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at how UK general elections since 1922 would have turned out if the 'first past the post' system in place in the UK had been replaced by proportional representation.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.

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.