Background

The UK is entering into one of (if not the) most fractious, partisan and emotionally charged elections of my lifetime. We have a country that has been sliced and diced and I put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the far right and left of the political spectrum. Firstly we have Brexit. The referendum was called by a Prime Minister who, rather than deal with the far and extreme right of his party (which was split in half on the EU question), decided to offer them a national referendum.

This was a purely internal issue within his party. As the leader, he should have addressed this, taken a vote within his party. Ran on the platform that the party decided. And if the extreme right (now the ERG) were unhappy, they could have left and formed another party, or if they were happy and he wasn’t, he could leave and form another party. But then he wouldn’t be able to form a government, so instead he decided to get the whole country to deal with his internal party issue.

Now, this brings in my second most (before Brexit it was my most) passionate talking point. FPTP (First Past The Post). This is the voting system that we use in the UK, and it means that the person who has the most votes in a constituency wins the seat. Actually, CGP Grey explains it really well:

So, as you can see, because of our voting system it wasn’t in Cameron’s interest to deal with this internally. His party’s vote would have split and Labour would win. (By the way, if you want to see the rest of the videos – which are really informative – go to CGP Grey’s website.) So we got a referendum.