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how UK general elections since 1922 would have turned out if the 'first past the post' system in place in the UK had been replaced by proportional representation.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

Simon Hoggart: Advocate of Eco-Crime

Regular readers of this blog, if there is such a thing, know that I am often stimulated to comment by things written in 'The Guardian' newspaper. I am typical of many British liberals in that I get my information from it and the BBC News, these days usually online rather than watching television. However, this does not stop me being irritated by the things it says. If I pick up a copy of the far more right-wing 'Daily Mail' or 'The Daily Telegraph' then I get even more irritated, but such a high level of irritation is probably not healthy for me and there are not enough hours in the day for me to blog about them all. I suppose one issue is that with the centre ground of British politics having shifted so far to the right since 1976/9, that me, Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill let alone Sir Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan and Tony Benn are left looking like left-wing extremists. I know Churchill was strongly opposed to the Socialists, but if you look at his policies these days they would seem to be of the extreme left-wing variety: a mixed economy plus a strong welfare state. Partly that comes from the fact that the Labour revolution of 1945-51 was more Liberal than Socialist in its outlook.

Anyway, we are getting off track. So, 'The Guardian' is the daily newspaper which sits closest to me politically though these days the gap is quite wide. I have also noted that too often it allows weak analysis into its articles which with a little sub-editorial work would have been picked up. However, as the 'Bad Science' column of that very newspaper constantly shows, actually stopping and thinking about things, digging below the attention grabbing headlines, is something that very few people do these days. They want shocking, easy answers rather than ones that involve real thinking. I was recommended to check out the new movie 'Idiocracy' (2006). I have no idea why I have never come across this before. However, it is about a man from present day who is put into suspended animation for 500 years and awakes in a world in which everything has been 'dumbed down'. It is a satire on current US society, but you can really believe it when you see what is written and broadcast without giving any thought to it.

On this basis I come to the columnist Simon Hoggart. He was recently selected by John Prescott to represent the essence of British middle class people. He has a very nice job, he churns out a column in 'The Guardian' on Saturday which aside from being far shorter, is really little different to this blog. The major thing is of course he gets paid for it. He pokes some gentle fun at middle class mores such as the round-robin letters sent at Christmas and recounts his life as he goes on innumerable holidays and for dinners and so on. However, there is a very dangerous thing about Hoggart and this is why I have invented the new crime of 'advocacy of eco-crime'. I accept that aside from fining people for dumping hazardous waste, eco-crime as a branch of the law is not overly developed, but I imagine that will change in the future. The advocacy element of my charge comes from legislation we do have in the UK, introduced in 2005 to punish people who whilst they may not take part in terrorism, encourage terrorism or justify or glorify it, not just in the UK but anywhere in the world.

Why do I feel that Hoggart should be charged with 'advocacy of eco-crime'? It is his incessant attacks on wind turbines. He represents these as the 'cathedrals' of what he sees as the 'religion' of environmentalism. He neglects to comment on the other 'religions' of our modern society, in particularly the highly damaging cult of consumerism which, generally unchallenged, has been setting the agenda for government policies and public behaviour certainly since the 1960s if not longer. It has 'cathedrals' in every town centre and out-of-town retail park, but I see no complaint about the rubbish and pollution these generate in vast quantities. On the basis of seeing concerns with the environment as a damaging 'religion' he simply portrays the environmentalists as misguided, foolish and to some extent dangerous. His particular gripe is with wind turbines which he feels are ugly, generate a minimal amount of electricity, wear out too quickly (despite lasting as long as a coal, oil or nuclear fuelled power station) and thus drive people away from the areas where they are introduced wrecking the tourist economy. I have seen a single wind turbine power a whole village and a factory without emitting any smoke. I do not need any more convincing of the need for them. Hoggart forgets that in the early 19th century before the country began filling with smog, air and water pollution many English counties had 200-400 windmills, to the extent that it was difficult to be anywhere without seeing one. For some reason, windmills which were a great fire hazard (due to the flour in the air you could not light a candle inside one and any spark could cause an explosion), are seen as attractive and useful but wind turbines are somehow evil. Given the strange concern about the appearance of wind turbines many are now being built out to sea, but this is still not enough. In Dorset I came across a campaign to prevent wind turbines built 16Km off shore. Would they rather have a coal-fired power station on Portland Bill instead? One advantage of wind turbines that Hoggart and others forget is that if you take them down you can erase all trace of them, but the site where a power station has been is contaminated for decades, just look at the site of the Millenium Dome built in South London where a gas-fired power station had stood. It took months to clean up the site before it was safe to build anything on it; nuclear power stations leave an even greater legacy.

