Thanks to the backward First-Past-The-Post voting system, Nigel Farage could obtain an absolute majority in Westminster with only a minority of British votes.
Labour would rather this than have to change the voting system. PR came up in the last party conference and they just said, "Naaaah".
Keep voting red vs blue everyone!
They and the Torys are inveterate gamblers who every couple of decades win a huge number of seats as Labour did at the last election and that hope that they can win big every time rather than playing the odds properly.
This is coupled with wanting to lock out smaller parties like the Lib Dems, but that doesn't really work for Tory adjacent parties like Reform when seat boundaries have been gerrymandered by the Tories to such a degree that a small shift in certain seats can win the election.
Could the monarch technically (I know they aren't typically involved in politics in recent generations) force a change? Is there any way to petition them to do so? I don't really know the UK system or if this would actually be a good idea.
The monarch has power to do a lot of things. In practice, that power would get removed the instant they deviated from the script.
I believe they has, but any act from the monarchy not instigated by the parliament would also be their last
The method by which the Crown assents to petitions is via signing bills which the elected government of the day and the House of Lords have voted to bring into law.
In theory, the Crown could refuse to do so, or attempt to bypass Parliament by issuing a royal decree. In practice they'd find such efforts ignored at best, more likely their constitutional role far further curtailed (thence leading to a rapid diminution of their ceremonial duties and privileges, if not outright abolition).
The situations under which the Crown could flex their power and have a reasonable chance of survival are extreme. Even here, they'd de facto be acting in tandem with the populace to defend against a coup and preserve (or restore) Parliament as the source of law within a representative democracy. Whether or not they'd do so in a very clear cut scenario is moot; in the dense fug of populism as a cover to usher in authoritarianism, absolutely not, let alone the drear realities of a clumsily formed electoral system chafing and fraying in a complex world. Against that, neglecting to intervene in defence of the realm from clear attack could also prove fatal to the Crown, albeit far less hazardous to the monarch themselves & their family, having greater opportunity to go into exile beforehand.
Either way, they'd have to be confident that a large majority of the Armed Services, Police and other key institutions, all members of which swear an oath of loyalty to the Crown, were up for obeying orders issued by the Crown against a hostile takeover of democratic institutions.
Whether as a temporary measure to defend the nation in an emergency, or any other cause including those which are malign, a monarch acting as a supreme leader would likely have to use a good deal of their personal wealth to fund their activities. In this they can quite easily outspend many actors.
Broadly, it may be more effective for the Crown or the monarch in their own right to discreetly support an array of resistance groups, than wield regnal power with overt grandeur in the face of grubby onslaught. Meantime... we all best be glad that is vanishingly unlikely that the current monarch or his heir would decide to avail of a severe crisis as an opportunity to seize absolute power.
As someone from a country with proportional voting, you should give it a try
But the babies need ventilators!
And our soldiers need helmets!
Y’know none of this would be necessary if we taught media literacy in the first place. You see- Ow!
Alright, alright, fine.
PR all the way for me.
I'm definitely all for PR, but hasn't FPTP hurt smaller parties like Reform/UKIP in the past? There was an election where UKIP received millions of votes but only secured a couple of seats. PR could potentially make it easier for parties like Reform to gain power.
Yes. One of the only benefits of FPTP is that for most of its history it has stopped tiny, insane, extreme, populist parties getting a foothold, and instead encouraged relative stability. For all the issues we have, the UK has been a phenomenally stable democracy over the years.
That is no longer a protection against Reform, as they've broken past the "not being popular enough to gain any traction under FPTP barrier".
Tbh I think actually it produces the opposite of stability. In the U.K. we get lurches from left to right every decade or so. In most places with PR that’s just not possible due to the necessity of coalition formation. Often these coalitions are in stalemate: the main criticism of PR is that it produces ineffective government. If anything, FPTP is too effective: it’s almost always fewer people voting for the government than not, yet they get absolute power.
And this, kids, is how they will replicate the Milei experiment in UK. We are going to enjoy homeschooling, healthcare bankruptcy, 3 jobs just to pay rent etc.
We should already start forming resistance networks in preparation for a fascist government.
So much for "FPTP keeps out extremists".
Unfortunately (in this case), if a party starts to get 30% of the popular vote or somewhere around that, it's going to start winning seats in FPTP elections.