Democracy - whats the point?

I spoke to a mate of mine the other day and asked him who he voted for in the European elections a few weeks ago. "I don't vote" was his defiant response, as if it was his way of protesting that he believed it didn't make any difference who he voted for.

It's quite sad that in Great Britain only 50% of the population - plus or minus 10% - can be bothered to vote; be it European elections, local elections or even general elections. In the recent European elections it was approximately 40% and in the last general election it was approximately 60%.

Taking the general election as an example: over 20 million people didn't vote.

Why?

Disillusionment?
Protest?
Main parties all have the same policies?
Assumption that Labour would get a majority anyway?

Personally I believe, like my friend said, it's because people feel their vote doesn't really count. What difference will it make to them? Will their lives improve, degrade or stay the same? When the Government says it's pumping money into something, who notices? Who benefits?

I've been thinking about this over these past few weeks as the misdemeanours of various MPs have become apparent thanks to the Telegraph and it's struck me that in the UK we really don't have a proper democracy in the true sense that the people have the power.

Does every vote count in a general election? The answer is it doesn't, due to the First Past the Post system. Let me give a quick example.

In a constituency of 24,001 people, 12001 people vote Labour and 12000 vote Conservative. Labour wins, the Conservative votes are discarded. Now, assume that the first 12001 people that went to the ballot box all ticked Labour candidates. At this point, it really doesn't matter who the other 12000 people vote for because Labour has already won. Therefore it can be said that their votes did not count.

Yes, this can work to the advantage of any party and you could say where one party gains in one place another gains in another place, so it's swings and roundabouts. It's still not a truly democratic and fair system though, because it can be manipulated. If there are two constituencies next to each other whereby one is traditionally weak and one is strong in terms of a party's domination of the vote, parties can orchestrate some voters from the strong constituency to vote in the weak one.

For the past 12 years we've been in a position where Labour, who got only 3% more of the total vote share than the Conservatives in the 2005 general election, have had a huge majority in the House of Commons and therefore you can say that all the other parties and all the other votes were irrelevant.

The result of first past the post is that representation in the House of Commons does not reflect the actual vote. You could have come second or third in the overall vote share yet still end up dominating the House of Commons because you won more constituencies.

I don't believe it's a great system, I don't believe it promotes democracy and lately with Labour's domination in the House of Commons it has given the Prime Minister an almost presidential role, though Mr Brown is falling from this pedestal quite rapidly (if he ever really climbed on to it in the first place).

So what do we need to sort it out?

Michael Jackson coming back from the dead to sing us all into the sunlight?

Kim Jong Il to nuke us into oblivion?

The other popular alternative to first past the post is proportional representation which shares the seats in the House of Commons proportionally to the number of votes for each party.

This means that every vote counts so radical parties, racist parties, one-policy parties and lots of independents will get seats there, and the domination of the big two parties will be lessened.

It sounds good on paper, but in practise it means that anything passing through the House of Commons would be voted on by these minority parties and their votes could make or break the outcome.

Some say that's a good thing, and some don't. The Government is against it: they say it would be a pointless coalition of a large number of small parties that never got anything done. Whilst that might be correct, it would in my view still be more representative than the current system.

It's not something I believe will happen unless the voting figures drop even more than they have already. I do believe that when the Prime Minister calls the next election, we will see a rise in voting simply to get him out but it could easily go the other way.

There can't be many people that still won't vote Conservative "because Thatcher closed the mines", can there?