Election results

[shewhomust]

The North-East of England now has one Labour and two Brexit Party MEPs (formerly two Labour and one UKIP who left the party and declared himself Independent): the only sense in which this is not bad news is that it is not really news at all, but very much as predicted.

In theory proportional representation means that you get a better representation of the minority parties: it works better in the larger constituencies, where one of the six or seven people elected might well be from the party you voted for. Where there's a lower population, and only three MEPs, not so much. Yet the North-East of England is a large and diverse area. But then, Scotland only has 6 MEPs...

I don't know the solution to this. I handwashed my Icelandic knitted waistcoat, and used the two very ripe bananas to bake blueberry muffins.

Comments

[durham_rambler]

Northern Ireland has three MEPs as well, but they are elected by single transferable vote, not the d'Hondt party list system. I think this is a much fairer system when you have a lot of parties with different shades of opinion ("some shadier than the others - © Phil Ochs) as then, in this case, the remainers could have put LibDems / Greens / Change UK in a preferred order, with one picking up transfers from the other two at the end of the day. And presumably most UKIPers would have put the Brexit party as their second choice, boosting its share slightly. In this case, I think the NE Englad result would have been a three-way split between Brexit, Labour and (presumably) LibDems.

In Northern Ireland the end result was one each for DUP, Alliance and Sinn Fein, in that order. And the count took 12 hours, longer than in our Euro-constituency, but not impossibly long.

[shewhomust]

I'd prefer - obviously - a system that allows me to vote for a candidate, rather than a party.

This wouldn't overcome the problem that proportional But I think the problem remains that the more weight we give to people's preferences in choosing a representative, the less weight we give to local representation. There are ways round this, but they involve multiple lists / chambers.

Not making any assumptions about representative democracy, other than that it's the system we have...