UK ‘coalition’ deals are reportedly deadlocked over the issue of PR. For the Liberal Democrats, it’s a (near) red-line issue; for the Tories, it’s something they’re totally against, because they currently have the most to lose if the UK dropped a first-past-the-post voting system.

I think the Tories should nonetheless embrace PR, and here’s why. This would secure, without doubt, Liberal Democrat backing (under contract), enabling a working majority for the following term. The Conservatives would get through the majority of what they want, with minor concessions to the Liberal Democrats regarding certain budgetary and taxation issues. If (and I realise this is a big ‘if’) everything worked well, Labour would be sidelined and the Tory vote-share would rise, because it would be seen to have not only been the party that put things right, but also a ‘progressive’ party regarding electoral reform.

Should the Con/Lib coalition survive until 2015, the Tories would grab a larger vote share, and may even have a small chance of a majority under PR. Worst-case scenario: by that point, the Con/Lib coalition is seen as a success, the Lib-Dems are largely happy, and the coalition continues, with the Conservative Party’s biggest opposition, Labour, sidelined.

With the BBC reporting that Nick Clegg is considering David Cameron’s offer to more or less implement Tory policy for no benefits, it’s depressing that some people in the UK still don’t fully understand what’s going on (typical response: “The Tories won so why aren’t they in power?”), why we need electoral reform, and why the Tories are so utterly desperate to retain our broken first-past-the-post system.

The reason is shown in the above image, available on my Flickr page, with this version being in big-o-vision. Because the UK’s 650 Commons seats are all ‘winner takes all’, bigger parties have more seats than they would under a proportional system. In fact, in an election where the Tories got 34% of every seat’s vote and Labour and the Lib-Dems got 33%, the Tories would have every single seat in the Commons, meaning 66% of votes would be entirely wasted.

That might sound crazy, but the election in 2005 wasn’t a million miles away from this, giving Labour a working majority with barely over a third of the vote. Today, we have a hung parliament, with the Tories narrowly missing out on a majority, despite only getting 36.1% of the vote. They claim this gives them a mandate to govern, due to being the biggest party. That entirely ignores the fact that 63.9% of voters clearly don’t want them in power, and that a majority of the UK would in theory accept a Lab/Lib coalition, since that takes into account 52% of the vote.

If we had a proportional system, the Tories would have as few as 235 seats, and Labour would be down 70. The Lib-Dems would jump from 57 to the 140s, and the SNP and Greens would also benefit. This would be a fairer system, since the Commons would represent the votes cast. However, this is also why the Tories won’t budge: they know they’d have almost no chance in the short-term of ever returning a majority.

The downside to the system? UKIP would grab 20 seats and the BNP 12. However, in a democracy should we deny representation to those we don’t consider desirable (or, for that matter, the likes of the BNP a chance to show how truly awful they are, meaning they’d likely get no seats next time round)? If so, why not stop beating around the bush and ban every British political party apart from the Conservatives and Labour?

Ah, Telegraph, you loveable bunch of xenophobic racists, you’ve outdone yourselves with your latest ‘evil foreigns’ rant. In ‘What has Iceland done for Britain?‘, Georgia Graham spits on suitability from a great height (along with accuracy and an ability to write something that’s actually funny, instead preferring ‘bitchy’), slagging off a nation suffering from a natural disaster, where the wellbeing of thousands of people is threatened by a volcano.

In case you missed it, I’ll mention that last bit again: Iceland is suffering from a natural disaster, where the wellbeing of thousands of people is threatened by a volcano. You might not have noticed this, because, clearly, the fact our planes can’t fly anywhere is far more important than the wellfare of people who actually live near an active (and currently very angry) volcano.

I fully admit to not reading the Telegraph often, but I’m pretty certain that after the earthquake in Haiti you didn’t decide to spew out 700 words of garbage, insults and inaccuracies about the country. Nor, as I recall, did you follow up any atrocities in Ireland by ripping into the Irish by rattling off ‘What have the Irish done for Britain?’ and making stupid jokes about potatoes. To that end, the fact you’ve seen fit to do this regarding Iceland is insulting and inappropriate, but, hey, at least I now know where your editorial standards lie: face-down in the gutter, throwing up last night’s Pimm’s.

If ever there was any doubt that the British electoral system is broken, a new set of figures from the BBC in its article Election 2010: Gordon Brown to claim race ‘wide open’ proves the point. Because the electoral system is a first-past-the-post ‘all or nothing’ affair, smaller parties often have no representation at all in the House of Commons, but larger parties get far more seats than the popular vote suggests they should.

With Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg faring well in the first Prime ministerial debate, his party has shot up in snap polls, overtaking Labour. It’s pretty unlikely that this will be the case come election day, but the YouGov poll from the aforementioned BBC article makes for fascinating reading when the percentages are applied to seats in the House of Commons:

1. Convervatives: 33% vote share, 245 seats (38%)

2. Liberal Democrats: 30% vote share, 100 seats (15%)

3. Labour: 28% vote share, 276 seats (42%)

It’s absurd that the party third in the popular vote would not only be the biggest party in the Commons, but that it could have almost three times as many seats as a party that came in second.