So the polls are narrowing, the Tory lead tottering along within the range of 2-7%. As we all know, the Tories need to poll at around 40% to be sure of a working majority, or else they will have to significantly out-perform their national ratings in the key marginal battlegrounds.
And if they don’t succeed? Well, that will clearly be a disaster for David Cameron’s leadership which has been predicated on the fact that he’s the Tories’ talisman. A hung parliament with a minority Labour/Tory government, perhaps with the tacit consent of the Lib Dems, appears at this stage the most likely outcome.
But what will be the effect on public confidence in the electoral system in the event of a general election result like the one illustrated? This image is taken from UK Polling Report Make your own prediction webpage, and shows one of the crazy results which could be thrown up by the UK’s old-fashioned first-past-the-post voting system.
It shows that the Tories could lead Labour by 37%-31%, and yet still end up the second largest party in the House of Commons. In other words, though the Tories under David Cameron could do better in 2010 than Tony Blair managed to do in 2005, Gordon Brown might be able to carry on as Prime Minister.
What would that mean in actual numbers? If turnout were identical to 2005, the Tories would win just over 10 million votes to Labour’s 8.4 million votes – yet under first-past-the-post Labour would have a parliamentary mandate to form the next government.
Perhaps the British public would be quite comfortable with that situation. Perhaps they would not care that the party with 1.6 million fewer votes would be entitled to continue to govern them. Perhaps they would consider it a price well worth paying in return for retaining the UK’s eccentric voting system.
But perhaps not.
PS: Next Left’s Sunder Katwala looks at how the headlines might play out in the event of such a skewed election result.
Follow @LibDemVoice on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Aging, Development, and Living at High Altitudes (Oxygen Levels)
The Charge of the Light Brigade - A perfect analogy for the United Kingdom today
Lib Dems miss out by 4 votes in council by-election
New lunchtime concerts for 2025
A looming trade war?
Only 3 historical inaccuracies
Rare 1950s film of Thomas Cubitt's stuccoed streets in Pimlico
Nonconformistradical
Matt (Bristol)
David Raw
9 Comments
I fed in the prediction Con/Lab/Liberal Democrat each with 31%, Others 7%, and got Con 208 seats, Lab 305, LD 106, Others 13.
Then I put Con 29%, Lab 29%, LD 35%, Others 7%, and got Con 184 seats, Lab 286, LD 149, Others 13
Looks like FPTP is heavily biased against the Liberal Democrats, or the Prediction webcage is at fault.
Bruce, you are correct in your first assumption. It is just a really bad electoral system. On equal shares in FPTP, the split is about 300-200-100 in favour of Labour.
An interesting experiment is to start from equal shares, then take equally from Labour and the Conservatives and give to Liberal Democrats. You need Lab 25.6 Con 25.6 LD 38.9 to see the Liberal Democrats as the largest party, and much more to get a majority. They each need to lose 4.1%, and LD needs to gain all that 8.4%, to achieve equality of seats, starting out from equality of votes.
That is why only a massive realignment, as in 1981, can give the party hope of governing without proportional representation.
PArt of the weirdness is accounted by differential turnout; a “safe” Labour seat sees a much lower turnout than other seats, so it looks like they have lower support, whereas reality is voters can’t be bothered to turn up and Labour hasn’t put any campaign resources there as it’s “safe”.
How many non-voters would vote for a different party is hard to assess, of course, but differential turnout is a big factor in these discussions.
@Bruce: Yes, the system makes it very hard for third parties to break through, but the predictor is also wrong, it applies Uniform National Swing to every seat, but UNS never works for LD held seats as one of the other two parties is almost certainly squeezed out already.
Stephen.
Whilst I would hope that a scenario such as you outline would result in an outcry from the public about the electoral system and them flocking to our electoral reform cause there is a danger that Cameron’s idea about “evening up the constituency boundaries” would also gain traction. After all, they could end up being perceived as the wronged party (given that they have the most votes but are not the largest party) and therefore their arguments regarding what to do about it might be listened to even more keenly.
That’s why we would need to push harder than we have ever pushed before to get our arguments about why such a stupidly distorted result has occurred and what the real solution is. In this situation the Tories would just be reaping what they had sown with their refusal to countenance any sort of proper reform of the electoral system. Even more than the expenses scandal, such a situation would be our time and we would need to seize it.
I predict the outcome would be a big fuss and flap, followed by an “oh well, it’s over now, we’ll just do something about it in five years”, by which time everybody will have forgotten.
The article seems to be based on the assumption that if the electorate wished to change the electoral system it could do so. The trouble is that only politicians can do that, and of course most MPs have a very strong vested interest in not switching to PR.
The best propaganda for PR would be if we came close to catching Labour in votes, they would get 3 or 4 times as many seats & our demands for fairness would resonate among many non-Liberal voters.
That sort of result is entirely possible, we have seen how quickly our polling figures can rise when we get some decent coverage.
Paul: the result you describe is not even as extreme as what happened in 1983: Labour 28.3%, 209 seats; Lib/SDP 26%, 23 seats. And the political result? Zilch. No one (beyond us anoraks) noticed. No one cared. Nor was there any sort of outcry at the last election, when Labour won 55% of the seats with less than 36% of the votes – arguably a much more seriously deficient result. There’s no possibility of change so long as either half of the LabCon two-headed devil has a majority.
@Malcolm Todd – you’re quite right – but I think there would be rather more outcry and interest if it affected the two largest parties, and not only us.
The Lib Dems would certainly do better than predicted above on that share of the poll. Systems like that always operate on the basis of swing between two parties, and really just can’t cope with the completely different way that third party votes work.