That's nothing more than the trappings of democracy; it's fool's gold and like a mug, you think it's good.
With the List System, candidates are selected by the party. Those at the top of the list are pretty much guaranteed to be elected. They need have no contact with the public at all and cannot realistically be gotten rid of.
Once elected, MEPs can then *completely* ignore the public until next time.
I could say the same, with rather more reason, about you every time you vote for a UK election.
Blind man: I can't see the sun, therefore it doesn't exist! Again you demonstrate complete ignorance of how the system actually works.
The system must be a form of proportional representation, under either the party list or Single Transferable Vote system. The electoral area may be subdivided if this will not generally affect the proportional nature of the voting system. Any election threshold on the national level must not exceed five per cent."
So the choice of PR is up to national governments, and if you didn't want a list system to be used for the UK when we were still members, you could have written to both your MP and MEP to apply pressure to get it changed to STV, which I grant is a better system.
Though actually the system that was used at the last UK MEP elections is described here, and again your description of it doesn't match the reality:
2019 European Elections: How does the voting system work?Blind man: I can't see the sun, therefore it doesn't exist! Again you demonstrate complete ignorance of how the system actually works.
From the same link above:
"Length of service
The European Parliament has a high turnover of members compared to some national parliaments. For instance, after the 2004 elections, the majority of elected members had not been members in the prior parliamentary session, though that could largely be put down to the recent enlargement. Hans-Gert Pöttering served the longest continuous term from the first elections in 1979 until 2014."
I can only suggest that you spend some time learning about a subject before shooting your mouth off about it. As someone whose name sadly escapes me, American I think, once so aptly said: "It is better to keep your mouth shut and let everyone think you're a fool, than to open it and remove all shadow of doubt!"
TimS wrote on 5/11/2021 12:46 am:
Gee, that sound just like any elected Parliament that I've heard of!!
Might that have been Mark Twain, perhaps?? Sounds about right!
The salient point is that the MEPs have no power whatsoever to change anything. They are neither the originators nor the passers of policy. They are in effect an 'upper house' a senate, a house of lords, who can at best stop legislation if they can be bothered to read it or attend parliament. Most do not. It is a purely ceremonial position. In the EU, the power is with the commissioners and the various Presidents none of who undergo popular election. Like every other communist state a Party of bureacrats controls everything, the elections are just for show, and nothing ever changes in response to popular demand. Lobbyists from multinational corporations dictate policy. The people are there to buy their product and shut up.
There was in the end only one democratic vote that an EU nation could have, and Britain took it.
Britain will now be destroyed for daring to.
Assisted by Zombie Joe.
Any parliament where its MPs are elected via a list system, yes. With FPTP you can vote an individual out. And of course, with the EU parliament, there are no by-elections. If someone dies or resigns, the next one on the list gets the nod automatically. How's that for democracy!
Spot on! - I just looked it up: thought you were probably right but it is also something Stephen Leacock might have said. This one of his seems about right for here and now:
"American politicians do anything for money... English politicians take the money and won't do anything."
FPTP needs to be replaced but the only sensible option is Single Transferable Vote if no candidate has a majority then the lowest candidate is removed & their votes added to the 2nd choice candidate of each voter - repeat as necessary (it may need a 3rd choice etc depending on the number of candidates).
No, it doesn't need replacing at all. Anyway we had a vote on this 10 years ago, no dice.
No, it doesn't.
It always - nearly always gives a clear working majority to a single party. People who say it isn't 'fair' have a childish view of democracy. It isn't there to 'represent the people' it is there to be able to sack the executive without a (civil) war.
The disaster that no overall parliamentary majority becomes with 'proportional representation' is illustrated by a minority party with perhaps only 10% of the popular vote becoming an indispensable coalition partner and having more influence on government than Carrie Symonds.
Unlike with the EU where the executive isn't sackable within the meaning of the Act. Indeed, in the case of its president, we don't even know why or how she was selected, by what process, and whether there were any other candidates.
I'm just re-reading my copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer. He has a lot to say about how the Weimar Republic's stability was not helped by its PR system of selecting deputies - lots of small single-issue parties.
The oldest version I know is Latin, so probably a couple thousand years old:
“O si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.”Literally translated:
“Oh, if you had stayed silent, you would have remained a philosopher.”
Hmm! Here in Australia, we call that "First Past The Post"!
Dana Mon, 20 Dec 2021 23:29:16 +1100, Daniel65 snipped-for-privacy@eternal-september.org napis'o:
And "FPTP" is acronim for...? :)
There is the Big Brother system:
You get in by random selection, jury rules - one shot per lifetime, you can get voted out by petition or you leave when your term expires or you get convicted of a crime. Your leaving bonus depends entirely on how long you last. Oh and lying to the public while in office is treated as perjury.
In a recent election here (Ireland) some seats (the last ones to be filled in the constituency) got to the ninth iteration of that process before a majority was found - essentially it became a process of selecting the least unpopular candidate for the last position (or two) since all the popular candidates already had seats.
This is perhaps a reason to avoid multiple seats per constituency rather than STV.
When are you going to stop lying about the EU???!!!
This is how the EU actually works, either read and understand it, or don't bother and stop speaking out of your arse about things that you can't be arsed to understand:
Like most countries, Britain does most of its trade with its nearest geographical neighbours, and as our nearest geographical neighbours are in the EU, it never made any sense at all for us to leave, the only reason we did so being the prevalence of bigoted and shameless liars like you. If you don't like what is happening to the country now, blame yourself, because you've lied about the EU for decades, voted to leave it, and thereby voted to make this country poorer, so you have directly contributed to the shit we're in, so stop moaning and shut the f*ck up.
The Scottish Parliament is elected via a list system:
Note that without the extra PR list seats, the SNP would have had an overwhelming majority of 51, but with the PR list seats, they are one short of a majority and consequently have to compromise with others to get legislation through. No-one in Scotland seems to be complaining about this, not even the SNP.
In fact in Scotland, there are two PR systems in use:
1) Local Council elections use Single Transferable Vote where voters rank candidates in order of preference. This is the Electoral Reform Society's preferred option. 2) MSPs are elected via a different system, the Additional Member System, aka Mixed Member Proportional, aka a list system. See below.The simple fact is that both the systems in use in Scotland produce more representative results than FPTP, even the second being easily more representative:
A way of measuring the proportionality of electoral outcomes is via the Deviation from Proportionality (DV) Index. The DV Index is calculated by adding up the difference between each party’s vote share and their seat share in each electoral area and dividing by two, giving a ‘total deviation’ score. The higher the score, the more disproportionate the result.
Westminster election results in recent years were in the 20s (2015: 24,
2010: 22.7, 2005: 20.7), the Scottish parliament has never had a result worse than 12.1."The EU system of government is if anything *MORE* representative than the UK national system, rather than less.
And look how the shit has hit the fan since. We need to reform the UK system of government to make it more representative of the people as a whole.
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