Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:
A major part of the point of a democratic electoral system is that those elected to public office can be held to account by the public for their actions. The anger we often see over the behaviour of MPs – whether on matters of policy (such as the Iraq war) or on matters of probity (such as MPs’ expenses) – is often aggravated by an underlying lack of belief that MPs will in the normal course of events get held accountable for their actions. Hence the paucity of comments along the lines of “I can’t wait to vote that awful MP out at the next election”.
Looking at the evidence as to how our electoral system actually works in practice, it is remarkably ossified. Let’s first look at how many Parliamentary seats have been consistently held by the same party since the end of Second World War, with no gain for another party in either 1945 or any of the sixteen general elections held since then:
England 30%
Scotland 19%
Wales 33%
Overall 29%
So in just a shade under a third of seats, nothing – social change, economic booms and busts, Tory landslides, Labour landslides, nationalist and third party surges and slumps, individual scandals or the impact of Churchill, Thatcher or Blair has been enough to see the seat change hands, even just the once.
You have to be of pensionable age in order to be able to remember when 29% of constituencies last changed hands.
Even for a pensioner, it would be a stretch to remember back to when 11% of seats last changed hands, because in those cases it was before the First World War.
If we look back at the election landscape since 1970, the message about how rarely seats change hands is repeated. The proportion that has stayed with the same party since 1970 is:
England 50%
Scotland 42%
Wales 43%
Overall 49%
So if you are under 40, nearly half the seats in the country have never changed hands since you were born. That doesn’t look like a system which is holding MPs to account for their behaviour.
A note on the figures: the raw data for these figures was kindly supplied by Lewis Baston at the Electoral Reform Society. The figures take into account boundary changes and Parliamentary by-elections. Where Parliamentary boundaries have changed constituencies have been tracked back until a significant part of the constituency was represented by another party. This produces some cases of close judgement, but the overall figures are robust.
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17 Comments
Great post Mark. I am especially horrified by the figures since 1970. I was born in 1974 so 50% of the seats in my home country have never changed hands in my lifetime.
You have inspired a blogpost on this from me here.
Is this particularly indicative or are my calculations competely flawed?
Over that time:
The Tories have polled between 30 and 49%
Labour have polled between 28 and 48%
So on a straight PR system at least 58% of all seats would have remained in Labour or Tory hands throughout that period – OK they would almost certainly not be the same ones (at the very least the breakdown of religious tory voting in Glasgow and Liverpool has had an effect) but these figures could be just as indicative of a very high base level of support for each of the two largest parties.
Yes, great post – thanks!
Hywel – you might be right but the voting system distorts how you vote and indeed whether you bother to vote.
I was brought up in a tory town with an enormous majority, the incentive to vote is really undermined if you are absolutely certain who will win in your area regardless of national shifts. This process massively helps the larger parties too as someone might be inclined to vote, say, for a socialist party but ends up voting labour instead because voting for a minority party can feel like a protest vote rather than determining whether they get an MP.
Just look at the difference between PR elections like the Euros and FPTP elections like the general. Same voters – but quite different outcomes.
The one fun thing about the expenses scandal is just how much it might change these stats.
When it seems that even the local, supposedly Tory leaning, paper in Bournemouth can run a headline: Tobias Ellwood: Up to the limit on expenses, I do wonder what upsets we may see when incumbents re-stand having been found out, not only for having a penchant for (no, not the line from Austin Powers) … flash gear like an expensive Sony notebook, but also have used taxpayer money to pay for work and furnishings on not just one home, not just a second after flipping his main residence, but also on refurbishing his “surgery room” at Boscombe Conservative Club (where naturally, people who really need to talk to him might feel rather afraid to visit!)
Since 1982 when `The Gang of Four’ under Roy Jenkins stewardship recognised that the two party duopoly did not speak either for democracy or modern Britain.
There was from 1982 a radical shift forward from the `Gang of Four’ and what they represented and this split from 2 moribund centrist parties, so that individuals,women,ethnic minorities and voters in the 30% of Parliamentary Seats that post 1945 have not changed their choice of party M.P.could vote for a third force in British Politics.
