Among yesterday’s front pages was a data visualisation which, at first glance, was one of the most effective I’ve ever seen: the Independent had made an infographic showing yesterday’s £6bn budget cuts in context - as a fraction of a debt mountain.
Then I looked closer - and something’s very, very wrong.
Can you tell what it […]
Yesterday, Hamid Karzai was officially declared Afghan president for a second term after an election marred by widespread vote rigging and fraud.
Those of us lucky to live in a stable and developed democracy like the UK will rest easy that our election – which is now no more than six months away – won’t be afflicted by the same issues. We shouldn’t.
The next UK general election is unlikely to be hit by an onset of fraud, though woefully inadequate postal voting controls make it at least a possibility.
The reality is that generally, expense claims aside, the UK’s political parties are generally honest. Our problem is an electoral system that is out of date, unrepresentative, and plain unfair. And it’s not voters for smaller parties that have the big problem. It’s the Conservatives.
The most recent October polls give the Conservative party a 10 to 17 percentage point poll lead over Labour. But thanks to the unusual distribution of voters in the UK (Conservatives remain concentrated in the south-east of the country) and outdated constituency borders, that might not lead to the landslide you’d think.
Prof Steve Fisher of Oxford University calculates that if the Liberal Democrats and other smaller parties were to retain the vote share they took in 2005, the Conservatives could secure a 10-point poll lead over Labour and still not secure a majority.
In fact, if the Conservatives polled anywhere between 1 and 10 points higher than Labour, they would be unlikely secure a majority in the Commons. Even if the Liberal Democrats only polled at their current level of 18% (in 2005 they hit 22%), the Conservative party would need a lead of more than 9 points in the polls to form the next government without the aid of a coalition.
Given polls tighten in the run-up to almost any election, it’s far from inconceivable that Cameron’s party could secure a virtual landslide in the popular vote and still fail to form the next government – a situation that makes George Bush narrowly securing the Presidency in 2000 despite losing the popular vote look virtually entirely sensible.
By contrast, if Labour managed to even match the Conservative vote share, they’d have a small majority in Parliament, and form the next government. The outcome of the next election might be decided by the voters, but the voting system reflects their demands very poorly.
In 2005 Labour received 27,000 votes for each Westminster seat it secured. For each Conservative seat, they received over 44,000. For smaller parties, it was much worse: 115,000 people voted Liberal Democrat for each MP elected, while more than 600,000 people voted for UKIP without a single MP gaining a seat.
Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats respectively received 35%, 32% and 22% of our votes in 2005. Thanks to our warped electoral system, this turned into 55%, 31% and 10% of seats in Westminster. If the role of democracy is to represent the will of the people, the UK’s voting system is doing a terrible job.
The UK might be the mother of Parliaments, and has a fairly-solid claim to be the world’s oldest democracy. That’s no reason for complacency. Indeed, it should be the opposite.
Many people support the constituency system for selecting MPs, to keep links between communities and parliamentarians strong. But we should not assume, without a genuine national debate, that an electoral system which distorts the will of the voters is a price worth paying for this link. Regional top-ups, such as those used for the Scottish Parliament or Welsh Assembly.
UK voters are among the luckiest in the world. Unlike Afghani voters, we will be able to go to the ballot box without fear. We can be confident their votes will be counted. We can be sure their vote is free.
Under this system, we can’t be sure it’s fair. It’s time to rethink it.
