PR

Imagine that you had a group of friends and you liked to go out to eat together once a week. And let's say that you all like Mexican, Indian, Chinese, etc to varying degrees. You might negotiate each week - "Oh, come on! We haven't had Thai for ages" - or you might even introduce a system to make it fair. Perhaps even involving a spreadsheet. What you would be unlikely to do would be put the two people who were passionate about nouvelle cuisine in charge of deciding *every* week. 

Bear with me.

In the last election, looking at the main parties:

Conservatives: 11,334,576 votes and 331 seats
Labour: 9,347,304 and 232 seats
SNP: 1,454,436 and 56 seats
LibDems: 2,415,862 and 8 seats
Greens:  1,157,613 and 1 seat
UKIP: 3,881,099 and 1 seat

So, that's 630 seats (20 went to other parties) and just under 30 million votes cast. That's about 47,619 votes per seat.

Taking a different method of allocating seats, where each of those parties gets a seat for every 47,619 votes they received, the results would have been:

Conservatives: 238 seats
Labour: 196 seats
SNP: 30 seats
LibDems: 50 seats
Greens:  24 seats
UKIP: 81 seats

Let me say before I go any further, I wouldn't relish UKIP having 81 seats but on the other hand, if they had, at least the government might have done something about infrastructure - houses, hospitals, schools, transport - in areas of high immigration.

But I don't need to explain proportional representation to you. It's the method by which we don't all have to go our for nouvelle cuisine every week when we really fancy the occasional curry. 

And if we had PR, I think a lot more people might vote Green, for example, knowing that their vote would count.

I mention all this because this is the photo I took in Kendal, today, wandering around while Abi was at the fair with her friends. It's LibDems vs Conservatives in this constituency. If you vote Green or Labour, your vote counts for nothing, simple as that. How is that democratic?

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