David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election

It's not random at all, it's just that the national vote doesn't factor at all (only the vote in each seat does).

It has the (often overlooked, IMO) benefit of a strong 1:1 connection between constituent and MP: even if you didn't vote for the MP, a majority of your neighbours did, and the MP is still your representative in parliament. Organising locally to boot out your MP is much, much simpler than organising nationally to shift balances of power. That has got to be a factor in keeping MPs (more) honest.

In PR, you can be in the deeply problematic situation that you like candidate A and dislike candidate B from party X, but you vote for A actually ends up going to B - in effect, you can only really vote for a party, not a particular candidate. This is a significant shift of power to the parties as they generally control (or heavily influences) who runs where and how the ranking that controls "spill-over" votes will end up. Parties are often run opaquely, through back-room deals and patronage, not terribly democratically.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but I get the sense that many left-wing Labour voters who might support them avoid voting Green (especially in the last two elections) for fear of "wasting" their vote.

It would be interesting to see if that ever changed under a different electoral system (like the buried AV, or PR), but I'm not sure that we're going to see such a change any time soon. A party that got a real majority on just under 40% of votes cast isn't likely to wipe away that victory with electoral reform.

But considering how high UKIP's vote was, despite returning only one MP, there may be more pressure to explore that idea again.

Relevant to some here (and really every internet user), Cameron started his election campaign with a pledge to "ban encryption" if he was re-elected:

  - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30778424

  - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/01/david_camerons_.html

  - http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/16/obama-sides-with-cameron-in-encryption-fight/

As a Swede without any insight into UK politics other than recent surveillance reports and internet censorships from the UK I can only say that this is disappointing for me.

"As an American" has apparently become a euphemism for "I know nothing about the subject, so explain this to me like you would to a small child".