What If Proportional Representation Been Used in the May 2015 UK General Election?

In previous postings, I have looked at how UK general elections since 1922 would have turned out if the 'first past the post' system in place in the UK had been replaced by proportional representation.  I did this most recently for the 2010 general election: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/what-if-proportional-representation-had.html

The 2015 election is certainly an interesting one for this consideration because the different between the proportion of the votes each party won compared to the proportion of the seats they won, has probably reached its most extreme.

There are a couple of well-known factors in UK elections which were apparent in 2015.  First is that the 'conversion rate', i.e. how many seats a party gets compared to how many votes they received, has always been highest for the Conservative Party.  The Labour Party and to an even greater extent, the Liberal Democrats, often have tens of thousands of 'wasted' votes that win them no additional seats.  In this election, such vagaries can be seen at the extreme.  The SNP (Scottish National Party) gained 1.45 million votes which won them a total of 56 seats.  In contrast, UKIP (UK Independence Party) won 3.861 million, more than double what the SNP got, but only won 1 seat.  This explains UKIP's sudden support for the introduction of some kind proportional representation.  This is despite the defeat of the proposal of adopting the Alternative Vote (AV) method in the referendum of 2011.

The other known factor is the 'shy Conservative'.  The factor that, in opinion polls, people who are liable to vote Conservative, are much less likely to say they will than supporters of other parties.  This explains the fact that the Conservatives received 2% more of the vote than polls had predicted.

Before I launch into the analysis, there are some caveats.  These calculations are made on the basis of direct proportion, so assuming constituencies with equal populations.  The most simple approach is used rather than ones such as AV which alter the proportionality to some extent.

In addition, I assume that, unlike, for example, in Germany, there is no bar on how few votes a party can get in order to win a seat.  In (West) Germany only parties that achieve above 5% of the vote have been allowed to sit in the Bundestag.  This has meant the absence of numerous small parties at national level and effectively a two-party system since 1949.

The first figure is the number of seats the parties would have gained in a simple proportional representation system.  The figures in brackets are the actual number of seats that the party gained is shown in square brackets.

Note, one seat - that held by the Speaker, was not really contested.  The current Speaker is a Conservative but he does not vote with his party.

2015: 650 seats [Conservative Government]

• Conservatives: (36.9%); 240 seats  [331]
• Labour (30.4%); 198 seats  [232]
• UKIP (12.6%); 82 seats [1]
• Liberal Democrats (7.8%); 51 seats [8]
• SNP (4.7%); 31 seats [56]
• Green (3.8%); 25 seats [1]
• Plaid Cymru (0.6%); 4 seats [3]

Northern Irish Parties:

• DUP (0.6%); 6 seats [8]
• Sinn Fein (0.6%); 5 seats [4]
• UUP (0.4%); 4 seats [2]
• SDLP (0.3%); 2 seats [3]
• Alliance (0.2%); 1 seat [1]

In Northern Ireland a form of proportional representation is used anyway, which is why the figures are not massively different. The adherence to different sides of the Unionist/Republican debate in different constituencies also makes it tricky to predict.

As always, I caution that, of course, with a different system in place, other parties may have come forward.  As a result there might have been a different range of parties on offer that there were in our world.  If we look back to the 2010 election, if then there had been proportional representation then, UKIP would have had 20 seats in Parliament.  Whereas with our system UKIP only gained 2 seats and then only in 2014.  Similarly, back in 2010, with proportional representation, the Greens would have got 7 seats and now would have 25.  Thus, representation in the House of Commons would reflect the trends that have been so commented on in recent weeks, but, because of the system in use, have not come to fruition.

Under proportional representation, Labour would have won 198 seats in 2015, compared to 189 in 2010.  This would still reflect Labour's difficulty in increasing their support, notably in England.  In 2015, voting for Labour did rise a little over that of 2015 but this was heavily counter-balanced by Labour's losses in Scotland.  In our 2015 election they declined in number of seats, a net loss of 26 seats.  The 48 seats they lost compared to their representation in 2010, were not only located in Scotland but in England as well.  With proportional representation system, despite a modest rise, the failure to break through the 200-seat mark might have been enough to see off Ed Miliband even more than the poor performance did in our world.

Proportional representation would not have altered the severe decline for the Liberal Democrats; they would now have a third of the seats they had back in 2010.  However, they would have retained 51 seats rather than just 8.  In this alternative, it would have still be likely that a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition would have been formed back in 2010, though then with the Liberal Democrats three times stronger than in our world.  Persisting with this scenario into 2015, they may have gone back into coalition, but, unlike in 2010, alone, they could not have secured either the Conservatives or Labour a majority.

Even with proportional representation, the often-envisaged Labour-SNP-Green coalition would be no more feasible in forming government in 2015 than in our world.  Indeed, the SNP would only have 31 seats rather than 56, so would be weaker by far than in our current parliament.  Thus, with proportional representation in place what seems would have been the most likely government would have been a Conservative-UKIP-DUP coalition to give David Cameron a small majority.  Given that they had lost two-thirds of their seats as a result of the election (though a better result than losing over four-fifths in our world), the Liberal Democrats, are likely to have been reluctant to have participated in this more right-wing coalition being formed in 2015.

The first-past-the-post system has given the SNP 25 out of 56 of the seats they won.  It  has denied UKIP 82 seats and the Greens 24 seats.  As Douglas Carswell, the lone UKIP MP now, noted, this has meant, combined, 5 million voters for these parties have been denied something even approaching the level of representation they might expect.  In large part those seats have gone to the Conservatives and SNP.

