Re: Null and void
Sure, it's complex than can be captured in a short post, and I'm sure people would stop reading well before the end if we went into all the fine detail.
I think the essence is, though, that FPTP systems tend to lead to highly polarised 2-party systems, like we have in the UK, and in the US, where you end up with two camps that are so firmly opposed to each other that they can never meet in the middle-ground. PR tends to lead to coalitions, where you still have someone nominally in charge, but they do have to get the consent of their minor partners to get big changes through. In theory, in such a system, disasters like Johnson's ultra-hard brexit, which is only just starting to unwind, wouldn't get forced through so easily, as you wouldn't only have a single opposition party, which has to pick a single view-point and stick with it. Which is largely why Labour has been railroaded into the position of not having a position, which is useless for everyone.
In other words, in FPTP systems, you end up with the party that can get a slim majority taking all. In the case of the last election, this means a 70-seat majority for the Tories when they didn't even get 45% of the vote. They can then enact policies that the majority of the populus didn't actually want, or vote for, with impunity. The combination of the fixed-term parliament act, and the majority they have, means that they can then stay in power for at least 5 years, and can essentially call an election before then if they feel like public opinion is in their favour. Meanwhile, a sizeable portion of the public has no representation at all. If you support a minor party, like the Lib-Dems, Greens, or whatever Fartage's nationalists are calling themselves today you basically have no say, and populists can exploit this resentment in all these groups.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
