Hey Blog! Goodness, finally all that election malarky is over and we can get back to the “new normal” (i.e. the new government). Covid phrase, I know. Ah, the (good?) old days! But the problem is I can’t choose who steps in at Number 10, as I’m only 14. But there is some good-ish news at the end, so keep reading.
If you live in another country, or on another planet (hiya alien readers!) you probably haven’t had an election today. You might well have had/are going to have one this year, as there are a lot of countries deciding who should lead them currently. However, if you don’t know much you may be wondering why we even need all this speeches, campaigning, over-four-pieces-of-paper-from-one-party-in-one-day-through-the-door, and what the fuss is about which person gets let in through the ministerial front door. Well, it all started back in Greece with a few pieces of pottery and a bunch of male citizens of a city called Athens (or at least, that was the first major democracy).
Athens decided that every adult male who was of local lineage and a free man (in short, a ‘citizen’) should have a say in what the country did. Whenever a decision, from minor ones like who owned which field, to major ones like should they attack Sparta (they did), needed making, all citizens would decide what to do by putting a piece of pottery in a particular pot. These pots were then counted out, and the pot with the more pottery shards in would be the pot of the decision which was made. Bingo – the first ballot, ballot box, and direct democracy! The idea spread to other parts of the ancient world, including Rome: before the emperors, the Roman Republic was a type of democracy, but not identical to Greece. This seems a good point to explain how Roman democracy was different. You may have heard the terms “plebian” and “patrician”. The plebs were the common people, the patricians were the wealthy ones. A system of checks and balances made sure that while the Consuls who the patricians in the Senate elected could make new laws, the Senate had to pass them, and Tribunes from the plebians could veto anything from above. The most important difference between Greece and Rome was the former, a ‘direct democracy’ was ruled by all the eligible citizens, whereas Rome was a form of ‘representative democracy’, where chosen people made the decisions, but the general population chose those people – complicated, eh?
The current British parliament is slightly different again. Citizens choose representatives, who campaign for seats in parliament. Most (not all) representatives and wannabe representatives (candidates) belong to parties, who are groups of people broadly in the same area on the political spectrum and who support each other (mostly). Some parties are large – e.g. in the election just passed, Labour won a whopping 2/3 of the seats available; and some are small – last parliamentary term, the Greens had only 1 representative in parliament. Independents are candidates who do not support and are not backed by any party, and the Speaker of the House (the person who all Members of Parliament address and who chairs debates) is a post kept strictly apart from any party so the Speaker does not favour any party more than others. The party with the most seats in the House becomes Government; the next largest the Opposition. The leader of the Government becomes Prime Minister, the Head of Government, as opposed to the King who is the Head of State. The two offices once used to be the same, but over time democracy reduced the powers of the monarch even as the power of the people went up.
One interesting thing to note about the UK is that it has a ‘first past the post’ system, or a plurality; where the person with the greatest number of votes wins the seat. This is true even if it is 1 more than the next highest, and you don’t need over 50% of the vote. Majority systems are where winning candidates must get over 50% to win, or else the candidate with the lowest number of votes is knocked out (metaphorically!) before going on to the next round. There is yet another kind of representation – proportional representation (PR), where the share of votes is exactly shared with the number of seats as a whole. This both makes sense and doesn’t at the same time – it would be difficult to achieve, but would prevent a result where a party with a low vote share can win most of the seats due to other parties squabbling (example: one party has 32%, another has 27%, a third has 26% and one has 15% – the 32% wins 100% power in plurality, but only 32% of power in PR). This is what just happened with Labour taking over – even though it got a smaller vote share than it did when it when it lost the election a decade ago, it has taken nearly 2/3 of the seats and been called a “landslide” win. This is a result of the system.
Who would I have voted for? Well, that’s a secret. Ballots are designed to be secret, so that no one need know who you voted for unless you tell someone. But judging how the country has been run for the last few years… The good news is that unless a snap election is called before February 2028, I will have a say in the next one. Which does unfortunately make me kind of responsible for whichever leader becomes PM – unfortunately that is if it’s a bad one! Still, I have four more years to think about who I’ll be voting for – or to decide if I want to stand as a candidate! Watch out in years to come, and don’t forget to vote for meeeeeee!