The analysis of how different proportional representation would have impacted has shown that the scenarios discussed in recent weeks were not massively misplaced.  This is because, as I have seen frequently mentioned, polls measure the anticipated proportion of the vote.  As yet, the only good way of predicting the share of seats is the exit poll which, this time was only out by 15 seats, and that neglected the persistent 'shy Conservative' difficulty.  Given that one of those Conservative seats was won by a majority of just 27 votes, it was pretty decent estimation, though, of course, insufficiently close to silence those who at every election howl for the banning of 'inaccurate' polls.  In this case, they worked very much in the Conservatives' favour by making their warning about the advance of the SNP sound convincing and getting out their core voters especially in the very tight marginals that Labour had to take in order to approach winning.

P.P. 11/05/2015
This time round, the BBC has done similar analysis: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32601281

drawing on work done by the Electoral Reform Society using the D'Hondt Method of proportional representation approach.  Their figures are not radically different to mine Conservatives: 256; UKIP: 83; SNP: 31.  However, their work corrects my views based on my previous analysis regarding 'conversion' rates.  This shows that only this year, 2015, have the Conservatives needed fewer votes than Labour to win a seat.  Contrary to my sense of what was happening in 1997, they needed about 30,000 more votes to get a seat compared to Labour.  Now Labour needs about 6,000 votes per seat more than the Conservatives.  This does suggest that the party on track to win gains the better conversion rate.  I wonder what the impact of boundary changes will make on this conversion rate.  For UKIP the rate is running at over 3.5 million votes per seat, 100 times greater than for the Conservatives.

What If Proportional Representation Had Been Used in the May 2010 UK General Election?

Back in March 2008 I produced a posting about the differences in the British political scene if a form of proportional representation had been introduced in 1918 when it had been considered by the government of the day:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-if-proportional-representation.html

This showed that the UK would have had a three-party system for much of its history and that certain extreme and regional parties would have gained seats and that for most of the time there would have been coalitions.  Of course, the very fact that proportional representation was in place most likely would have led to different parties appearing or the greater fragmentation of the three main parties.  Now with a coalition government or a minority government the only two options for government at least for the next few months and possibly, the introduction of proportional representation as the price of Liberal Democrat support either for the Conservatives or Labour it is interesting to discuss how different things might have been if back in 1997, in line with what Tony Blair promised, proportional representation had been introduced and this 2010 election had been under that format.

The approach I adopt is quite crude, it equates the percentage of the vote to the percentage of seats in parliament that the party would win.  This is basically the goal of proportional representation systems, but there are different types that have slightly different outcomes in any given case and there remain factors such as the size of constituency; currently in the UK system Scotland has more seats at Westminster than it would be entitled to if the constituencies were allocated strictly on a population basis and a proportional representation system would not be immune to such distortiones either.  Anyway, it remains an interesting exercise and allow us to compare with the same analysis that I have applied to earlier elections.

In the following list the first number is what the party would have got under a proportional representation sustem and the number in brackets is the number of seats that the party actually achieved.  Voting in the Ryedale constituency in Yorkshire has been delayed until 27th May as the UKIP candidate, John Boakes died during the election, so this seat will retain its current MP until then.

2010: 649 seats [Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition]

• Conservatives: (36.1%); 235 seats  [306]
• Labour (29.0%); 189 seats  [258]
• Liberal Democrats (23.0%); 150 seats [57]
• UKIP (3.1%); 20 seats [0]
• BNP (1.7%); 12 seats [0]
• SNP (1.7%); 11 seats [6]
• Green (1%); 7 seats [1]
• Plaid Cymru (0.6%); 4 seats [3]
• English Democrats (0.2%); 1 seat [0]

Northern Irish Parties:

• DUP (0.6%); 5 seats [8]
• Sinn Fein (0.6%); 5 seats [5]
• SDLP (0.4%); 4 seats [3]
• Alliance (0.1%); 1 seat [1]
• Ulster Conservatives & Unionists - New Force (0.3%); 2 seats [0]

In Northern Ireland a form of proportional representation is used anyway, which is why the figures are not massively different.  The big gainers would be the Ulster Conservatives and Unionists - New Force (who must win the prize for the longest party name), probably at the expense of the DUP.

With proportional representation across the UK, the situation would not be massively different to what we have now, i.e. the Conservatives would be the largest party but lack an outright majority, there being 409 seats in the hands of other parties.  The key difference would be that the Liberal Democrats would have almost three times as many seats as they won in reality and together with Labour or with the Conservatives would make a strong coalition.  In fact, being only 39 seats behind Labour they would almost be equals in a coalition rather than a junior partner.  As would have been the case at all elections since the 1970s, the nationalist parties of SNP and Plaid Cymru would clearly benefit from proportional representation and the Green Party would now be of the size the Liberals were in UK politics in the 1950s and 1960s.  

Of course, if proportional representation had been in force since the late 1990s, let alone since 1918 they could have become an established party in the 1980s when they had an upswing of support and by now at least as important as the SNP or Plaid Cymru.  The far right in British politics represented by UKIP and the fascist BNP would have been returned with a sizeable bloc.  I doubt the Conservatives would have worked with BNP, but, given how Eurosceptic David Cameron was, he certainly could have come to an agreement with UKIP.  This result would have more accurately reflected UKIP support in the country in line with their European election result of 17 MEPs.  No wonder UKIP wanted a hung parliament and the chance of proportional representation.

If you look back at the analysis I did of previous elections, what is interesting is that for these smaller parties we see a maintenance or improvement in their number of seats.  For example with proportional representation in 2005 we would have seen 17 UKIP seats, 7 Green seats and 5 BNP.  The BNP getting 7 additional seats in 2010 under this system over what they would have won in 2005, shows us not to be complacent about their support.  The Greens might have been frustrated to remain on 7 seats.  However, given that they have managed to get 1 seat even on our current system, I think they would have been as credible for longer and, especially at this election, tactical voters may have turned to them rather than one of the larger parties.

