The whole point of democratic elections is to allow for a peaceful transfer of power—without violence—when a government embodying one type of policy has become widely unpopular.
The problem we've gotten into in the UK (and also the USA) is that extremists have seized control of one of the regular incumbent parties, and the other parties have responded perversely by moving towards them. Removing the ability for a course change after an election.
Labour or Tories, they're still neoliberals.
@cstross It's a shame you don't have preferential voting.
You'd still likely end up with two major parties, but it is safe for people to express their true preferences without wasting their vote. So it becomes obvious if the left-ish party isn't left enough for the electorate, or vice versa for the right.
@jamesh Yes, I think the defeat of AV in the 2011 referendum was perhaps an even worse setback for the UK than the Brexit vote. Not least because under AV it seems to me that both Labour and Conservative parties might have split over Brexit leading to more forceful remain campaigning.
Also, with more parliamentary parties, and so more coalitions, there'd be more of a culture of negotiation rather than the current culture of screaming at each other then taking a vote and whoever wins just saying sucks for you to the losers. This might have served to make the actual Brexit negotiations after the referendum less of a shambles.
@edavies @cstross preferential voting alone won't necessarily increase minor party representation or encourage coalitions.
Here in Australia, The Greens received 12% of the vote but only won 4 out of 151 lower house seats. Single member electorates inflate the influence of the major parties. That only really changes when you also have multi-member electorates.
@jamesh I don't disagree that multi-member seats are better (which we have in the Scottish Parliament, though with some odd quirks).
But, even with single-member seats preferential voting will reduce the need for and power of parties to apply so much discipline and also reduce the penalty for parties splitting.
The Tories got such a large majority of seats in the last UK general election because they got more votes than each of Labour, Lib Dems, Greens, etc, individually in quite a few constituencies but nothing like an overall majority of votes. It seems likely more Lib Dems would put Labour as their second preference and vice-versa so in a preferential voting system maybe a Labour or Lib Dem candidate would have won in quite a few of those seats.
The Lib Dems are, at least in part, a split from Labour via the short-lived SDP.
But, yeah, a simple change of voting system keeping single-member constituencies wouldn't immediately bring a change of culture but it would have opened the way to further voting reform and longer-term culture change.
Charlie Stross
James Henstridge
Ed Davies