Hoggart is a man of double standards. He seems delighted that some environmentalists have now seen nuclear power as the quickest way for the world to reduce its CO2 emissions. Hoggart sees this as vindication of his attacks on environmentalists (in this case Stephen Tindale, former director of Greenpeace and Chris Goodall a candidate for the Green Party) and that there should have been no opposition to nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s, as if it would all be fine by now because we would have loads of nuclear power stations. He argues their switch in opinion demonstrates that environmentalists cannot be trusted, suggesting that we should never listen to them again. Again, this simply is derived from Hoggart's bile rather than thinking through the actual developments. The environmentalists are no big fans of nuclear power they know the risks it brings (anyone who lived through the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 is aware of this; the mutations among children born affected by it are absolutely horrific even more than twenty years on), but they see it as numerous Pacific nations are on the verge of disappearing beneath the sea as the lesser of two evils. If the UK had embraced nuclear power in the 1970s to the scale that Hoggart feels is necessary, then we could be looking at a large area, say of Cumbria (location of Windscale/Sellafield plant) and neighbouring counties around that would be uninhabitable; as it is the sea off there has major ecological damage to creatures. The UK is tiny compared to Belarus and more densely populated; 4000 people died after the Chernobyl disaster in the UK it would have been many times more.

If the UK government had not dilly-dallied over alternative sources of energy and got down to developing these in the 1970s when the oil price rises were an impetous, the UK would be in a far better position now. UK scientists were at the cutting edge in wind and wave power but a lot of their projects were under-funded or allowed to go abroad. Almost forty years have passed and Britain is only slowly making use of alternative energy. We are in a different world now, the policies of the 1970s whether from government or environmentalists would not fit in the late 2000s. Hoggart complains about the religion of environmentalism and yet he also wants to punish the 'believers' for not being sufficiently dogmatic in their views over a 40-year period. He conveniently edits his memory. I read a copy of the children's magazine 'Look and Learn' from 1964 and it outlined the damage CFCs from aerosol sprays were doing to the environment and it took thirty years to begin eliminate them from products. The environmentalists were right about that, yet to Hoggart they must be wrong or he forgets it.

Thus, I charge Simon Hoggart, columnist with the crime of advocacy of eco-crime. He has abused his influential position to glorify dangerous policies towards energy in the UK. He has sought to persuade influential people to adopt approaches that will halt the growth of much needed wind turbines and so is contributing both to the shortage of energy in the UK but also to air and water pollution and the rising of the world's average temperature. He has sought to ridicule those going about legitimate business in promoting a more thoughtful development in these areas simply on the basis of them responding to changing circumstances. He has allowed those arguing his line not to be challenged on their inconsistencies and simply often irrational behaviour to these issues.

Hoggart's punishments will be to move to the Wittenham Clumps in South Oxfordshire and every morning open his curtains to see how the vast towers of Didcot power station to the North-West blights the entire landscape of this otherwise beautiful part of England. He will be to house a family from a Pacific island which has gone under water because he has persuaded people not to move to methods of providing power that cost others so much in terms of their homes and identity. Of course he will be forced away from his column. He has had a free hand to whine on incessantly about his own, perverse perspective on things for too long; 'The Guardian' should be embarrassed to keep on employing him and should relieve him of his duties and allow more rational, thoughtful people into his place.

P.P. 22/3/2010: This weekend I noted that Hoggart, clearly out of wind turbines to complain about has now turned to cyclists, portraying them as being 'dangerous' when transported on trains.  What he failed to note in his complaint against cyclists using public transport is that even a decade ago cyclists and other passengers were not compelled to mix; us cyclists simply lifted out bicycle into the guards van and stood with it all the way.  It is the removal of these that has forced bicycles to mix with other passengers.  Even so, bicycles on trains are no more hazardous on trains that the pushchairs, skis and snowboards, let alone the vast luggage, that Hoggart seems to have no problem with.  Has he set himself a mission of trying to curtail any form of activity which will help reduce air pollution and eke out our fossil fuel supplies?

Do Greener Paths to the Future Need to Be So Conflicting?

This afternoon the Virgin airline company is flying a Boeing 747 from London to Amsterdam with one engine powered by bio fuel made up of oil from a nut grown in rain forests and ordinary coconuts. This event in the past might have been praised as finding a way to provide sustainable airline fuel, which is daily used in vast quantities, as a substitute for fossil fuels. However, the event has been severely criticised as nothing but a publicity stunt and green groups such as Friends of the Earth have pointed to the fact that bio fuels produce more greenhouse gases both in their growth and in their use than conventional fuels. They also argue that growing bio fuels takes away land that should be used to produce food. They also dismiss Virgin's plans for developing algae-based fuels as impossible in decades. Sir Richard Branson the head of Virgin is probably wondering why he even bothered. His argument is that the nuts will make rain forests more necessary and so people will be less willing to deforest and that the coconuts come from plantations where people cannot even sell their nuts normally.

Now it is clear that there are differing views of the future and most greens would like all of us to stop travelling away from where we live certainly by aeroplane and to only eat locally-produced food. We would go back to a kind of 18th century model of living. As it is, in the UK mobility is being reduced greatly given the sharp increases in fuel and public transport prices, but that is not being done on any environmental basis, simply due to the greed of companies. Trains are lesser polluters than cars, lorries and aircraft but it is now more expensive to go by train from Cornwall in South-West England to West Scotland than it is to fly to Cuba and stay in a hotel for a week. You can have a holiday in Egypt for less than a train fare from London to Newcastle in North-East England.

