The 2021 Batley and Spen by-election which was held on the 1st of July, following the resignation of the previous Member of Parliament Tracy Brabin, who was elected Mayor of West Yorkshire (and became intelligible to sit as an MP, once again highlights the utter stupidity of the First Past The Post system.
There is in fact no post which the candidates must get past; which you would naturally assume as the name implies, that there would be some minimum standard. That simply isn't the case.
To wit, the results of the election are thus:
13,296 (35.2%) - Kim Leadbeater LAB
12,973 (34.3%) - Ryan Stephenson CON
8,264 (21.9%) - George Galloway WOR
3,245 (8.6%) - Everyone Else OTH
The fact that George Galloway is mounting a legal challenge to the result when under the current system he has zero chance of winning, indicates that given the opportunity, he would have voted for the Conservative candidate as a second choice. Herein lies the idiocy of the First Past The Post system. It isn't actually the first past the post who wins but merely the one with the most votes who wins.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,"
- Thomas Jefferson, Declaration Of Independence, 4th July 1776
I think that it is also self-evident that the United States which was created in the wake of this Declaration, which did not extend the franchise to men without property, all women, and lots of people on the basis of race, was not instituted upon deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed. Quite the opposite. It was conceived in liberty for a select few.
Nevertheless, the principle that governments should derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, is a good one; especially considering that the two biggest things which determine what a government is are the ability to write, administer, and enforce laws, and the monopoly on violence therein.
That might sound incredibly harsh but bear in mind that both Bodin and Hobbes arrived at this conclusion and Max Weber in his 1919 work "Politics As A Vocation" which was written in the aftermath of the First World War and kind of foreboding foreshadowing of the rise of the Soviets, the Fascists, and the Nazis, who would all exact violence in hideous ways.
His conception of the concept of the state itself is any entity which holds the exclusive right to use or authorise physical force against the residents within the geographical borders of a territory. That monopoly of force must always occur via a process of legitimation.
What does this have to do with the mechanics of elections? Elections for members of parliaments, who are the representatives of the people; who then take part in the process of writing and if in government the exercise of the administration and enforcement of laws, can only arrive at legitimacy through deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. My question is: how do you arrive at that consent if more than half the population did not vote for you?
The thing is though in Australia, we have compulsory preferential voting; which means to say that not only is every MP in Australia chosen by at least 50%+1 of the vote but because everyone is compulsorily asked what they think, then that consent is achieved, although perhaps begrudgingly.
People might make the case that there is a right not to vote but I would argue that all citizens who live within a country and choose to continue in the civic life of that country, owe their opinions of consent to that country. If they want to express that none of the candidates are good enough, then that should also be an option. However, if someone does not want to take part within the civic life of the country, then should be forced to leave.
In the case of Kim Leadbeater, 64.8% of the population did not vote for her. In the case of Ryan Stephenson 65.7% of the population did not vote for him. In the case of George Galloway 78.1% of the population did not vote for him. I would argue that none of these candidates actually have the consent of the governed.
If there had been preferential voting, then the people would have been asked to whom they would ultimately consent to as their Member of Parliament until someone did achieve at least 50%+1 of the vote. I think that it is fair to assume that 50%+1 is the bare minimum threshold of where consent actually lies, instead of the current system where the people have not been asked at all. Who you like best and who you will consent to are in fact different questions and the Most Votes Wins system fails to address this.
When the AV referendum was held in 2011, the argument made against the Alternative Vote (which is just another name for preferential voting) was mostly that implementing AV would be expensive, due to the necessity of installing electronic voting machines. Clearly that is idiotic dumbwittery on a massive scale because Australia uses paper ballots to conduct elections; which means that the actual paper looks identical to that used in the United Kingdom.
On the existing ballot papers, the instruction "Number the boxes from 1 to 16 in the order of your choice" is so simple that a ten year old child could follow it. I can only assume that the No to AV campaign thought that the average intelligence of the Great British public was less than that of ten year olds.
If they took this view, then that says to me that the people who are actually in charge of the United Kingdom, don't care about the consent of the governed and they certainly aren't interested in asking for that consent. Instead we get an MP whom almost two thirds of the electorate might despise. However, this is true for every election for the House of Commons.
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