Great Britain has 69 seats in the European Parliament. At the election on June 4, Britain used proportional representation to elect its new representatives to the European Parliament. The results: Conservative 25, UK Independence 13, Labour 13, Liberal Democrat 11, Green 2, Scottish National 2, British National 2, Plaid Cymru (a Welsh regional party) 1.
Did the UK Libertarian Party run? Did they get close?
No, that party only had a candidate for county office in Cambridge. It didn’t run candidates for the European Parliament. It is still very young.
I thought that the Libertarian Alliance UK did not want to field candidates for office. I remember doing some research on them back in the 1990s
The UK Libertarian Party is a separate organization from the Libertarian Alliance. Their candidate in that county race received 7.5% (last place, but still respectable) in a five-way race. In another local race, the English Democrats elected a mayor in Doncaster, their biggest win in their existence. BBC story here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8088799.stm
Democracy at work, via PR. It is good to see seats won by UKIP, the Greens, Scottish Nationalists, and Plaid Cymru and that the LDs took a far higher proportion than they do under the single-member district system the Brits use for the national House of Commons.
I have some misgivings about the two seats for the BNP, but if that party, even if it is fascist, represents a significant sector of British public opinion, it too probably should have some voice at the table.
Even though this was a low-interest election, the rules under which it was conducted in the UK (and throughout Europe) were DEMOCRATIC. We can hope that the British follow suit next year in their national elections, and we can wish that someday maybe even the “world’s leading democracy” will follow suit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament_election,_2009_(United_Kingdom)
http://www.europarl.org.uk/section/european-elections/results-2009-european-elections-uk
http://www.elections2009-results.eu/en/index_en_txt.html
U.S.A., Canada, India, etc. — stuck in the STONE AGE with gerrymander minority rule regimes.
The United Kingdom (plus Gibraltar) has 72 MEP’s elected from 12 regions, 9 in England, and 1 each from Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Gibraltarians vote in one of the English regions.