I asked a professional gambler recently – someone who made a decent tax-free living from his betting – if he could offer me some tips that I could follow. One of his suggestions, which he said had proved to be a sure-fire consistent money-earner, was to bet against the draw in cricket test matches.
He brought up a pile of statistics on his lap-top to show that the odds you can usually get on this option are better than the chances of it happening. The reason was simple – cricket punters have a long-standing record of over-estimating the chances of draws which in the modern game have become much less likely.
Thinking about this, it is the same with hung parliaments. There always seems to come a time in the run up to general elections when this becomes a big focus. We had it a lot in the periods before the 1983, 1987 and 1992 general elections and, of course, we are getting it at the moment. For Lib Dems it means that ever so tedious question about what we would do in such an eventuality.
For received opinion has it that Labour will find it very hard to win a fourth majority in succession, whilst the Tories have yet to prove that they can command the support and vote shares that will ensure a Conservative government.
Yet an inconclusive general election result has been very rare in post-war Britain. It has happened just once – in February 1974, after Edward Heath went to the country early on a “Who governs” platform in the middle of the fuel crisis, a miners’ strike and the three day week.
In 1992, the only general election I fought as a candidate, the widespread expectation was that the Tory government that had been elected 13 years earlier would lose its majority. Yet in those final 48 hours before voting, we all felt a hardening of opinion on the door-step. The public was not ready quite yet for Labour, and preferred to stick with what it knew. The Tories had a national vote margin of nearly 8% even though the polls were showing a dead heat.
My sense looking back at that election was that there was an abhorrence of an uncertain outcome. There was a desire to stick with what the public knew and was familiar with. Now I do not know whether something similar will happen with Gordon Brown in 2010, but I do believe that there will be a polarisation of opinion. This will produce a majority government for either of the two main parties.
People will either want the change that the Tories are promoting, or they will want to stick with what they know. So my betting is that there will be no hung parliament.
* Mike Smithson founded and edits PoliticalBetting.com, the UK’s leading political discussion blog. He was a founder member of the Liberal Democrats, stood for Parliament at the 1992 General Election, and has served as both a county and borough councillor. This is the first in a regular series of monthly articles from Mike.
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10 Comments
Are those fickle swing voters really such a cohesive bunch though? I guess you’re saying yes.
Good to see the famous Mike Smithson on LDV.
Spot on. The amount of discussion around Hung Parliament senarios is completely out of proportion to the amount of times they actually happen. I remember 1992 and think its a good example of opinion polarising. If a hung parliament was on the cards for 2010 and the media focused on it i’d bet my bottom dollar that it would send somepeople scuttling back to the two bigger parties.
What would be interesting is an analysis of when FPTP stops delivering Commons Majority Governments. If the total “others” vote and number of MP’s is in long term ascent ( by which I mean none Lab/Cons) what is the vote share/seat total that amkes it impossible for either of the other two to get a majority?
If the post war trend continues and total Lab/Con vote share continues to decline decade on decade what happens when we reach this tipping point? Does the electortae panic and step back to what it knows or do we get a 1911 style crisis where we get a few Hung results before we shift to a proportional basis?
Mike you are completely right and of course, totally wrong. The number of seats held by other than the big two is now at an all time high. I haven’t the time to do the calculation, but how many parliaments would have been held ones if the other parties had had the 94 seats they have today? I’m not betting on a hung parliament, but I wouldn’t want to bet against it either.
3. In principle, you’re correct. It *ought* to be harder for either Conservative or Labour to win an overall majority, given the number of third party MPs.
In practice, it’s relatively easy for Labour to win one, given the way their vote is distributed. But I would suspect that if there a swing to the Conservatives big enough to make them the largest single party, it would in practice be big enough to give them an overall majority.
But, suppose the outcome of the next election was something like Conservative 310, Labour 250, Lib Dem 60, Others 30. A minority Conservative government, should it prove reasonably competent, would probably win an overall majority in a second election.
I like speculating on what LibDems should do in a hung parliament. Either a minority government or a fully-fledged coalition in which we hold the balance of power. Then, next time around, we would be in a much stronger position, having established ourselves. Like our counterparts in Germany.
Personally I wouldn’t be too averse to some kind of agreement with Cameron, provided he gave a lot and abandoned the headbanging wing of his party. They can take their ideological purity to UKIP, and then demonstrate their irrelevance by failing to carry the public with them.
Then, next time around, we would be in a much stronger position, having established ourselves.
Yes. That worked so well for us in Scotland, didn’t it?
Yes, we reached the PINNACLE OF LIFE. Maybe.
It’s hard to be confident about what will happen, as the polls are so volatile at the moment.
Even so, the thought of magnifying the last few months of Labour leadership to another few years is terrifying for me and the rest of the electorate!
I think there is a middle way through all this in that it is certainly unlikely to get a hung parliament, but it is becoming increasingly likely as time goes on. Paradoxically, the more a hung parliament is discussed, the more likely people will vote to avoid one – it’s a self-unfulfilling prophecy.
With that in mind, it’s probably in the Lib Dems’ interest to talk it down and in Labour and the Tories’ interests to talk it up.
What this all adds up to is a system that seems to be more rooted in psychology than measuring actual public opinion; in effect the system has become a game with literally millions of actors employing stratagems and counter-stratagems to create something truly chaotic. The media end up reporting politics as if it was a sport, which isn’t healthy (and arguably isn’t healthy about reporting sport either, but that’s another story).
The betting argument overlooks a crucial point. While a hung Parliament has rarely happened since the war, we have never had a third party with more than 60 seats! Last time there was a change of Government, Lib Dems went into the election having won only 20 seats at the previous election. The likelihood of a hung Parliament is much stronger next time the balance of power flips. But I may have a punt on the next Test not ending in a draw….