Far from being jokers, these small parties command a very substantial percentage of the vote. That percentage would be even higher under a PR system, as demonstrated by UKIP coming second last year, beating both Labour and the Liberal Democrats in a national election.

The only reason that they are losing their deposits rather than winning MPs is that their support is geographically spread out. If it was all focused in 10-20 constituencies, all of the smaller parties would have 10-20 MPs.

As for ‘attention seeking platforms’, yes there are some, but don’t confuse that with the real alternative viewpoints offered by these smaller parties, especially in an era where the big three are increasingly looking and sounding the same. In fact, they are so close on policy in so many areas now, that the Lib Dems and Conservatives feel comfortable governing in coalition. We may soon be dependent upon the smaller parties to offer any kind of opposition to things like ‘green’ taxes.

It sounds very much like you are saying that the smaller parties shouldn’t have MPs just because you don’t like them. As a democrat, I really can’t agree with that viewpoint. I believe that if a party gains the votes, they deserve the representation. More importantly, the voters deserve the representation. The fact that over 900,000 people voted for UKIP but they still don’t have an MP is an absolute scandal.

You call them ‘fringe’ parties, but that is only the case because they don’t have the MPs that their votes support. Under a PR system, their votes would be somewhat higher too.

If the Tories and Labour are incapable of securing 100% of the vote between them then they don’t deserve 100% of the MPs. The age of two party politics is over and the public want more choice.

At the moment the Tories and Labour combined command just 65.1% of the popular vote, but have 86.9% of the MPs. That can’t be right.

That would be a radical shift in the way the British parliamentary system works. We are having a hard enough time convincing the establishment that PR is both viable and desirable; the odds of us having an elected President in Britain in the foreseeable future are slim to none. I have seen very little support for the idea at the moment, but certainly the fact that Brown was an unelected Prime Minister highlighted the inadequacies of the existing system.

We would still need a fair system to elect the MPs even with an elected President, so the need to find the best possible system remains.

Paper candidates are generally used by smaller parties to make up the numbers in the absence of a proper candidate for the area. They don’t campaign, they don’t attend hustings and they don’t have any chance of being elected. Generally speaking these people are selected as candidates unopposed because they are the only people willing to put their names forward. Hence they are often of very low quality because no one actually expects anything from them.

Susan :

Anthony – I probably could have been considered to be a paper candidate but I did campaign, I did turn up to hustings and I did achieve nearly 8k in votes and move the party into second place…. I am not low quality!

Er.. you sound like a normal candidate to me! Turning up to hustings and campaigning pretty much disqualifies you from being a paper candidate.

It wouldn’t directly change the votes, no, but voting patterns would change significantly.

Firstly, many constituencies only have a limited choice. My constituency, for example, only had candidates from the big three parties and UKIP. Had I wanted to vote for the Greens or the English Democrats I couldn’t at the moment. Hence the national percentage of the vote is limited by the number of candidates standing and many people never get to vote for their favoured party. Because Regional Top-Up allows us to vote for a party even without a local candidate we would have had a much greater range of options.

On top of that, the FPTP system encourages tactical voting because of the two-horse-race issue. Only the Lib Dems had any chance of challenging the Tories here, and I know at least one Labour supporter who switched his vote to the Lib Dems. Tactical voting happens up and down the country on a large scale. Under RTU or other PR systems, there would be no need for that because all of the votes are counted either locally or regionally. Hence people would be much more likely to vote for their party of choice.

There are also substantial numbers of people who won’t vote because they don’t feel that their vote counts. Is there any point in walking to a polling station if your favoured party has no chance of being elected? If every vote counted, turn-out would increase slightly too, also altering the voting numbers for the smaller parties.

We may also see an opposing effect of people being less likely to vote for the smaller parties as a protest vote. For example, it is believed that many people vote BNP to make a point about immigration levels. It is pretty safe to vote for small parties in the knowledge that it will make no difference at the moment. However, if it looked likely that they might actually be elected, some of those people might switch their votes to a party they considered more suited to Government.