The inability of democracy to evolve in a line towards local community politics,local budgetary control and community decision-making since 1945, rests squarely at the door of the those who support `First Post the Post’ and those who want STV and the supporters of the Electoral Reform Society…
Labour government in 2005 was elected by only 36% of the popular vote and in 2010 few are predicting that the Tories will gain an absolute majority as they are unlikely to get 40% of the popular vote.
I predict that Nick Clegg`s star will rise when the L/D Policies and truth telling by Vince Cable on the British Economy are properly understood, in the coming campaign.
L/D`s must have equal time as Labour and Tories in all TV General Election debates, especially from the BBC.
Let’s say you have STV on six seat constituencies. Whatever the election I’d put a pound to a penny that in 90% of those seats Labour could always win one, the Tories one and the Libs one. In a large chunk of them Labour would always win two or the Tories two – no matter how bad the election the Tories would always scrape up 30% of the vote (or whatever the benchmark is for two out of six) in most of the Home Counties, Labour the same in the Valleys, inner London and the industrial cities, and the Liberals in the South West. I’d bank that as 50% of seats never changing hands.
So every system has safe seats. What’s your point?
There’s one problem with this argument, which is this: why have so many seats not changed hands? Believe it or not, the reason is because voters decided they didn’t want them to change hands. Safe seats CAN change hands if voters want them to: look at Tatton in 1997 or Nottingham North in 1983 or Solihull in 2005.
I live in Canterbury which has to be one of the safest seats in the country. It’s gone Conservative at every election since 1874. Deeply scary and frustrating stuff 🙁
Seats not changing hands is not necessarily a bad thing – the MP or candidate may be an ideal fit for that particular constituency. However, the unwritten theme here is the opportunity for change. The current first past the post system does allow for the theoretical monkey with a red/blue/orange rosette situation.
I am a Labour electoral reformer ( a member of both the ERS and LCER) and need no convincing about the need for a change to many facets of our democracy. Aside from unchanging incumbency (and the pereceived lack of accounatbility) I find the way FPTP skews campaigning the most irksome feature.
“I live in Canterbury which has to be one of the safest seats in the country. It’s gone Conservative at every election since 1874. Deeply scary and frustrating stuff”
Why scary? More people in Canterbury have voted Conservative in each of those elections and it’s probably been above 50% most of that time (it was even in 1997).
Hywel,
Because it suggests that no matter what the MP does, he will still be elected and relected in Canterbury so long as he’s wearing the right rosette.
Maybe but consider:
1) Neil Hamilton and the guy in Wyre Forest suggest otherwise.
2) Plenty of MPs have been deselected by their constituency party for various indiscretions (i’m not suggesting that it is a good solution but there certainly isn’t a “seat for life” arrangement)
3) If Canterbury was a 6 seat STV constituency it would have returned at least 3 Conservatives at every election (certainly recently). If one of those consistently got the party support to be the “prioritised” candidate it would be very hard to vote them out – arguably harder than under FPTP.
Wrigglesworth: “Safe seats CAN change hands if voters want them to: look at Tatton in 1997 or Nottingham North in 1983 or Solihull in 2005.”
Nottingham North 1983 is a bad example. A popular Communist Party candidate scored 2,000-ish votes, slightly less than he scored in the City Council elections held in the same time frame as I recall. The Tory won by less than the unimaginable Communist vote.
The popular Communist, John Peck, won the City Council seat in 1987, eventually joining the Green Party.
A bad candidate is usually either deselected or turns a safe seat into a marginal. If a seat, like Canterbury, remains with one party it may be because most voters want it to be that way.
Tatton isn’t a great example either, because to get Hamilton chucked out both the Lib Dems and Labour had to back Bell and not enter the contest. In normal circumstances, Bell’s vote would have split three ways and Hamilton would have held the seat. The only way that safe seat was made unsafe was by deliberately depriving the voters of the full range of choice previously available to them, so that they were forced to vote against something, rather than for something else. That isn’t a particularly healthy way to do democracy.
These results are a symptom of a bad system but are by no means the worst outcome. As Julian said the worst thing about FPTP is its focus on the marginal constituencies, how disproportionately campaiging, money and time are spent in an area compared to equally deserving safe seats. Good post though I liked it.
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