The polling cards that have come through our door for the forth-coming elections are headed with this legend:
Representation of the People Acts
Over the weekend, I watched the latest episode of Ashes to Ashes on BBC1 and it was set on the day of the 1983 General Election. The polls were starting to come out over the weekend that put the Liberal Democrats in second and in some cases in front – ahead of both the Tories and Labour. Ashes used a news clip from 1983 mentioning that the SDP/Liberal Alliance (the forerunner of the Liberal Democrats) had been in second place in some polls, ahead of Labour and I got to wondering how the votes had been divided up. The answer is very different depending on whether you look at the actual number of votes cast or the number of seats gained in the Commons.
Here’s a couple of pie-charts to demonstrate the disparity generated by our present electoral system. On the left is number of seats won and on the right is the share of the popular vote:
For fuller details of the breakdown of the vote, see Wikipedia.
Things don’t change. A poll over the weekend which showed Labour in third place would still – because of how the constituencies are divided up – have given Labour the largest share of seats in the Commons.
2 comments
Nick D says:
19/04/2010 at 19:11 (UTC 0 )
Looks pretty fair to me. Well, to everybody except the SDP, anyway. And you can’t be fair to all the people all the time, can you?!
James Ogley says:
19/04/2010 at 20:40 (UTC 0 )
Nick, point is you can if you reform the electoral system to one that doesn’t favour the two old parties but returns representatives proportionately to the votes the parties garner.