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: