First Pass the Post causes cancer

Over on Lib Dem Voice Mat Smith argues two points.  The first is that coalition governments have to compromise on the promises they made before an election, a point I agree with.  He then goes on to argue that Lib Dems have to be "mature" and accept a that coalition means "One must no longer think about pledges, promises....". 

I think that this is one of the most fundamental reasons why all people who believe that a party should stick to its promises or be accountable if they do not should vote against AV.  Those in favour of proportional representation (in any of its many guises) blame FPTP for almost all ills whilst ignoring the elephant in the room about political accountability.

The other point that Mat makes is that First Pass the Post (FPTP) was directly responsible for the MPs' expenses scandal.  What tosh!

Mat's claims that because we have had the same party for 13 years MPs scammed their expense, conveniently ignoring the fact that PR would have given us a centre left coalition since 1992.  Blaming FPTP for everything is lazy and meaningless, we have seen a massive increase in cancer rates over the last few hundred years that FPTP has operated, are we claiming that they are related too?

As I have said before, PR is a different electoral system but not inherently better.