Thread by @syrpis

Yesterday I wrote a thread about people's increasingly fractured political preferences. I said that we were becoming less easy to please, and that this made it increasingly difficult for political parties to craft a message with broad appeal. 1/16

https://twitter.com/syrpis/status/1422117703020654594?s=20

The thread got a lot of very interesting responses, for which 🙏.

A lot of the responses, perhaps unsurprisingly, said that some form of proportional representation was the answer. 2/

I'm a big fan of PR. But if the problem is that political preferences are ever more fractured, I don't think that PR does anything more than move, rather than solve, the problem. 3/

Let's imagine (this might take some doing...) that the next GE has been won by Progressive Alliance parties, and that they have introduced a wonderful PR system for the following GE. 4/

The parties of the left are likely to realign in some way. Staying optimistic, let's say that they configure themselves so as to better match the fractured preferences of the people. 5/

The 'broad church' Labour party may no longer exist. Parties may emerge with different priorities on (eg) the environment, capitalism, UK/EU relations, etc etc. The whole process is likely to be fraught. 6/

And, let's say, that the Conservatives, as now, keep about 40% of the vote; but that, under the new system, that only gets them 40% of the seats in Parliament. 7/

The question is what happens next. 8/

Many seem to imagine that the new 'progressive' parties, who between them have 60% of the vote, will simply group together and form a Govt. 9/

The fact that they will have that opportunity (which they don't have under FPTP) is a strong - perhaps even overwhelming - reason to welcome a fairer voting system. 10/

But, while the individual parties may be able to fashion policies which, to return to my theme, appeal to people's fractured political preferences, many of those preferences (esp the 'niche ones') will - inevitably - not survive coalition negotiations. 11/

So we will be in a position in which *parties* will be able to represent fractured political preferences, but in which *a coalition Govt* in which those parties are represented will - inevitably - abandon (or shelve) some of those preferences. 12/

And that, as the LDs can testify, can lead very quickly to dissatisfaction from voters whose preferences have been abandoned. 13/

It also strikes me that we are asking a lot (too much?) of our politicians in this environment. The push for PR comes (in part) from a desire to have parties which better reflect our preferences, and therefore (in part) from our inability to moderate our preferences. 14/

Yet, while *we* don't seem to be prepared to compromise, we seem to expect that politicians, who have formed parties to reflect those preferences, will, post-GE, find compromises between rival 'progressive' positions. 15/

I'm afraid I don't see a solution which doesn't start with us all accepting that we won't get all of what we want, and that we need to compromise. 16/16