What is interesting is the lack of any left-wing parties.  Both Socialist Labour and Socialist Alliance would have got 1 seat if proportional representation had been in place in 2005 but still would have received none in 2010.  I suppose this represents the meltdown of the Socialist Labour Party before the election was called and even the weakness of support for the Scottish Socialist Party who polled only 0.1% of the vote and would have got no seats in contrast to 2005 when under proportional representation they would have achieved 2 seats.  The Respect-Unity Party, led by radical Labourite George Galloway who returned 1 MP in 2005, himself, also fell away probably as charismatic George was not standing and in East London support for the mainstream Labour Party strengthened throughout.  It seems that for the moment Socialism is dormant as a party political creed in British politics. 

Despite the bankers portrayal of Brown as risking old-fashioned Labour principles, since the era of the Thatcher Consensus, in fact, at best his policies are old fashioned Beveridge-Keynes Liberalism rather than anything even approaching Socialism.  There is a quotation from the mid-20th century that Britian is a Conservative country that occasionally votes Labour, but now that does not seem to be the case as Labour of today is really just the Liberals of yesterday rebranded.  Of course, I would love to see some radical policies in this financial crisis to really seize back power from the bankers who exploit us and get us to foot the bill for their profitable (only for them) playing with the economy, but no-one dare off such policies these days.

So, proportional representation would not have delivered us a majority government and we would be having the same kind of negotiations now that we would be seeing at the moment, the major change being that the Liberal Democrats would be so much more powerful than they are with about a third of the seats they would expect under another system.  Certainly UKIP, SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens would be sensible to campaign for proportional representation as, once they had a foothold, the way the Liberals were able just to maintain for many years, from that standing they could grow to be real players in the political system.  Of course, BNP would benefit too, even if they found it difficult to tolerate such a 'foreign' system as proportional representation.  I would only hope that the left-wing parties could cobble together a sufficiently strong party to get such a foothold but that now seems more remote than it has been even in recent elections. 

The presence of parties especially on the fringes, does influence policy-making by the major parties as has been seen with anti-immigration approaches to try to recapture votes from the BNP.  What I would also hope to see would be other specific parties, hopefully a Socialist Party, no doubt a Countryside Alliance party, a Cornish Party, a Grey (i.e. elderly) Party, a Stop The War or Anti-Nuclear Weapons Party, perhaps a Women's Party (given that they are the majority in the population but a tiny minority of the MPs), perhaps an Islamic Party.  In recent years we have seen independents often focused on local or other single issues becoming MPs and proportional representation, most likely, would benefit them, though with larger constituencies would remove that local link necessary for some.  Countries with proportional representation allow a range of voices to be heard and despite the mainstream parties saying they represent the broad population, this is in fact not the case, despite the token MPs from ethnic minorities or women.  This would promote engagement with politics more regularly not just when a crisis seems to be imminent, and for true democracy, such continued engagement is necessary.

P.P. 23/04/2011: What If AV Had Been Used In The May 2010 UK General Election?
With the referendum on the adoption of the Alternative Vote (AV) system to replace the current First Past the Post (FPTP) system, I have been reading material on what impact having had AV for the May 2010 general election would have had.  AV is a very mild form of proportional representation so its impact would not have led to a vastly different outcome to the one achieved by FPTP, but there would have been some differences.  Research by the University of Essex suggests that 43 constituencies out of 649 would have returned a different MP to the one they did.  The greatest impact would have come in London, Scotland, Yorkshire, South Wales and South-West England.  Interestingly the two constituencies covering Oxford would have both returned Liberal Democrat MPs rather than one Labour and one Conservative.  Of course, with AV in place people may have voted differently to how they did using FPTP and it is likely that smaller parties not featured in this analysis would have received more support. 

Anyway, taking the broad brush approach of this posting, the following would have been how the results, most likely would have turned out for the three main parties, had AV been used.  Note that Northern Ireland already uses the more proportionally representative STV system anyway.  In addition, the university analysis does not reflect the changes for smaller parties such as the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens.  Thus, for this table, I have left all the parties, bar the three largest, unaltered.  However, the fact that changes would have impacted in Scotland and Wales in particular, there is a good chance that the votes for the SNP and Plaid Cymru would have been affected too. As before, the actual figures are shown in [ ]; I also bring down the figures if a greater proportional system was used, these are shown in { }.  The percentages are how much of the vote that the party actually received under FPTP:

2010: 649 seats [Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition]
Conservatives: (36.1%);  283 seats [306] {235}
Labour (29.0%); 249 seats [258] {189}
Liberal Democrats (23.0%); 88 seats [57] {150}
UKIP (3.1%); [0] {20}
BNP (1.7%); [0] {12}
SNP (1.7%); [6] {11}
Green (1%); [1] {7}
Plaid Cymru (0.6%); [3] {4}
English Democrats (0.2%); [0] {1}


Northern Irish Parties:
DUP (0.6%); [8] {5}
Sinn Fein (0.6%); [5] {5}
SDLP (0.4%); [3] {4}
Alliance (0.1%); [1] {1}
Ulster Conservatives & Unionists - New Force (0.3%); [0] {2}

Unsurprisingly, the Liberal Democrats would have benefited, gaining a total of 19 seats from the Conservatives and 12 from Labour.  Labour would have gained 11 seats from the Conservatives and lost 1 seat to them, but its gains would have been outweighed by the Liberal Democrat gains.  Ultimately, even with AV, the political situation in May 2010 would have been the same as we experienced with FPTP.  Neither the Conservatives nor Labour could have commanded a majority unless they worked with the Liberal Democrats.  Consequently, we most likely would still have ended up with the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that we saw for real in 2010, only with the Liberal Democrats slightly more numerous, but still with less than a third of the seats held by the Conservatives.
 
