Now wonder my memory seems to be going – history is being re-written…

Incidentally, and what sparked this post off, is that “Bounty” have recently rebranded in the UK as “Plenty” – but watching US adverts (such as those currently on the Discovery US Mythbuster’s site) shows they are still using Bounty as the name in other markets… Interesting

So, what would the General Election look like under PR? Would we still have a Hung Parliament? Well, I’ve taken the data from the BBC’s General Election website and calculated how many seats each party would get under a very very simplified Proportional Representation system. It’s very simplified as I’ve just pooled the votes nationwide and then worked out the percentage: under “real world” situations each constituency would join others to make a large one and then pool on that level.

Well, the table is in the “Read More” section of the post – but what conclusions can I draw?

• We would still have a Hung Parliament
• The Conservatives would actually lose 71 MPs compared to now (from 306 to 235), and Labour would lose 69 (257 to 189)
• The Liberal Democrats would actually gain 93 seats to go from 57 to 150 (so it’s understandable why they like PR)
• The Green party would increase their single seat to 6 seats (a gain of 5)
• Unfortunately, “right wing” parties such as the BNP would go from no seats to 12 and the UK Independence Party would also go from no seats to 20
• The Conservatives could only form a majority government with the help from the Liberal Democrats with 150 MPs: all the remaining parties only have 76 seats spare – Conservatives would need 91 seats
• Labour could only form a majority government with the help from the Liberal Democrats with 150 MPs: Labour need 137 seats to go over the 326 majority threshold

So, in realistic terms, not much would be different to the current situation – EXCEPT (and this is the most important part in my eyes), the mixture of MPs will more accurately represent the voting intentions (and wishes) of the electorate. I might not agree with them, but if that’s what 5% of the voting public want then perhaps we should have some.

Proportional representation may actually lead to more coalition governments in the future – after all Germany “the powerhouse of Europe” has a coalition government, but Greece and Iceland (both who have had major major financial difficulties recently) have majority governments…

Anyway, here’s the data:

Download as OpenOffice Spreadsheet or Excel Spreadsheet

Why is there a difference in seats? There are 650 constituencies – each returning a single MP. However, “Thirsk and Malton” will not run their election until the 27th but I’ve “assumed” that their votes won’t make much of a difference (plus if I worked on just 649 seats, then the “seats under PR” column wouldn’t add up to 649 due to rounding: I’m not sure what you would do if a party gain 0.25 of a seat…)

How right am I? Well, we’ll find out in a few days time…

PLUS
“Vogue” by Madonna
and “Never gonna give you up” by Rick Astley

• United Kingdom
• England
• Wales
• Scotland
• Northern Ireland
• UK
• Great Britain

WTF? I could understand if it listed England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland separately (as technically they are different countries), but to list them AND “United Kingdom”, “UK” (is there a difference between those two?) and “Great Britain” just got me confused. I live and work in London, England, in Great Britain part of the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” commonly shortened to just “United Kingdom” or “UK”. So which should I pick….

Current prisons are overcrowded (“two to a cell designed for one”, “doubled up in cells…113% of capacity” with Ministers admitting prisons are overcrowded), and whilst I do believe Prisoners should be punished – this does not mean depriving them of their human rights (note that access the television, computers, gym equipment etc are not human rights!). Therefore more prisons do, unfortunately, need to be built.

My response to comments on Votematch: UKIP did say that they “would double prison places” and Liberal Democrats said “[we] will make prison work to turn people away from a life of crime; We will take steps to stabilise the prison population in the short term and reduce it in the long term”: but did not state that they would ease overcrowding for people that should definitely be in prison (I’m talking the “serious” crimes such as murder here)

And here’s my thoughts:

The United Kingdom is in a very privileged position of being one of the Founding members of NATO (28 member states), one of the Original members of the UN (192 member states), a member state of the European Union (27 member states), a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (15 member states), the current head of the Commonwealth of Nations (54 member states), member of the G8 (8 member states), G20 (20 member states), OECD (30 member states) and WTO (153 member states). To put our privileged position into context, the USA appears on the members list of 7 of the 9, China 4 of the 9 and Germany 7 of the 9 – so we certainly have a lot of “friends”: and that’s ignoring the 1958 US/UK mutual defence agreement!.

The possibility of us actually needing nuclear weapons is therefore quite low (especially “mutually assured destruction” being a good reason for nuclear weapons to never again be used) . We currently maintain 160 operational warheads and whilst I am not asking for us to scrap all the nuclear weapons, we should seriously look at reducing the numbers: perhaps to half or less.

If we were a “lone state” which only had to rely on our own defence capabilities and we were a large land mass with lots of enemies, then it may be possible to justify a larger number – but we aren’t. If you attack us, then between 7 and 191 other countries may declare war on you! Just ten nuclear warheads per country, and that’s between 80 and 1,910 that could still be pointing at you. The Trident nuclear submarine missiles will cost around £15-20billion to replace with £1.5billion per year running costs.

A common statement I have heard is that we need our own nuclear weapons to protect against “rogue states” (whatever that definition is!), but having our own large expensive (not just to build but to maintain and service) reserves would not help us in any way. If “Psycho X” got in charge of “Rogue State Y”‘s nuclear arsenal, what good would us having our own be? “Oh – he won’t fire at us as we’ll nuke him to oblivion” won’t be much of a deterrent as he probably doesn’t care (and might see it as a form of martyrship). In fact, if we DO have a large reserve of nuclear weapons, then we might actually stand a larger chance of being targeted by “Psycho X” as he pose a big threat to him and hence should be eliminated before we realise what a threat he is (the UK/US track record with “perceived threats” and actions we take was established with the Iraqi war).

My response to comments on Votematch: UKIP said “[we] would insist on having 4 ballistic submarines” (note this is currently the number of “Trident” submarines we currently have!) and the Liberal Democrats said “There is no longer a major nuclear threat to the United Kingdom. We favour global multilateral nuclear disarmament, so we would put Britain’s nuclear deterrent on the table in arms reduction talks.”. As stated, I wouldn’t go for total disarmament, but just a reduction.