By now, everybody who has bothered to check the news knows that in the UK, Labor lost, the Liberal Democrats lost but may get to decide who governs anyway, and the Conservatives didn't win enough. The relevant lesson from this and previous UK elections is that a Third Party that gets 23% of the votes ends up with less than 10% of the seats. If that doesn't convince everyone that a third party only works if there is proportional representation or second rounds, I don't know what does.
The interesting fact about the Third Party in the UK, unlike the US, is that it is almost as well-known and popular as the other two. It is visible in the media and seems to be well-founded. Its leader is a serious politician with a broad following and strong personal appeal. Its positions are not on the fringe. It is different enough from the other two, at least by US standards. With Labor mutating into New Labor, it may be the closest to the ideal of American Liberalism. And it has been around more than two decades, and its roots reach much further back than that. In spite of that, it's on track to getting an extra 1% of valid votes, and 10% FEWER seats in Parliament. I'm not griping on their behalf. For the record, I'm not that interested in who governs now in the UK (if anybody), and for how long.
There are also Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh parties (the Green Party seems quite popular). Other than the regional ones, none of them gets much more than a token seat here and there.
The Leader of UK's Third Party, Nick Clegg, [is/is not/is not openly] correctly demanding electoral reform as a condition to support a coalition. Other than the prospect of hanging on to power in a probably shortened legislature, I don't know why any of the other 2 parties would support their own diminishment, but anyway. It is only by a rare quirk of the way the votes were distributed that the Third Party now has a semblance of a chance at legislative or executive power as a separate entity.
If anybody really wants a true multi-party system, winner-take-all has to go first!
We already knew that elctoral winner-take-all was unfair, undemocratic, illogical, archaic, encouraging of voter alchemy, prone to rigging, fomenting of divisions, you name it. Still, we have put up with its huge deficiencies, because it supposedly leads to a clearer separation between winners and losers, between majority and opposition. We used to be semi-comfortable in the belief that no third wheel would get to play decider. We should have suspected from the legislative battles of the last year and a half that isn't really true, but if we didn't, then the UK election spells that out for everybody to notice.
UPDATE: There is a lot of back-and-forth as to what the Lib Dems will do now. Is this good for them? Is it bad? Clegg (or his party) may demand proportional representation in exchange for being part of a majority. Why would he do that? Well, try and do the fucking math. He gets 1/4 the seats of the other 2 parties thanks to winner-take-all. Whaddya think? He may do that, but only openly. He may do it only in secret. He may not. I don't fucking care!!!