got them here too.
That's part of the point. Minor parties are usually minor parties for a reason. Some systems like the one in the US mean that the minor parties get engulfed in a major party, but the policies that they advocate for tend not to be popular, hence why they aren't the major party.

It is nice to have a system where you've got at least some idea what you get based upon party affiliation, but at the end of the day, any system where you vote for a candidate and not party is going to result in politicians that don't tow the party line at times.

For me, that's a good thing and a major issue with true PR.
I don't want to vote for a party.
I want to vote for the guy I like &/or trust.
I don't want to vote for the next guy in the list.
I have no idea who he is, what he stands for, where he may toe or break the line, etc.
The only party that truly reflects my political affiliation is the Rodzaju party.
So I vote for the guy that gets closest, NOT the party that gets closest.It's much easier to get rid of an MP that breaks their word than a party that breaks it.

This is not a leading question, and simply of interest to me. What are you defining as a "parliamentary system" compared to what is in america?

To be honest, it's sort of complicated and I don't fully understand the difference in large part because there isn't really only one system that uses parliament.

But typically a parliamentary system will typically have features like a Prime Minister, the ability to have a no confidence vote and early elections, governments that frequently need to be formed rather than being the inevitable result of an election and probably the most interesting thing being the narrow selections of candidates in any particular party.

What gets complicated is that there's a lot of systems that use a basic parliamentary set up, I think they mostly follow from the system in place during the latter stages of the British Empire and tend to look a lot like that.

Of course. If there's only two legitimate choices professional politicians will have to choose one of the two that seems closest to them and work within them. But there IS a key difference. Voting expresses preferences for something more specific if there are more labels - and more manifestos. With more parties around - and a proportional system - voting becomes more of a public statement of what people want, rather than what they want to "keep out".In a two party system with a large variety of opinions within each party it is really unclear WHY the majority elected the one party over the other. I.e. in a PR system it becomes slightly harder for politicians and parties to ignore voter intent. If you have two parties and you agree with, say, 35% of it's candidates in the one, and 40% of the other, you still are voting for something you don't necessarily support; voting becomes an exercise not in choosing what you want, but tactically voting to make sure the "lesser of the two evils" wins. In a PR system that effect is limited a lot more. There is more of a chance to say this manifesto, in comparison to the [going by Germany, again] four others represents me most. Given that PR results in a proportionally filled parliament represent a cross-section of the population (those that voted) it is more of a vote on how the population wants society to evolve next. That, with the Green party, a broad social movement that started operating outside of party politics gained a representation [whether good or bad] among the party system is something you'll not see happen in a two party system. PR eliminates that need of voting tactically just to make sure the one party you don't want gets in power - even if you don't really agree with the other mainstream candidate either - but would agree with one of the candidates of a minority party.

I utterly disagree with your statement in reply to someone else that minority opinion is unimportant in a democratic system. What might be a minority opinion can very much be a legitimate concern; and, again as shown by the fact that new parties do manage to break through in a PR system can very well become a movement that a large part of the population actually agrees with, if offered the choice. The Green party just now, in the recent German elections, collected the majority of all votes in one federal state in Germany - starting out as a local minority voice in the 1980s.

It really comes down to what the purpose of a democratic system is; and in my opinion it HAS to be about representing voter will as clearly and as broadly as possible. You will not get that in a two party system. You will especially not get that in a FPTP system [in the local election here in the UK loads of parties didn't even bother selecting a candidate for some voting districts; in some cases people only had the choice between two candidates of the same party and nothing else.] THAT is very different in a PR system. There's no need to win the majority of the votes of a district for a party; where in a FPTP system it is easily possible that a candidate 70% plus didn't vote for ends up - unasked - as a represent for everyone within that district, in a PR system the political will of that districts voting population is represented [as long as you manage to gain a minimum percentage of votes [usually a base of between 3-10% of the votes across all the countries that use PR] more clearly.

Of course PR isn't perfect - but of the systems we have I consider it the one that is closest to the idea that democracies should represent the will of the people - all of them, rather than that of the biggest sub-section.