My thoughts for the morning - why politics in Britain is broken - Part 1

I started this blog by noting down the topics I wanted to mention, but then got carried away by the politics section so decided to leave the rest as bare scraps. That's right, I don't write these things linearly! Or sometimes even legibly!

Scott Bradlee and Postmodern Jukebox - good band. check out.

Making Money as a hobby - new plan.

Sister Engaged - congratulations!

New Flat - I'm moving out!

2015 - Happy New Year!

Politics
If you have an uncontrollable yearning to be hated by the country, but can't bring yourself to take up the paedophile lifestyle, then you're best bet is to become a politician. I would say that I'm no expert on politics, but then you might think - well why should I care what you think then? - so I won't say it, or I might leave it until the end. So here it is, all my knowledge of politics, so you can have your own shot at trying to work out how it got to messed up!
First off, in this country we're a Democracy, which basically means 'the people' get to choose who's in charge. But wait! They only get to choose from a shortlist of a few people, usually one from each of the political parties. For quite a while now, the only two powerful political parties have been Labour and Conservatives, whilst the Liberal Democrats are a sort of 'third wheel'. Labour claims to be all for the rights of the working class, whilst the Conservatives claim to be there to protect the rights of the vulnerable super-rich. Oops I may have come across as a bit biased there, so I'll juice it up by replacing 'working class' with 'plebs'. Perfect. Moving on...
We have in this country a system called First Past the Post, which basically means whichever party gets the most votes in an election wins, and no-one else gets anything. So imagine if there are only two people running for an election, one from Labour and one from Conservative. If there are a hundred people voting and 51 of them vote for Labour and 49 vote for Conservative, then Labour would win. But...imagine if we threw a Liberal Democrat in there, and some of the voters voted for them instead. So let's say that 25 people votes Labour, 26 votes Lib Dem and 49 votes Conservative. Conservative would win, but more than half of the voters would be unhappy with this! On one level it's fair, as Conservatives were the most popular, but on another hand it's not, as it's not a fair representation of what the people want. In a general election, votes are generally split into one of three groups. Labour, Conservative, or Everyone Else (which includes the Liberal Democrats). So if you were one of the parties you are looking at victory in the polls even if only roughly 33% of the population votes for you! Ever wonder why so many people complain about politicians? It's because most people didn't even want the government in power!
Anyway this First Past the Post system is designed to give the winning party the legitimate powers a government needs, rather than needing to rely on what's known as a coalition government. Imagine in my example stated earlier, but where Labour and Lib Dems decided to fuse together and combine their powers/votes so they actually had 51% of the vote. Then they would be in charge instead of the Conservatives. But I was taught in college that people in this country don't like coalition governments as they are flimsy and rely on the two parties getting along. You typically get coalition governments in countries where they use a system called Proportional Representation (or PR). This basically means that - again using my example earlier - Labour would get no power with 26% of the vote under First Past The Post, but under PR they would receive exactly 26% of the power. It's much fairer as a system but we don't use it for +REASON NOT FOUND+

That's enough about politics for now. Next week I'll be showing you what you can do to become a politician and change the country for the better, and how this will never happen.
I've read a couple of other people's blogs recently and I've realised that my attention span is pretty short. By now I would be speed-scrolling to the bottom of the blog to see how much more there is to read, not because I'm bored but just because I'm deluded enough to think I have better things to be reading! Although in most circumstances facts are better than opinion, it's only a fool who disregards what other people are thinking (which is in itself an opinion so muddle round that if you will.

Until next time! Enjoy your day!