Sanjay Jagatsingh
It’s not because they want more women in parliament. Legislation can be passed within our current first-past-the-post (FPTP) system to have female politicians represent at least one-third of the candidates. It’s not to remove the obligation for candidates to categorise themselves into one of the four groups of the best loser system (BLS) either as we just need to chop this section off our constitution to do that. Besides the BLS is not subsumable. It’s not to specifically correct the big imbalances that were generated in four of the last 11 general elections because these can be handled in a way that doesn’t take away any of the huge benefits of the FPTP. Plus we need to remember that three of the four lopsided results collapsed before 21 months.
So what’s the reason for a dose of PR and increasing the size of a parliament that voters across party lines already find way too big? Easy. To create a class of MPs that’s a lot more difficult to remove in a general election as shown in the chart above.
Make sure your MP knows you don’t want this.