The main difference that a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition would have had a clear majority without involving other parties, a situation which was not the case in our 2010.  Interestingly, UKIP perhaps is another party which would benefit from AV, especially given its good showing at the 2011 Barnsley by-election.  This may split the Conservative vote, or have potentially offered a different coalition partner for the Conservatives.  You can see why the Conservatives and even many Labour supporters are ambivalent towards AV as it will certainly shift seats from them to the Liberal Democrats.  Thus, looking simply at party interests it would be foolish approach.  However, for all of those people who have voted for the Liberal Democrats only to see their vote not even attempted to be represented in parliament, moving to a fairer system is a necessary step.  

In addition, it is clear from the relative popularity of the Greens, UKIP, SNP and Plaid Cymru that there are other broader interests receiving minimal or no representation despite the votes for them.  As I have noted before, FPTP discourages the appearance of political parties which actually speak to sizeable sections of the constituency.  Sitting to the left of the Labour Party, I certainly feel that no party even comes close to addressing the kind of concerns I have.  Having no chance of representation means parties focused on such voters do not appear, and, in turn, the other parties are not even prompted to address concerns of chunks of the electorate.

Lack of Political Maturity in the UK

Well, we had lots of certainties in the 2010 UK general election.  First it was that David Cameron would walk into office without even really having to think up any policies.  Then we had the idea that there would be a hung parliament and finally that somehow the Liberal Democrats would turn back the clock to 1906 and push Labour into third place.  As Norma Tebbit, a man I loathe, noted in 'The Guardian' today, in part David Cameron lost the election more than Gordon Brown did.  Brown was part of the party that had been in power for 13 years, he looks weary and is not charismatic, but still, Cameron could not defeat him outright.  Partly, it was because of the distorted electoral system in the UK so that despite gaining 2 million more votes than Labour and securing 36.5% of the vote compared to 29%, the Conservatives only managed to get 48 more seats than Labour.

One notable thing about this election is that in many heartland seats both Labour and Conservative more people turned out to support the existing MP or their successor from the same party, than they did in 2005.  It is good for democracy that more people voted, some constituencies were seeing a 73% turnout which is almost unheard of in Britain.  Of course, a lot of these extra votes were 'wasted' because in the UK you only need to win a single vote more than your opponent to win the seat.  Gaining an extra 5-10,000 votes in a constituency is not going to give you anything extra.  This trend was seen most in Scotland where the pattern of representation barely changed and the Conservatives still only have a single seat.  What the party leaders did well, certianly Cameron and Brown, was to alert their core supporters to the fact that if they did not get out and vote they risked having their opponents come to power.  This undermined the surge of the Liberal Democrats.  The tactical voters and their own smaller constituency still turned out, but they were now rather over-shadowed by an upswing in the number of traditional Labour and Conservative voters supporting their natural party.  Greater apathy, as is typical in British elections, ironically, would have benefited the Liberal Democrats.  Ironically, not getting as many seats as they 'deserved' might finally make at least some Conservatives see the benefits of a changed electoral system.

The hung parliament had been discussed and certainly was analysed by all the parties before Thursday's result.  However, the exact figures needed to be in to find out what needed to be done.  We could easily have seen a Conservative government brought to power by the 8 Ulster Unionists if Cameron had only fallen a little short of the figure he needed, hence his visit to Ulster last week.  In addition, with the Liberal Democrats having increased 10-20 seats as I thought they might, rather than drop 5 to 57, they would have been the real kingmakers as at present if all the 'Others' went over to the Conservatives, unlikely I know but still mathematically possible, they could out-vote even a Liberal-Labour combination.  On this basis I heard one Conservative ranting that Brown should not even be trying to form a government and should step aside, unaware that Plaid Cymru, the SNP, the Green MP, the SDLP MPs and the Alliance MP (a Northern Irish party closely aligned with the Liberal Democrats) would vote against the bulk of Conservative legislation, especially public sector cuts.

Britain is not familiar with coalitions, they are seen as something weak and even more damning, foreign.  It is ironic that Britain has had coalitions at the times of greatest challenge: during the First and Second World Wars and during the Depression.  The UK was ruled by a coalition for 21 years of the 20th century, in which time it managed to win two world wars.  I suppose the fact that the last coalition ended in 1945 and the last attempt at a 'pact' ended in 1978 means that because 'the past is a foreign country' even these aspects of British history are perceived by today's electorate as being alien.  Minority governments are weak and whilst people point to the example of 1974, there is also the steps towards a minority government that John Major faced as prime minister in the lead up to the 1994 election.  The Liberal Democrats had said they would not enter a coalition and would come to deals over particular policies.  However, the British, unfamiliar with coalitions as they are would be better served by a proper coalition rather than a limping minority government.

Where the lack of political maturity comes in, is how the public and the media cannot tolerate the deals that are being worked out at present.  In continental Europe and further afield, including in New Zealand, such negotiations are common.  There are benefits in a government which represents a wider range of opinion and it tempers the kind of extreme policies the 'elective dictatorship' of the UK has seen in the past.  The right-wing newspapers who insisted that Cameron had won and now insist that he should be in office, do not want this complication.  They have done all they can to sweep Brown away and despite their slurs and whining, they too were not able to convince the bulk of the population that he had to go.  In fact, those who will suffer most from the cutbacks the Conservatives are lining up, clung to him even tighter than before.  Whether Cameron or Brown is the next prime minister, the British public needs to grow up.  Politics is an adult game, and there is no place for stamping your feet and sulking because the simple picture too many Conservatives painted all along, has not become real.  Just because you are indignant and somehow expect Brown to disappear in a cloud of smoke, it will not happen.  Negotiations are not 'shabby deals' as I saw them described on the front of one right-wing newspaper.  Clearly they expect the Liberal Democrats to say 'yes, Mr. Cameron, you are entirely right, we are wrong, we support everything you want to do, without challenge'; that is never going to happen.

