I don't understand people who want to defend Apple in this case. UK is a functioning democracy, and why would you want to put a (foreign) company above that? If you want change, you know the route ...
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None of that sounds like democracy to me.
we vote for a local MP to represent our constituency in the house of commons. first one past the threshold wins and represents our area in the house of commons.
each MP gets one vote. one vote in the house of commons for each constituency.
so yes. this is possible. because it’s not about total votes — it’s about representing the individual local areas and the people within those areas.
labour won a landslide of “areas”. that’s how our system works.
just because it doesn’t match what you think democracy should look like doesn’t mean it isn’t democratic. it’s just different.
plenty of criticisms exist about our system (esp house of lords). we even tried to have a referendum on first past the post about two decades ago. i voted for AV. but oh well.
I don't consider FPTP to be democratic, because it disenfranches large swathes of the population and means that you can rule the country with a massive majority despite only getting 34% of the vote.
The first-past-the-post election tends to produce a small number of major parties, perhaps just two, a principle known in political science as Duverger's Law. Smaller parties are trampled in first-past-the-post elections.
>let alone government
The idea that everyone is entitled to have his preferred local candidate become a minister of the Crown is truly absurd.
>artificial consensus ... Managed democracy ... arbitrary
I don't know what this means.
There is nothing non-representative about FPP. It has nothing to do with parties. It is a non-party-based system. There is no a priori reason why it is "more democratic" for the proportions of seats in Parliament when split by parti to correspond to the proportions of votes for candidates from those parties. You can declare that you define "democraticness" to be a measure of the extent to which that is true, but there is no logical reason for them to correspond and no good argument that they should.
It is assumed as axiomatically good and you work backwards from there. Party-proportionality is democracy, therefore list-based proportional representation is more democratic. Well only if you redefine "democratic" first to mean "proportional", which isn't what anyone understood it to mean in the past and isn't the way the term is commonly used in any other context.
FPTP has more flaws than other systems and almost inevitably leads to less representation in democracies by promoting two party blocs that barely differ over successive election iterations. It's a political form of Hotelling's Law coupled with discrete dynamics.
As has happened to the USofA despite a strong opposition to party politics by the founders and crafters of the current system who failed a few centuries back to understand the dynamics of a scheme that didn't scale well.
FPP prioritises local representation and majoritarian results: if constituencies are arranged properly, then swings in voter sentiment are amplified. Relatively small changes in voter satisfaction can produce hundred seat majorities at Westminster. That is on purpose. It is part of why governments are accountable.
If you compare it to Germany, where there is enormous dissatisfaction with the government, they held an election, and mostly the same parties will be in government again, because of coalition politics.
The alternative to Germany is the situation here in New Zealand. Culturally still two main parties, but instead of voter sentiment deciding which of them wins, instead it is the choice of a minor kingmaker party that can pick a winner based on who gives it the most concessions. That is arguably better, but still not a good situation compared to a simple majoritarian system. We had one of those. The country was better-run under FPP than under MMP.
Westminster proves quite wrong the common claim that the system encourages two parties, by the way. The main parties have a lesser percentage of votes between them than they have ever had. It is just not true that two parties inevitably dominate.