Using Me!

The UK General Election

Well I am very disappointed at the lack of people voting for the Liberal Democrats this morning. Initially I wanted to say that people bottled it and decided to vote Conservative but if we look at the shift in votes for each party as a percentage of the total that doesn’t appear to be the case.

With 617 of 650 seats declared so far the voting for each party is:

Conservative

• 10,168,583 Votes
• 36.1% of Votes
• +3.9%
• 291 Seats
• 47.2% of Seats

Labour

• 8,236,191 Votes
• 29.2% of Votes
• -6.3%
• 248 Seats
• 40.2% of Seats

Liberal Democrat

• 6,435,621 Votes
• 22.9% of Votes
• +1.0
• 51 Seats
• 8.3% of Seats

Democratic Unionist Party

• 168,216 Votes
• 0.6% of Votes
• -0.3% Change
• 8 Seats
• 1.3% of Seats

Scottish National Party

• 482,823 Votes
• 1.7% of Votes
• +0.1% Change
• 6 Seats
• 1.0% of Seats

The shift in voting

In Elections a 5% swing is considered to be large and a swing of 10% is huge – roughly what Tony Blair achieved in 1997. The swing from Labour to Conservative in this election was 5.1%, with a few seats still to declare. So political commentators talk about this as significant and in terms of the numbers of seats it is indeed a big change. Still it seems pretty feeble to me. The net change is only 1 in 20 people decided to change from voting Labour to Conservative. I’m not going to attempt to analyse this as it would take an age to discuss all the issues and the tactical decisions that might be involved. There’s plenty of comment from more qualified people all over the networks. But I am underwhelmed by the change when you consider the nature of the pre-election discussions about the state of the economy and unelected prime ministers.

Proportional Representation

What really is interesting in this is how the constituency based, first past the post system skews the ratios of votes to seats. For the parties outlined above the number of seats per million votes is:

• Conservative Party 28.6
• Labour Party 30.11
• Liberal Democrat Party 7.92
• Democratic Unionist Party 46.56
• Scottish Nationalist Party 12.4

So a vote for the DUP is 50% more effective than a vote for Labour and four times as effective as one for the SNP. A vote for the Conservative Party is almost four times as effective as a vote for the Lib Dems. And voting for the DUP in Northern Ireland or for the Green Party in Brighton Pavillion is five to six times more effective than voting for the Lib Dems in general. If anyone fails to see the unfairness in this system then I despair!

If the seats were allocated on a pure proportional representation basis these 617 seats would be allocated:

• Conservative 222 (-69)
• Labour 180 (-71)
• Lib Dem 141 (+89)
• DUP 4 (-4)
• SNP 10 (+4)
• Sinn Fein 3 (-1)
• Plaid Cymru 4 (+1)
• SDLP 2 (-1)
• Green 6 (+5)
• Alliance Party 1 (+0)
• UKIP 19 (+19)
• BNP 12 (+12)
• UCU-NF 2 (+2)
• And a few others with 1 seat up from 0.

You can clearly see what an enormous impact proportional representation would have on the system. Electoral reform does appear to be on the cards and in my next post I will examine the Alternative Vote System that the Lib Dems want to see implemented and could make a requirement of any pact they make to form a government. The pure proportional system has the problem of not having MP’s representing specific regions. The AVS system tries to keep proportionality at its heart but have regional MPs.

Defenders of the current system say that it leads to strong governments. In the past this has been mostly true although I think that the critics of the system claiming that this one election proves this is wrong are themselves wrong. One anecdote does not make data. However I think that a hung parliament is for the best and proportional systems would almost always lead to one. It forces the parties to work together on the ideas that unify them and it creates some give and take which means the actions of the parliament more closely match the desires of the populace. In the current system a party can have a majority in the house with barely 40% of the vote and then run roughshod over the desires of 60% of the population!