Now the work begins.  Even if Cameron becomes prime minister of a minority government any piece of legislation could be voted down, so I do not see the sharp cuts he has been lusting for coming into force any day soon, especially if, as seems likely there will be an election this Autumn.  The British public has thrown itself into this election in a way it has not done for many years, but the expectation that the outcome is going to be neat and tidy is deluded and betrays the immaturity of too much of the electorate.  To a great degree this is fostered by the constant portrayal of any other political system in Europe or further afield as 'weak' or 'unnatural'.  There is a real snobbery that the UK system is the best and no other is worth even considering, despite the fact that you have to get outside the EU before you can find a system less democratic than ours (remember half of our parliament is unelected; and the head of state is a hereditary position).  Grown up Britain and engage with the whole political process and do not sulk because it did not go the way you wanted the first time round.

There are a couple of other things I would note.  First is, as in 1992, when Labour was in with a chance of gaining power, there were electoral irregularities.  This time round people being turned away from voting, sometimes on discriminatory grounds (students in Sheffield were given their own longer line to queue to vote, whereas other voters were able to vote more quickly) and often insufficient ballot papers were printed.  This is because too many returning officers had become complacent that never more than 55%, perhaps 60% but never 73% of the electorate would turn out.  That is incredibly patronising.  Given that some majorities of both Labour and Conservative MPs are smaller than the numbers of people turned away from polling stations, I trust we will have some re-run ballots in some locations, though I imagine the issue will be fudged, again showing how rickety a democracy we live in.  Fortunately the civil liberties group, Liberty seems to be mounting legal challenges.  This is the kind of problem you expect in Third World countries where democracy is new, not a country like this which has had universal suffrage for over 80 years.

The one joyous piece of news is the failure of the BNP to gain any ground.  This is reported as weakening the party and I hope it is now terminally ill.  Saying this, if they are patient, proportional representation may let them get a path to some MPs, though UKIP will probably be in the queue ahead of them.  However much I loathe the thought of BNP MPs I know, as was proven the case very clearly in Barking at this election, such a threat gets parties, notably Labour, to raise their gain and tackle the issues that drive support to the BNP.

At the end of the day, the run on the stock exchange when Cameron did not win an outright majority shows how little we the electorate actually control our democracy.  Financiers are insisting on a government being assembled by Monday threatening to disrupt the economy even further if it is not formed.  Of course, historically there was always a 'run' on the pound whenever a Labour government was elected.  Blair had to win over the ultra-rich to stand any chance of coming into power in 1997.  Now we are being told that the financiers will not accept any government that will not cut public spending sharply and they are upset that Brown who supports a Keynesian rather than monetarist approach to the banking crisis even remains on the scene.  So, basically, even millions of us (30 million people voted on Thursday) have far less clout in terms of determining the next government that a couple of hundred bankers.

The Nick Clegg Factor

People said they have found the current UK parliamentary election campaign to be dull.  I suppose after the big changes that happened in the USA it must seem a little downbeat, not helped by the fact that people have been talking about the election for so long.  The Conservatives' haranguing of Prime Minister Gordon Brown to call the election may have backfired on all the parties as we feel we have been in the midst of the campaign already for six months if not longer.  To some degree, the mudanity of this campaign conceals how much of a crossroads we have reached in British politics.  Whichever party comes to power it is going to be tough for them as we attempt to clear up the mess in the economy left by the greedy bankers, who of course are already back to their old dangerous tricks, though it was nice to see Goldman Sachs, the leading investment bank in the USA being charged with fraud.  I do hope they suffer harsh penalties for their criminal behaviour, but as yet am not confident they will.  However, the key point in the UK is how we cope with the recession.  It is clear that both Labour and the Conservatives want to cut public expenditure, it is just an issue of in which areas and how fast.  What has become apparent from the speeches of David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader is that if he comes to power with a majority we will see economic policies of a harshness not witnessed in the UK since after the 1983 election. 

This will mean sustained high unemployment and a damage to British industry, let alone to those dependent on social welfare.  Such an approach will increase the divisions in society as people will look for easy scapegoats and will blame people from abroad or other parts of the UK.  This is already what many employers are looking for as they feel the 'whip' of unemployment to get long hours on insecure terms and bad conditions out of workers on frozen or depressed salaries has become too weak in recent years.  High unemployment, they feel, works in their behaviour.  Partly they are right, because given the UK has long been a low income economy and yet people have high levels of consumption based on credit, they can afford to reduce the domestic demand without impinging as heavily on domestic sales in the way you might expect to be the case.

Given the nature of the MPs who would come in with Cameron, we will see the House of Commons with an very elitist flavour with apparently 68 of these MPs coming straight from the banking sector that needs to be reined in.  Brown will have a challenge in restraining outrageous bank behaviour, but Cameron and his MPs will have no interest in even attempting to do this.  Like many people of my generation and even younger, we really fear a return to the 1980s which is not the big hair, cocktail glamour that it is portrayed as now, but millions of people suffering years of unemployment, low incomes and whole swathes of the UK simply being wastelands of boarded up shops and houses, as a result.  Thus, this is actually a very important election.  There is the other factor of preventing the rise of the racist BNP (British National Party) and their watered down equivalent UKIP (UK Independence Party), both of which seem perched on the edge of getting some representation and no doubt will locally in the areas with local elections on the same day as the general election.

