Using Me!

Election Speculation

Today the LibDems revealed they are talking to Labour about a coalition. Between them they do not have enough seats to form a majority but they would have more than the Conservatives and would have every right to form a minority government. They could pretty much count on getting enough more votes from the minority parties to work their way through most bills they might wish to pass.

The Conservatives for their part have offered the LibDems a referendum on the reforming the electoral system to use the Alternative Vote System. However the Conservatives are further away from the Liberals than Labour are, in their general ideologies and there’s plenty of backbenchers that aren’t keen on a coalition with them. Many of them would be happy to see a Lib/Lab coalition that pushes through the necessary unpopular tax and spending changes that will be needed to fix the economy and then in a few months force a general election on a vote of no confidence. They forsee themselves winning a majority in this second election because of the bills that need to be passed on the economy making Lib/Lab less popular and the fact that they can campaign on the message that the government is a coalition of losers – and with today’s revelation that Brown will stand down – that we again have an unelected Prime Minister.

However I foresee this backfiring BADLY on them. Most of the minority parties stand to gain (perhaps with the exception of one of the Irish parties) in an AVS electoral system. They mostly have a smaller share of the seats than their share of the vote. In addition those parties that failed to gain any seats would campaign hard for this system too. Remember from my earlier post that the BNP would stand to gain 12 seats and UKIP 22 in a pure proportional representation system. They wouldn’t gain that many under AVS (I still plan to write about why) but they could only benefit from it.

So, if Lib/Lab could push through the AVS system before a new election is called, by getting the backing of the smaller parties in Parliament as well, then in another election the two of them would start from having over 50% of the vote. They might lose a few, or even quite a lot of primary votes because of the above reasons, but they would most likely still pick up over 50% of the seats through the second or third votes that people place. In fact they would, in my opinion, more likely end up with closer to 60% of the seats between them. The conservatives would likely pick up around 35% of the seats and the last few would go to the minor parties. Lib/Lab could continue their coalition with a large majority.