Proportional representation: it really isn't dull

Proportional representation is something that gets talked about so little that most of you won't have heard of it. But from the point of view of democracy it's really important.

It must be important, because half a million people just signed a petition to get the system changed, and it united voters from the far-right and far-left.

The reason that no-one talks about it though is because most people don't understand it: I remember sitting in quite a few politics lessons where people tried to explain the voting system that we have now -- "First past the post", and other types, which are largely proportional; I don't think any of them made sense.

One teacher used bags of crisps.

Seriously, you know things have got desperate when people try and explain politics using the medium of crisps. Oh wait, they did that for the last election

Susan smiled for the camera, but really she was crying inside

This might be dangerous, and stupid, but I'm going to try and give it a go, and explain why 'PR' is more democratic

Lets look at the seats won by each party, and the number of votes they got.

	Actual Seats	Votes	Vote share	‘Earned’ seats	Variance
Conservatives	331	11,334,520	36.9	240	+91
Labour	232	9,347,326	30.4	198	+34
SNP	56	1,454,436	4.7	31	+25
Lib Dems	8	2,415,888	7.9	51
DUP	8	184,260	0.6	4	+4
Sinn Fein	4	176,232	0.6	4	0
Plaid Cymru	3	181,694	0.6	4	-1
SDLP	3	99,809	0.3	2	+1
Ulster Unionists	2	114,935	0.4	3	-1
UKIP	1	3,881,129	12.6	82	-81
Green Party	1	1,157,613	3.8	25	-24

Okay, so the Conservatives got 11 million votes, that's more than Labour's 9 million, so that's why they got more seats. So far so good.

	Actual Seats	Votes	Vote share	‘Earned’ seats	Variance
Conservatives	331	11,334,520	36.9	240	+91
Labour	232	9,347,326	30.4	198	+34
SNP	56	1,454,436	4.7	31	+25
Lib Dems	8	2,415,888	7.9
DUP	8	184,260	0.6	4	+4
Sinn Fein	4	176,232	0.6	4	0
Plaid Cymru	3	181,694	0.6	4	-1
SDLP	3	99,809	0.3	2	+1
Ulster Unionists	2	114,935	0.4	3	-1
UKIP	1	3,881,129	12.6	82	-81
Green Party	1	1,157,613	3.8	25	-24

But hang on, the SNP only got one-and-a-half million votes, while the Lib Dems got two-and-a-half million. They got a million fewer votes, but they got 48 more seats. That's dodgy.

It's even more dodgy that the SNP got 55 more seats that UKIP, who got more than two million more votes.

Now take a look at the actual seats compared to how many seats each party earned: or how many they deserved based on the number of votes.

	Actual Seats	Votes	Vote share	‘Earned’ seats	Variance
Conservatives	331	11,334,520	36.9	240	+91
Labour	232	9,347,326	30.4	198	+34
SNP	56	1,454,436	4.7	31	+25
Lib Dems	8	2,415,888	7.9	51	-43
DUP	8	184,260	0.6	4	+4
Sinn Fein	4	176,232	0.6	4	0
Plaid Cymru	3	181,694	0.6	4	-1
SDLP	3	99,809	0.3	2	+1
Ulster Unionists	2	114,935	0.4	3	-1
UKIP	1	3,881,129	12.6	82	-81
Green Party	1	1,157,613	3.8	25	-24

The earned seats are based on how many votes each party got nationally, and you can see that the Conservatives earned just 240 seats, but they actually got 331 seats. Now why is that?

Simple, the voting system lets people get a seat in Parliament with less than half the people supporting them, and that benefits the big parties most because they can put a candidate in every one of the 650 constituencies.  Small parties, one's who regularly come second, are never represented fairly by the First Past the Post system, and never will be.

But why does it matter?

Well, it means that 7,751,259 people's views are unrepresented (more than 10% of the population)

…And that’s just the parties that got a seat, another 350,021 people voted for parties that didn’t get a seat, which is why if you add up the total of ‘earned seats’, you'll see that it's short of the 650 total.

More than 8 million people are voting but their vote means less than for supporters of the Conservatives, Labour, and the Scottish and Irish parties. 

Meanwhile, the Lib Dem, Green Party and UKIP supporters say...

Childhood: it's the happiest time of your life

For more details, check out the Electoral Reform Society website

Exam stress 

Exam season is upon us, and it would be irresponsible of me not to offer some advice to deal with exam stress.  Actually it's not my advice, it comes from various people across the world: check out these ideas.

Seriously though, exam stress comes about when people put too much pressure on themselves.

If there's one good piece of advice, it's this:

Election results

As they say on the telly, the results have been counted and verified and I can announce that the winner is...

Actually I don't want to talk about winners and losers, it seems crass, vulgar, cheap.

Instead I want to talk about other results, for example me feeling really, really tired is a result of the election. Hundreds of people across the county, and thousands of people across Britain will have been feeling tired over the weekend as a result of last week's election.

The reason being that an election can't take place without staff: there are the presiding officers and poll clerks, who sit in the polling stations for 15 hours (6am to 10pm) to make sure that the people have a chance to vote.  There are more than 40,000 polling stations across the country, so that's over 80,000 people who put in a really long day in the name of democracy.

Then there are the counters, who have to record every vote to make sure that the right person gets the job they're elected to.  I'm not sure how many counters there are, but there were a few hundred gathered in the Whitehaven Sports Centre from 10pm on Thursday until after 6pm on Friday, counting the Copeland votes. I know that there are 326 districts in England, there are another 73 constituencies in Scotland, 22 council areas in Wales and 18 constituencies in Northern Ireland.

That's 439 administrative centres, of varying types.  If each one of them employed just 150 counters (many of the larger ones could've needed more) that would be 65,850 people counting votes across the United Kingdom.  Many of them doing it into the early hours of Friday morning. Not Sunderland though. 

The point I want to make is that it takes a huge number of people, working very long hours to enable people to vote, and that's just one more reason why everyone eligible should take the opportunity to stand up and be counted.

And just for fun:

Which party are you?

For all those people who keep asking me which party I'm going to vote for, my answer is... it doesn't matter.  What matters is what party you would vote for if you had the choice.

Two quizzes here to give you an idea of which party you should vote for, one fairly easy, the other a bit more detailed. Take your time over the answers, and each time think about which one would make the world more like you want it to be.

But bear in mind, this only applies to the present election. By 2020, everyone might've changed their position on the best way to run the country.

The thing that most people seem to forget is that the election is about choosing the people you think would make Britain a better place for you to live in.  It is not about voting the way your parents do, or voting the way your parents don't  depending on how much you want to rebel.

Nor are elections some kind of beauty contest.  Just as well for some people...

 Of course, there are other options to following one party: you could always start your own. Remember: UKIP haven't been around that long really, nor the Greens, nor the Lib Dems really.

Here are the main parties, with their official year of creation.

Conservatives 1834
Labour 1900
Liberal Democrats 1988
Green Party 1990
UKIP 1993

Three of them are younger than me, and there are new parties coming along all the time; and there have been about 65 different party with at least one candidate in the House of Commons over the past 200+ years.

It doesn't really matter whether you join a mainstream party, a fringe party, or start your own.  What matters is that you get involved: the more involved the people, the more responsible our elected members have to be.

Oh, and you might want to avoid having a party in your house, it can get a little out of hand.