Another factor which makes this election interesting is the possibility that it has suddenly become a three-party race.  That has not been the case, probably, since 1923 when the Conservatives had 234 seats, Labour 188 seats and the Liberals 183 seats.  The eclipsing of the Liberal Party by the Labour Party in the 1930s was very rapid.  The Liberals struggled with single figures of MPs in the 1950s.  Whilst holding the balance of power March 1977 - July 1978 when there was a minority Labour government in power (a minority government is one which does not have a majority of MPs over all the other parties combined in the House of Commons; it is usually still the largest party though).  The 1990s and 2000s saw a renaissance of the Liberal Democrats, the latest version of the Liberal Party, though Tony Blair's vast majority in 1997 meant that plans for having the Liberal Democrats in with Labour in the 'big tent' cabinet were shelved.  The Liberal Democrats rose from 20 MPs in 1992 to 46 in 1997 to 52 in 2001 to 62 in 2005.  This is more seats than any combination of Liberal parties has had since 1935.  Of course, they are still behind the Conservatives with 198 seats and Labour with 356 seats. 

The big change in how the Liberal Democrats were perceived following the debate between the leaders of the three main parties on 14th April 2010.  This was the first televised debate between the party leaders in British history and mimics closely the model used on US television first in 1960 and then intermittently afterwards.  There have been regular jokes since 2007 when Nick Clegg became Liberal Democrat party leader than he was 'unknown'.  To some degree this is because in our very media-conscious age all the part leaders simply look like different varieties of bank manager.   However, appearing on a programme watched by more than 9 million people and which has generated a lot of general media coverage since, has helped massively. Labour and the Conservatives have been pretty successful marginalising the Liberal Democrats and in turn they seem to have shifted steadily from being more radical than New Labour in 1997 to seeming like a pale version of the Conservatives, only really marked out by a pro-European Union stance.  Now with the recession they seem to be ready to embrace more radical solutions and whilst not back left of the Labour Party do seem to have some radicalism about them once again.  After the lame duck leadership of Charles Kennedy (1999-2006) and Menzies Campbell (2006-7), in part Clegg, slowly, seems to be capturing a little of dynamism of Paddy Ashdown, leader 1988-99.

With the election of Tony Blair to being prime minister in 1997 just before his 44th birthday has made youth appear at a premium in British politics. Brown is 59; Cameron is 43 and Clegg is three months younger.  Cameron is very much old fashioned elitist Conservative, his long-term friendship with the moronic Mayor of London, Boris Johnston, does not help.  Brown seems to have aged a great deal while in office, though is much younger than some prime ministers of the past; Winston Churchill first came to power in 1940 at the age of 66 and was in office in 1955; Margaret Thatcher was 54 when she came to power in 1979 and was still there until late 1990.  So, Clegg appeared to be of that youthful style that is currently in demand.  As the two other parties have effectively kept him out of the spotlight, I believe has actually now helped, because Clegg's party's ideas now seem fresh.  He also presents them in a clear and logical way.  This morning the first poll to put a Liberal Democrat in the lead to become prime minister, came out.  There has not been anthing like that since probably 1918-20.

The issue for the Liberal Democrats has always been that the first-past-the-post system in the UK never distributes seats evenly depending on the percentage of the vote the party receives.  The classic example was in the 1951 election when the Labour Party received more votes than in 1950 but received fewer seats.  At the 2005 election the Liberal Democrats got 22.1% of the vote (but 9.6% of the seats; back in 1992 they got 17.9% of the vote but only 3.1% of the seats), the Conservatives got 32.3% and Labour 35.3% of the vote.  On vote percentage division the Liberal Democrats would have got 144 seats; Conservatives 210 seats and Labour 230 seats, making a minority government.  This means that the Liberal Democrats need more than twice as many votes as the other parties to get a seat; the Conservatives lose out a little, but it is far simpler for Labour to get seats these days with them securing 126 seats more than they would have get through the proportional distribution.  This is why the Conservatives want to redraw the electoral boundaries.  The fact that the Liberal Democrats need to struggle harder to get seats, as a lot of their constituencies are in large rural areas on the periphery of the UK, opens them up to the allegation that a vote for them is a 'wasted' vote.  If people believed they could get into power, more people would vote for them.  This is one reason why the Liberal Democrats do well in local elections.  They control 65 local councils, and a total of 4,200 local, 21% of the seats from 25% of the votes, ahead of Labour.

Of course, the political parties know they can no longer ignore or easily dismiss Clegg and you have immediately seen Cameron say that Clegg would simply usher in more years of Labour.  Of course, even if Clegg went into a pact with a minority Labour government it could not be the same Labour government that it would be if it won a majority.  The Liberal Democrats would bring far more pro-European and electoral reform policies into the mix, something Cameron could not stomach if he had to work with the Liberal Democrats to gain power, especially since the Conservatives in the European Parliament abandoned fellow conservatives for a right-wing extremist bloc.  The Liberal Democrats would not tolerate the kind of cuts Cameron is envisaging.  He has positioned his party almost as far as he can from the Liberal Democrats, overly cocky that he would not have to work at all hard to get into power, it would be gifted him.

Thus, even if the public now likes Clegg, there is still a long way for his party to go to get the votes, let alone the seats to form a government.  As was highlighted on the BBC news over the weekend, with our current electoral system, even to achieve additional seats in double figures, and, for example, lift the Liberal Democrats up to 80 seats would need a swing of 6% against both the Conservatives and Labour in marginal seats.  However, there are a number of seats where the non-Conservative support is split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats almost equally and a shift in such seats would certainly make David Cameron's job a lot harder.  This is in contrast to both a year or so ago and the day the election was announced when it was assumed that the Conservatives would 'walk' into power.  Now they not only face a battle with Labour by the Liberal Democrats too.  Whilst it seems unlikely that the Liberal Democrats can win, a loss of seats for Labour and a smaller than previously expected gain for the Conservatives was already being considered, with the Liberal Democrats as powerbrokers for government, even before Clegg's successful television performance.  Baroness Shirley Williams a Liberal Democrat peer who was Paymaster General and Secretary of State for Education and Science in the Labour government when the Lib-Lab pact was in force in 1977-8 (she left the Labour Party in 1981 and was in the SDP and then Liberal Democrats), has said the Liberal Democrats would work with a minority government on an issue-by-issue basis rather than forming a pact with one party or the other.  Calls for a government of national unity are likely to fall on deaf ears especially as the Conservatives have re-embraced Thatcherite economic policies once more.

