What is the process for voting for the Prime Minister? Do you get to cast a vote for the Prime Minister or is the Prime Minister selected based on what party has a majority in Parliament?
Voting procedures can be weird at times. For example, here in the US we don’t actually vote directly for the President. Instead we’re voting for an electoral college which in turn selects the President.
We don’t vote for the PM either, which is unfortunate because if we did we might have got rid of the warmongering b******!
You vote for the party candidate in the constituency where u live, and the party with the most constituency wins (seats) forms the Government, and the PM is the leader of that party.
Theres lots more about it here: www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/a591383
we vote for local member of parliament to represent us in parliament. The party with the majority wins. It’s a first past the post system. If we had proprtional representation the results today would be somewhat different. Labour have won a majority with the lowest share of the vote in history I think.
The Lib Dems have done well this year though…Hats off to them. Looks like a return to 3 party politics…Never a bad thing.
It’s a shame there isn’t an effective third political party in the US. You lot are in dire need of one.
Kit
Thanks for the civics lesson. I thought the PM was not directly elected but some of the news reports I was reading about the election made it sound like the PM was a directly elected position.
How are the constituencies determined. Is it by population so each constituency is approximately the same number of people? Or is it more by region such that rural constituencies would have fewer people compared to an urban constituency? Depending on how it’s done the system could be biased towards rural or urban areas. Politics in rural areas tends to be different than urban areas.
It’s by population, if you look at the political map you’ll see that constituencies in Scotland and Wales cover a much larger area where as in the more populated South of England there are more constituencies covering a smaller area.
One thing that annoys me in the British political system and I don’t know if this happens in other countries is that if an MP is fed up with their party and wants to change sides then they can go over to another party, to me this is wrong, if they want to change sides they should stand down and force a by election and if the party they defected to wants them to stand then fair enough.
we’ve recently had a ‘floor-crossing’ exercise in our parliament
i have to agree with u completely
i cannot fathom how it can be allowed, in a democracy, to walk away from the party-ticket u were elected on
and we have proportional representation
constituencies can also be chopped and changed by the party in power to try n consolidate their position
gerrymandering is another one of those things that kinda blurrs the line between the letter of- and the spirit of democracy
our british friends aren’t entirely forthcoming on the issue of the PM
as i have it (and please correct me if i’m wrong), the leader of the party that attains a majority in the election is asked (by that strange old lady they keep trundling out for special occasions so she can watch her son(s) divorce someone) if he wouldn’t absolutely mind whipping up a quick parliament
only if it’s not too much bother, obviously
it’s simply assumed that he’d pick himself as PM
(else he’s either an idiot, or honest, neither of which are characteristics they want in a PM
oh, wait…)
We’ve had a few congress members switch party while in office. Generally it’s something like a liberal Republican (the conservative party) going to the Democrat side (the liberal side) or a conservative Democrat switching over to the Republican side.
In those cases the elected person isn’t changing their views that they were elected on. They’re still the same person with the same views. They’re usually switching parties to express extreme displeasure with something their party did or to gain a good appointment with their new party or gain support for a major issue they feel deeply about.
I can see why some people wouldn’t like it if their representative switched sides. But if you elect a Republican who is almost a Democrat, or if you elect a Democrat who is almost a Republican then it’s something that could happen. If the change makes your representative more effective because he now sits on a better committee or gets some other perk then it could balance out in the eyes of some people.
I believe that it is possible to start a recall if a representative does something that really upsets a good number of voters.
What do people think about George Galloway? I like the fact that he’s started an anti-war party and got into parliament. I’m just not too sure about the way he’s gone about it. As much as I hate Neo-Labour, Oonah King (the Labour MP he unseated) was a very good local MP who did a lot for her constituency. Galloway seems to have exploited racial tensions in East London to serve his own agenda.
And poor old Kilroy…What a flop veritarse was hahahaha!!!
this made me chuckle:
Kit