New Zealand would be a start. Elections every three years. MMP. Ardern govt shows a majority is possible if one party gives enough of a shit about the country and voters at large.
And plenty of countries in the EU have reasonable systems we could adapt for the UK. Of course, all we hear about are when it takes ages for a coalition to form in, say, Belgium, or the ongoing shitshow of Italian politics. We very rarely hear about other countries that have PR, because, well, their politics is often pretty boring. They work out how to collaborate and just get on with things.
Our electoral system was fine when just a smallish number of rich men could vote and choose between a relatively liberal rich-person’s party and a somewhat less liberal rich-person’s party. Today, it’s a relic. I mean, look at what happened in 1983. Thatcher gets 61% of the seats on 42% of the vote. Labour ends up with 32% of the seats on 28% of the vote. The Lib/SDP alliance gets 4% of the seats on 25% of the vote.
FPTP is bullshit and needs consigning to history. Once that’s done, we can look at how to deal with the upper house, although that’s a much, much trickier thing to sort. After all:
- Do you make it fully elected? If so: cross-benchers are eradicated and you have a deeply partisan second chamber, with an eye on elections rather than doing their jobs
- If you create a senate, how do you divvy up the seats? Evenly between country? (Good for the union; not great for representation of individuals.) By population? (Bad for the union; would give too much power to the English.) Regionally, like with MEPs? (Could go either way—would depend if English regions would gang up on the others, or recognise they have power at that point.)
- And do you give it more powers, potentially enabling it to block HOC decisions? (Vs the current situation, where the Lords is basically a chamber with little power that the govt can override almost whenever it chooses to.)
