Reply to: Why don't the Tories support electoral reform/PR?

[The Wikir Man]

Cameron was talking to the Lib Dems weeks before polling day, as soon as Clegg did well in the first debate.

Linky?

[Doggy Styles]

If the UK had a proportional representation system, then there would be a greater chance of coalition governments rather than the mess we're going through at the moment - mainly because the parties would know what to expect and know that they would need to compromise. Cameron went into the campaign still expecting a clear and decisive victory, so had no need to consider a compromise (until he actually needed to compromise).

If this is a mess, we'd get a mess every election. It's what all countries with PR go through.

Cameron was talking to the Lib Dems weeks before polling day, as soon as Clegg did well in the first debate.

[The Wikir Man]

With PR the BNP would have 14 seats...

1.9% of the vote => 12.35 seats.

Whether you agree with the politics, the way forward to to educate and persuade people rather than to ignore their views. You only have to see what happens to BNP councillors after one term - once the people that voted for them realize what they are actually like, they turn their backs on them. Plus, they wouldn't be able to claim that they were being ignored by the fundamentally racist FPTP system that we have in place...

To be honest, the fact that UKIP would have 20 seats I find more disturbing.

[The Wikir Man]

Plus Sinn Fein may hold the balance....

Sinn Fein have already said that they refuse to take their seats in the House of Commons. Ulster Unionists held the balance of power from December 1996 to the 1997 election after Major lost his majority.

If the UK had a proportional representation system, then there would be a greater chance of coalition governments rather than the mess we're going through at the moment - mainly because the parties would know what to expect and know that they would need to compromise. Cameron went into the campaign still expecting a clear and decisive victory, so had no need to consider a compromise (until he actually needed to compromise).

[NickFitz]

Common lookups would be useful in business/accounting/technical forums. As a trite example, HMRC and IR35. Can you get content packs for technical terms like USB/ADSL?
Does the forum allow it to have different content in different boards.. then in general SKA could be included or other user-nominated CUK insider terms.

It seems it's a global thing that can't be applied differently to different forums

Not sure what the expansion of IR35 would be - "Eye Are Thirty-Five" perhaps?

I agree that it could have some value if applied correctly, but it will take some time to come up with a suitable list.

Also, it does the acronym expansion on every occurrence - best practise is only to do it on the first occurrence per page, but that isn't configurable and there's little point hacking third-party code when it'll just be de-hacked on the next security update.

[d000hg]

Common lookups would be useful in business/accounting/technical forums. As a trite example, HMRC and IR35. Can you get content packs for technical terms like USB/ADSL?
Does the forum allow it to have different content in different boards.. then in general SKA could be included or other user-nominated CUK insider terms.

[AtW]

(unlike SKA, CUK is not yet self-aware)

And it never will be.

[NickFitz]

Why is PR being underlined? Is this some forum feature?

I've just been digging into that. The vBSEO plugin, which confers such worthwhile improvements as having URLs that read /general/55863-why-dont-tories-support-electoral-reform-page-ranking-2.html rather than something like /viewtopic.php?fid=2&tid=55863&p=2, appears to have gained an acronym expansion utility: if you look at the markup, you'll see that PR has been automagically converted to <acronym title="Page Ranking">PR</acronym>. Browsers then use this to provide a tooltip which gives the meaning of the acronym. (This is something browsers have been able to do for years - I think it came in around the IE4/NN4 era.)

This is a good thing in many contexts, as it improves the overall semantics of the document and has accessibility and SEO benefits. However, being a company that sells SEO software, the only acronyms they've pre-defined are "SEO" (Search Engine Optimisation) and "PR" (Page Ranking, derived from the name of one of Google's algorithms).

I'm in two minds about automatic acronym expansion: although it may well be that a post in Technical uses PR to mean PageRank, over here in General it's more likely to mean either Public Relations or Proportional Representation. As the algorithm is based on straightforward pattern-matching and replacement, there's no way it could determine from the context which to use (unlike SKA, CUK is not yet self-aware), so ultimately it fails in its goal of improving the semantics of the document by actually corrupting the meaning. It's also corrupted the URL for this thread

I reckon it should either be turned off, or some effort put into determining a set of commonly-used acronyms that are deserving of expansion and unlikely to be used to mean something else. Whether such effort is worthwhile is for admin to decide, methinks.

[NotAllThere]

If you hold your cursor over PR, it changes to a question mark, and then a tip pops up saying "Page Ranking". I assume this is configurable.

As you were.

[AtW]

Quite a few MPs this time got voted out on who they were rather than the party they stood for due to the expenses scandal.

Nowhere near enough got voted out - Labour got sensational result in my view, which is more than 0!

[SueEllen]

I think both the Cons and Labs can safely offer the Libs a referrendum on PR because at the moment the mood of the public would be to overwhelmingly vote against it, fearing hung parliments and centre left coallitions for ever and a day.

True if they said to the general public you have a choice of:
1. PR like the European parliaments
2. Preferential voting system like London Mayoral elections
3. FPTP

Then people would tend to vote against the first choice. It's not only fearing hung parliaments and coalitions its also the fact that people can't identify with their MP with PR.

Quite a few MPs this time got voted out on who they were rather than the party they stood for due to the expenses scandal.

Plus I spoke to some Tory activists in different parts of the SE who made it clear they wouldn't help in a PR system as a lot of the work they do is due to the type of person the particular candidate is.

[centurian]

yes, and 14 times as much influence as they have now. 14*0%=0%

According to votes cast, the BNP came 5th in the election, ahead of the Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru and all the NI parties.

[VectraMan]

With PR the BNP would have 14 seats...

I've never understood the "it'll let the extermists in" argument. If the BNP get enough of the share of the vote nationally, then perhaps they ought to have some MPs. It doesn't mean they're going to be in government.

I think both the Cons and Labs can safely offer the Libs a referrendum on PR because at the moment the mood of the public would be to overwhelmingly vote against it, fearing hung parliments and centre left coallitions for ever and a day.

[Mich the Tester]

With PR the BNP would have 14 seats...

yes, and 14 times as much influence as they have now. 14*0%=0%

[scooterscot]

With PR the BNP would have 14 seats...