The price for Liberal Democrat support of course will be proportional representation, a policy embraced by Labour until it won massively in 1997.  As I have highlighted on this blog before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-if-proportional-representation.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-has-it-taken-so-long-to-even-get.html  this would change the face of British politics forever.  Given the corruption among MPs we have seen this year that is probably necessary.  By potentially allowing in a far wider spectrum of parties more people would feel their voices were being heard.  Of course, it depends on the model as (West) Germany has had proportional representation since 1949 and yet only the SPD and CDU/CSU have dominated the governments for sixty years.  In Britain with a centre party almost already stronger than the FDP in Germany (93 out of 622 seats in the Bundestag) a three-party system under proportional representation would appear to become the norm.  Of course, extremist parties are likely to appear (though Germany has seen off extremists like the NPD and Republikaner parties through a minimum of 5% of the vote needed) but then that would challenge  the major parties to address the issues these parties raise; the same goes for the Green Party.

So, whilst we may already be weary of the election, 2010 is going to be a year in which we may see a more radical change than even the Conservatives are seeking and we finally see the face of British politics change for the first time in almost 90 years.

Pacts and Tents - the Liberal Democrats and Labour

I was quite surprised to find out this week that prime minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown has been in negotiations with the Liberal Democrat party to see if they would like some of their MPs to have seats in Brown's government which will be formed next week. Even though the Labour government's majority in 2005 slid from 165 in 2001 (and 179 in 1997) to 66, this does not seem small enough for Brown to be scrabbling around looking to form a coalition in order to get legislation passed.

The relationship between Labour and the Liberal Democrats (and their ancestors the Liberals) is a long one. From 1903-18, the two parties had an electoral pact which meant that the Liberals would not contest some seats where Labour candidates were likely to win. Many early Labour MPs had been former Liberals anyway. With the rise of the working class it was liable that Labour would eclipse the Liberals anyway. Liberal support enabled the first Labour government, a minority one (they were dependent on the votes of other parties to be sure of passing legislation) in 1924. In March 1977 the so-called 'Lib-Lab' pact was established between the two parties because James Callaghan's Labour government was now a minority one too. The country was facing severe economic crises due to inflation and felt obliged, through pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to drop Keynesian approaches to the economy (e.g. stimulating consumer demand and so reducing unemployment through creating public-backed works) for more Monetarist ones. Callaghan delayed the election until 1979 and the Conservatives won the power they would hold for 18 years.

Before the 1997 election which brought Tony Blair and his party to power, Blair was concerned that he might end up with a minority government. Labour had been out of power for almost two decades but memories attributed to them many negative attributes, most of them false, of being a 'tax and spend' party and in the pockets of the trade unions (which by 1997 had been basically destroyed by Thatcher anyway) so he approached the Liberal Democrats with what was called the 'big tent' suggesting some of their leading MPs would come into the government. However, when Blair won the landslide in 1997 he had no need of the Liberal Democrats and they and many of the policies they supported such as proportional representation for elections and other constitutional reform were forgotten.

Despite the Blair party not needing them, the Liberal Democrats have prospered. In 2005 they gained 22% of the vote and 62 seats (the Conservatives got 32.4% of the vote but 198 seats, more than three times as many) which is the largest number they had achieved since 1923, rising from 52 in 2001 and 56 in 1997. Is Brown worried he will lose more seats at the next election now that the glamour of Blair has gone, the party is restructuring itself away from being the Blairist party to a modern form of Labour Party or that current Conservative Party leader, David Cameron seems the first credible one for a decade? So far the Liberal Democrats have rebuffed Brown, partly it seems they were embarrassed by press coverage. Sir Menzies Campbell, the least dynamic Liberal Democrat leader probably since the 1970s seems uncertain what he wants anyway. It is no suprise Brown turned to Lord Ashdown, the Liberal Democrat leader 1988-99 and supporter of the 1970s Lib-Lab pact, but he too has turned the prime minister down.

Are the Liberal Democrats still smarting about being wooed and then spurned in 1997? Blair's arrogance made him behave foolishly then, as even if he had no longer needed Liberal Democrat support he did not need to turn away from them so abruptly. The Liberal Democrats may be biding their time, waiting for a better offer or to see how Brown's regime turns out. Sometime in the early 1990s the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party passed each other on the political spectrum. As the 'centre' had shifted farther to the right with Thatcher and Labour moved to the new centre, the Liberal Democrats adhered to what had been characteristic of the centre back in the 1980s and indeed before. Now with everyone further right than them, they seem to be the radicals.

The Liberal Democrats' opposition to the Iraq War, their strong support for the European Union including introduction of the Euro currency to the UK, their strong green policies, their wish to reform the tax system to benefit the poorest, all of these things seem more left-wing than what Labour espouses. They also stand for a secular society which these days seems quite radical if one listens to the faith-supporting Christian Democrat core of Blair's party. Maybe Brown wants to inject some Liberal Democrat radicalism to counteract the rightist views of the Blairites who will remain numerous in his party. Maybe Labour is running out of ideas and to get the Liberal Democrats into the government will be less embarrassing than stealing ideas from them at arm's length. Labour has always had Liberal input. Its welfare state model of the 1940s was that of William Beveridge, a Liberal not a Socialist; its economic policy was first economic planning, again propounded by some Liberals in the 1920s then from 1948-76, Keynesian economics and again John Maynard Keynes was a Liberal, not a Socialist.

