Chris

What’s right about our voting system is that it requires local depth of support rather than breadth, as it relies entirely on persuading electors in generally quite small areas to vote for you in order to win a seat.

This generally prevents cranks from gaining undue influence by forming and winning representation for niche parties with limited policy platforms and incentivises the politically ambitious to pursue their interests through one of a limited number of ‘broad church’ parties (mostly Labour and Tory) where they may contribute to internal party debate but not dominate it. If you personally have to persuade people face to face to support you, you don’t as easily get away with being a fringe nutter.

In proportional systems there is less incentive for people to work within parties with broad appeal either on the left or the right. It is much easier to set up your own fringe group, knowing that no party will get an outright majority and whichever one is the largest is going to have to make concessions to your bonkers agenda in order to secure your support for theirs. If you think I’m overstating it, consider how much bat-crap the SNP/Scottish Greens coalition inflicted on Scotland. It produced an unworkable bottle deposit-return scheme that has cost a fortune to develop whilst never actually going live, it threatened to decimate the Scottish fishing industry by declaring no-go zones in waters depended upon by some of our most fragile fishing communities, and it fought - and lost - all the way to the Supreme Court *twice* because of its insane gender identity policies.