The general election

Going back to the stats, but this time looking at general elections, although the Conservatives have suffered defeats of historical magnitude at the last three, the electoral ‘first past the post’ system is specifically geared towards creating differences in seats.

Whether this a good thing is actually quite hard to tell - more on this later. Let's take the example of last years election results, again using the BBC site figures. In 2005 Labour won 35.3% of the UK vote to the Conservatives’ 32.3%.

So even though the separation of the parties in votes was only 3%, the Labour Party actually won 356 seats out of 646, or 55%. Clearly then, the road to electoral success is defined by a party's ability to gain support where it is needed most - rather than having a large numerical support base confined to a lesser geographical area.

The diagram to the left shows the share of the electorate who actually backed the winning parties over 1951-2005.



The BBC news site also features a prediction system designed for the 2005 election based on the percentage ‘swing’ of votes between the two leading parties. A swing of 6.5% to the Conservatives was predicted by the site in the run up to the 2005 elections to remove labour’s majority, and in the 2005 elections part of that was achieved with an overall 3% swing to the blues. Based on the 2005 vote separation between the leading parties, with just another 3+% by 2009 we could in theory have a new government!

However, the situation is not so simple. A swing to the Conservatives of between 6.5 and 10%, or 3.5% and 7% by the 2009 election, would result in a hung parliament in which the winning party is deemed not to have a sufficient parliamentary majority to govern effectively - leading to a coalition if the parties concerned agree to one, a form of government this country has not experienced since the Second World War, although there was a close call in 1974. As you can see from the chart on the left, the UK Parliament has kept coalition-free while its European counterparts frequently face such alliances.

So over the next few years the age-old debate about the implementation of Proportional Representation (PR) is likely to rage on. Now that the proportions of the British public voting are likely to be so close, weak coalition governments (which are of course more likely to be plagued by in-fighting than individual ones) will surely arise with or without PR. On the other hand we have the compelling statistic that in 2005 only 22% of the electorate voted for the winning party, a proportion which has been shown to be falling since the 50's (see BBC chart above).

Figures such as those produced by ukelect.co.uk confirm my prediction of an unusually closely fought future election based on today’s political situation, placing support for the two lead parties for 2005-2009 squarely at a figure of 36%, when a hung parliament is likely to be achieved when support for the two lead parties is in the 34-37% range.

The parties themselves are no strangers to most of these issues. If you read a bit further down in the DCA UK electoral system summary above, you'll see that since their first term in power Labour have established two independent commissions tasked with analysing the electoral system: The Independent Commission on the Voting System and the Independent Commission on Proportional Representation. The latter, carried out between 2002 and 2004 was inconclusive, stating that if the switch were made, there culd be ‘some increase in the range of small parties represented in the Commons, as well as, a greater chance of coalition or minority governement.’

It would be interesting to see the logic upon which report decided the chance of a coalition would be greater. Labour has been hinted to have one rather strong supporter of PR, and placed in a rather strong position too. Paddy Ashdown has asserted he is ‘absolutely convinced’ that none other than the Rt Hon Tony Blair was at least at one time eager for a coalition with the Lib Dems even without the potential stalemate now faced.

●Download the DCA summary of UK voting systems as a PDF.
●Visit the website of the Electoral Reform Society, the oldest pro-PR body.