What gains and losses would the Liberal Democrats face from a working relationship? If Brown follows Blair's line and embarrassingly follows the USA into terrible wars the Liberal Democrats own members would condemn the party for being part of this. On the other hand it would be the first time Liberals were properly in the government for decades and might allow Liberal Democrats' views to get a greater airing and maybe they will gain credibility by showing they can serve in office. This is a game that has high stakes, but if the Liberal Democrats play it sensibly, the second decade of the 21st century may see a three-party political arena that is more dynamic than that seen in the second decade of the 20th century. Debate and choice are always to the advantage of the electorate.

UK local elections - narrow crack in the window of change

Yesterday I scrolled through the blogs that exist beside mine and was pleasantly surprised that within a handful of clicks I had seen blogs in most of the world's major languages (including textspeak used on SMS and blogs, it seems). So, I am very conscious, that even though no-one is coming to my page it is hanging very much in a global context. Hence, I feel I have to apologise for its parochial nature. I suppose though, we are the parts that you can make a sum of, so if you are interested in picking up the fragments in English about the state of society and politics and one man's wellbeing, in the UK which has 1/70th of the world's population then read on.

Yesterday, 5th May 2007, was a day for local elections in the UK. Not every seat on every council is elected each three year period, so you only get a patchy voting picture across the country. However, these elections are usually taken to be a vote of confidence or no confidence on the party in power. Though Labour lost 460 seats across the country, and the Conservatives have the largest number since 1978, that kind of thing is typical for a party coming to the end of its third term in office. There were the 'national' elections for Wales and Scotland too and for the first time, the SNP (the Scottish party wanting independence for Scotland from the UK) became the largest party with 47 seats to 46 Labour seats in the Scottish Parliament. They may form a coalition or be a minority government or in theory a Labour-Liberal Democrat (the Liberal Democrats got 16 seats, the Conservatives 17) coalition could rule. The UN said many years ago it would give Scotland a seat in the general assembly if a pro-independence party won more than 50% of the vote in Scotland and that day might not be far off. The rise from having less than 10 MPs in London in the 1970s has been swift(ish) and strong, partly helped by New Labour becoming a Christian Democrat party leaving the SNP on its left and many of the most radical left-wing politicians, agitators, etc. in the UK have always come from Scotland and public housing has always been more common, so Labour has left the SNP a lot of popular ground there to seize.

The Liberal Democrats did the worst really through gaining very little and losing quite a bit. As the smaller of the major UK-wide parties they have always been strong locally and people who would not vote for them for government would often support them for their town council, not now it seems. Such people have gone to the Conservatives who seem to have shed their Thatcherite clothes and the blandness of the 'small, quite man' era of John Major, William Hague and Ian Duncan-Smith and David Cameron looks terribly like Tony Blair did 10-12 years ago and he has been clever in portraying himself as being green too. I hate the Conservatives for what they did to the UK in the 1980s and 1990s and making my life and that of millions filled with fear and uncertainty. Many millions clearly disagreed with my view of the period or have forgotten it. Whilst I do not see the Conservatives winning the next general election, expected in 2009, the one in 2013/4 might be theirs.

Back to the Liberal Democrats. The inter-relation of national and local politics is always hard to disentangle, but it seems that public image is playing as big a part as ever and after losing their previous leader Charles Kennedy due to alcoholism, his successor Sir Menzies Campbell seems too aged and staid to catch the interest of the electorate, though ironically, voting among the under-25s is at an all-time low, so he must be near to the age of the majority of the people who actually vote, but clearly they prefer someone who looks like their son-in-law rather than the leader of the residents' association. It is interesting what phases we go through, in the early 1990s there was a fad for leaders who looked like bank managers, John Major as prime minister, had actually been one, and John Smith leader of the Labour party at the time resembled one. Now the fad is for men who look like young lawyers, Tony Blair was one and David Cameron looks like one; even Alex Salmond, leader of the SNP could be said to fall into that category.

Locally I have had a run in with the Liberal Democrats after they sent round patronising leaflets telling me my hedge should be cut back and the refuse bin lids must be closed (where they think we should keep all the rubbish that we cannot fit into the bin each week, I do not know) and the Conservatives and Labour have similarly treated us no better. An Independent had posters out but strangely did not appear on the ballot paper. Torn between this choice of very similar candidates all trying to treat me like a child, I spoilt my paper. It hurts me to do that because I know how long people fought for the vote and how few people in the world have a vote at all, but I could not offer to support to any of the arrogant incompetents laying before me. In my town, the Conservatives took every seat from the Liberal Democrats on offer this year, so clearly I was not the only one upset by their publicity. I used to prefer it when I lived in London and you had about 20 different parties to choose from and had to roll up the ballot paper. I do not like anarchy, but neither do I like stagnant politics with parties all offering the same and sneering at me because I have no other choice. At least this election seems to have opened up the field by a chink and Scotland will be interesting to watch.

One thing that did hearten me is the minimal progress of the BNP (British National Party) the main fascist party in the UK. They gained 10 seats but lost 8 seats across the whole country. That is 10 seats too many, but at least their progress is slow. They certainly cause trouble wherever they make progress and it is for the peace of the country that it is good that they remain marginalised. Fortunately, it seems that all of those who spout racist statements unapologetically (usually started with 'I'm not a racist, but these immigrants/asylum seekers/etc....') cannot be bothered to vote. Turn out was 30-40% depending on the area of the country which suggests about 2 out of 3 voters do not care who runs their council, though you can guarantee they will moan when the town moves to fortnightly waste collections (as many are doing) or increases parking fees or closes a school.