Purple Protest Demands Fair Votes
Peter Marshall | 17.05.2010 08:59 | Social Struggles
Democracy
The Bar Chart
See Us Hear Us Count Us
Dave & Nick. What a Joke!
George Monbiot speaking
Purple ribbon for Parliament
The petition
The rally there was one of a dozen or so in towns and cities across the UK, in a movement that has sprung up rapidly through the Internet, using Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and other social networking sites, but has also attracted the backing of existing electoral campaigning groups such as the Electoral Reform Society, Unlock Democracy (incorporating Charter 88), 38 Degrees and Power2010.
Speakers from these and other organisations, politicians including MEP Jean Lambert and Martin Linton, former Labour MP for Battersea, radical comedian Mark Thomas, environmentalist George Monbiot and others from the Take Back Parliament movement all spoke to considerable applause from the crowd.
Crowd and speakers were united in finding the current proposals for a referendum on an alternative vote system failed to go far enough - and felt that they represented more an attempt to defuse the issue than to deal with it
At the end of the rally the crowd walked across the road and tied purple ribbons on the fence in front of the House of Commons before continuing to Downing St where the Take Back Parliament petition was taken into No 10, and the rally dispersed quietly.
To many mainstream commentators and politicians, the idea of a mass demonstration in favour of proportional representation came as an utter shock - and some continue to deride it as just a few extremists who have no popular support. Seeing it close to, both online and in person, they may well have completely misjudged the public mood. This really could be the start of a large and growing popular movement that in the longer term politicians will be unable to ignore. Proportional representation for the UK parliament may be an idea whose time has come.
A similar report, with more pictures, is on Demotix:
http://www.demotix.com/news/331196/purple-protest-demands-fair-votes More pictures on My London Diary
http://mylondondiary.co.uk/2010/05/may.htm#takeback in a few days.
Peter Marshall
e-mail:
petermarshall@cix.co.uk
Homepage:
http://mylondondiary.co.uk
Comments
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Important for voting reformers to understand
17.05.2010 11:25
In other words, the voting system influences into what size groups and inot how many groups we divide.
We must also take into account that some of us have firm ideas about THAT question, ideologies that say how we SHOULD divide. Need to be very careful when we define "fair" ("fairer") in terms of THAT preferred set of divisions since distinctly unfair to do that. Please, I am not saying by this being WRONG to have a preferred set of divisions, not saying wrong that these are the only fights worth fighting. Just that "fairer" refers to considering the matter of voting in the vacuum of "ignorance" as to how the society will divide and what the issues will be.
* For example, the reason that you have two main large parties with sometimes a third trying to displace one of these is a consequence of "first past the post" vote counting. Had you instead a dozen small parties the vote counting method would provide a strong incentive for some of those to somehow put aside their differences so that they could merge and win. For a contrary example, were the system proportional representation with small threshold there is nothing to keep parties from splitting over minor differences of ideology and personality clashes among the leaders and so fragments into a large number of parties just safely above the threshold.
MDN