The Living Vote:
'...a most astutely written, astutely grounded, and impassioned new prose.' Exclusive Magazine
F2PTP-IND - a brand new system, not just a voting system
In 2015 I developed a brand-new voting system called F2PTP (First two past the post. It doesn’t sound too different, but my goodness it changes a lot. I had taken an interest in electoral reform over the previous couple of years and whilst thinking about it an idea struck me that I wanted to check out. However, I needed to do a considerable amount of work first so that I could overlay my system on real election results to see what happened. About three months later all the work had been done and I had the results.
It was very encouraging but there was one huge flaw. The same flaw that all more proportional systems have and that was it would lead to inevitable coalition government. It was still better than the system we have now FPTP, or any of the PR systems in use or proposed, or even in theory, but it would not have survived a referendum, because we Brits don’t like the idea of grubby coalitions.
It was good, but not good enough.
One fine morning in early 2022, I woke up with a thought.
A quite radical thought so I did a little work on it and realised it would work and it would enable my new voting system to be employed but it would no longer lead to coalition government, in fact, it seemed to be the perfect solution, so I wrote the book ‘The Living Vote’.
A good friend of mine helped me with the editing etc, and I submitted it to my publisher, a company that had published me before [The Sophisticated Alcoholic] in 2011. Publishers put new manuscripts out to readers who decide whether to publish or not, so there’s always a time when authors wait with bated breath to see the results of these critical readers. Will they publish or won’t they, will they want changes, is it really for them, will they crush it, as often happens.
As you might imagine, I then felt this might be something to try to get known and perhaps even make a difference.
The publishing process is slow, so about 15 months later the book was released on 29th September 2023, the Fairer Voting Party was registered on 13th December 2023 and all the things needed such as this website could then be started.
The book is the manifesto of the party. We have but one policy, to force the government into a referendum on the proposals in the book. This can be done only with the weight of votes. We do not need to win a seat in parliament, for if that were possible there would be less desire for reform. We need votes, perhaps in the next election just saving a deposit (5% of the vote) would begin the journey to standing in 400 constituencies and robbing huge numbers of votes from the established parties. When they see that coming, the government will call a referendum, because governments always win referendums, except when they don’t.
Forcing a referendum is but one part of the job. It is critical that the system, the book, the ideas become familiar to the ordinary voter. and this will take time. Perhaps, 10, 15, 20 years, but if we don’t start now, we’ll have the same dysfunctional parliament then as well.