The world as a whole produces too much food and has been wasting vast quantities of it for decades. The European Union has long encouraged farmers to 'set aside' land from production for other uses or just to lie fallow so as to reduce food production. Now I accept that much of this land is not in regions of the world producing tropical fruit but rape seed which grows in vast quantities in the UK is a bio fuel too. The world can feed everyone who currently lives on it, it is just that the food resources are held by the rich and the agricultural economies of much of the world is distorted to satiate the rich, at cheap prices, rather than feed locals. Fair trade approaches are beginnning to assist a little but will not alter two centuries of distortion overnight.

As I have noted before, control of oil has taken over from first religion and then politics as the prime cause of wars in our contemporary world. So whilst bio fuels may have difficulties at present if more people can grow fuel in many parts of the world it should reduce the fighting to capture what is becoming an increasingly rare resource and we have known that for the past four decades.

Branson represents one view of the future which is a capitalist, global economy that pays attention to its impacts on the environment and on people. There is a much more popular model which is that simply capitalism proceeds as it is at the moment chewing up everything and everyone in its way. Now, I am no advocate for Branson, but I am relieved that he seems to behave more in the way that many Victorian businessmen did, tempering his drive for profits with other concerns. He could simply continue to run his airlines on the fuel they currently use and not bother to experiment, but he feels it is important to do so.

The green movement keeps making a huge error that undermines its campaigns. It keeps offering us one option: return to the 18th century or die. Now for the bulk of the population sitting in brightly lit houses, microwaving their meals, playing with their ipods, flying for holidays in Spain, the 18th century is not an attractive prospect. They are willing to take that gamble than give up all the things that they feel they have worked hard for (and which it is becoming increasingly difficult to get hold of as prices rise and wages stay stagnant). So, the bulk of us are not going to listen and we are not going to alter our behaviour to benefit the planet.

Personally I have long encountered this 'all or nothing' approach from the greens. Back in 1980s I was an enthusiastic youth and with my housemates recycled and did all we could living in a Midlands town to address environmental issues. Then I went to a talk which featured all the candidates in the local election. Me and my friend were on the front row knowing that the Green Party candidate was going to be there and were interested to hear what she had to say. That was the day we abandoned all attempts to be green. When her turn came she made no effort to try to win over anyone in the audience and simply said in the following words 'you will never be like us, you will never really understand'. She made it appear that she would feel dirtied to receive the votes of the audience. In addition, it seemed to me as an impressionable supporter that however hard I worked I would never be able to reach the perception or the status of this 'us' she spoke about. She left that hall with less support than she had entered it with, but probably felt righteous through her patronising of what she saw as the greedy idiots killing her planet.

Green movements no matter what their focus need to learn from religions. Christianity offers the model of Hell but it also offers Heaven as a reward for living a good life. At the moment the greens simply keep showing us different versions of Hell without any suggestion of how a green, sustainable world could look like (and not just one that is the 18th century recycled - people are not going to give up on high tech); this is why Branson is popular he seems to indicate a time when you could travel without damaging the Earth in doing so.

Another aspect that the greens overlook is that those religions that have an 'elect' that you are born into, die out, they do not grow and they do not prosper in the meantime. Addressing environmental issues is too important to adopt that approach. You need to win over a much larger chunk of the population, because even if say, 75% of the ordinary British people supported green movements actively their influence would be minimal against the 0.1% of the population who are super-rich. However, the greens seem to be making no effort even to address the bulk of the population. Again they need to look at how religions did it. In the past some men and women would become monks and nuns. They were a small elite in society, living godly ways. However, many would reach out into the local communities and some people would become lay brothers, associated with the monastery but not taking vows and other people would help the monastery with money and labour. A successful movement needs to ripple out into its community or it becomes cut off. Those bodies which have a single rule and turn away anyone who does not match their standards will not thrive. There are millions of young people who could support green movements but if it has strict rules they are never going to participate. There are millions of families who could reduce their consumption of fuels, plastics, paper, water, and so on, but they need it set out in easy steps otherwise like me twenty years ago they will simply give up and go for the easy option of not bothering at all.

It is a great sensation to feel righteous and patronise the idiots in society, however, more greens have got to give up this power trip and realise that if they are going to lay foundations for real change for our planet's benefit they need to come up with an offer to the bulk of the population which is more appealing than 'change or die'. Despite what you might think most people will gamble on the 'die' option especially when so many scientists and politicians give us conflicting information about what that entails or what causes it. It may be uncomfortable to sit down with Branson who you see as a self-publicist, but at least he has made more steps in your direction than the bulk of businesspeople and if you avoid ridiculing you may find you can get his money and influence behind you. It is better to show people, gently, the error of their ways, than to dismiss their efforts which have often been at heavy cost to them as worthless. When the green movement lost me in 1988, it probably did not notice, but there are others who have a lot more power and influence than me who could accelerate achieving many green objectives. Responsibility for the destruction of the planet will not lie with the attitudes the green movement adopted, however, responsibility for not changing the minds of sufficient people to stop that destruction will lie with them.