Where did the political system go so wrong?

Isn’t that the question we should be asking ourselves in the UK today?  How could a system that is supposed to ensure democracy suddenly start producing such undemocratic results?  How could this system produce such an unrepresentative Parliament?

Let’s look at the statistics from the 2015 General Election to provide some rigorous mathematical evidence:

• Total number of voter registrations = 46,814,081
•  Actual voter turnout = 66.1%
• Total number of votes cast = 30,944,108
• Total number of valid votes cast[1] = 30,691,680

From just these four figures you can see that we already have a problem of unrepresentativeness in the electoral system with a huge 33.9% of registered voters not even bothering to vote due to apathy caused by an almost complete disconnect with the political process.  For whatever reason, millions of registered voters felt that it was not worth the time to vote in the election.  Was that reason because they couldn’t find a candidate in whom they had confidence?  Was it because the party they wanted to vote for was not fielding a candidate in their constituency?  Or was the reason much more fundamental – a complete lack of faith in the veracity of politicians and the ‘First-Past-The-Post’ (FPTP) electoral system altogether?  These questions need to be answered.

In the FPTP electoral system the single winner is the person or party with the most votes; this does not mean that they have to have an absolute majority of votes, just a relative/simple majority.  This, however, can lead to some very dodgy results and has led the Electoral Reform Society to argue that FPTP is "bad for voters, bad for government and bad for democracy".  The graphic below shows how unrepresentative the results were in the 2015 General Election.

Table: The disproportionality of parliament in the 2015 election was 15.04 according to the Gallagher Index, mainly between the UKIP and Conservative Parties.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_2015

As you can see from the table, the disparity between the percentage of votes cast for a particular party and the percentage of seats they won is, in some cases, hard to figure out.  How, for instance, can the Conservatives only get 36.8% of the vote but win 50.77% of the seats in Parliament?  Is it fair that the UK Independence Party (UKIP) got 12.6% of the votes but only won 0.15% of the seats?  And how can the Scottish National Party (SNP) get 4.7% of the votes but get 8.62% of the seats?

It seems that the current allocation of seats is hardly representative of the actual will of the nation.  In fact, under Proportional Representation (PR), a much more valid representation of the wishes of the country, the winners in terms of seats gained would be UKIP and the Green Party (as you can see from the infographics below).

Source: http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/heres-how-the-election-results-would-look-under-a-proportional-voting-system--gJenQmaW2gW

Looking at the above infographics and how unrepresentative the results of the election were compared with the general will of the people in terms of the allocation of seats in Parliament, is it any wonder that people have become so disaffected with the whole idea?

Yes, it is true that the overall result is basically the same with the Conservatives in pole position and Labour a poor second but the people who voted UKIP or Green Party must feel as if their voice has not been heard or that they wasted their vote.

The fact is that the Conservatives, despite having a majority of the seats in Parliament, do not have the percentage of the popular vote to back it up and is, in fact, a minority Government.  Let’s back that assertion with some figures, shall we?

• Votes cast for Conservatives: 36.8%
• Votes cast for Conservatives as a percentage of total voter registrations: 24.2%

So, looking at these figures, the Conservative administration has been forced upon the UK by only 24.2% of the registered voters, leaving a huge opposition of 75.8% of registered voters to anything the Conservatives want to do.  Hardly a legitimate mandate from the people, is it?  More to the point, what we are looking at is rule of the majority by the minority.

It is facts like this that led to the findings of a poll conducted by The Independent newspaper that “61 per cent believe the system should be reformed so that smaller parties are better represented in parliament (sic)”[2].

People who oppose electoral reform do so because they say that it will lead to more coalition administrations; the counter-argument is “So what?” as, so long as the coalition partners actually negotiate so that both partners, regardless of the size of their contribution of seats to the coalition, both stand up for their principles and come up with some kind of compromise on issues they disagree on.  The Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition of 2010-2015 was never a partnership as the Lib Dem members either gave little opposition to legislation that conflicted with their core principles or refused to vote on those issues at all, even selling out entirely on core manifesto pledges.

The FPTP system has shown itself to be completely inadequate to the job of handling the 21^st Century needs of a multi-party electoral world and needs to be reformed otherwise the UK will continue to swing between the Conservatives and Labour, leaving many to feel that it’s a waste of time voting because nothing ever changes.  The current system is completely unrepresentative of the genuine will of the electorate and is so open to corruption that large interest groups and individuals can call the shots (if only behind the scenes).

It is not just a move towards Proportional Representation in voting that’s needed, it is the implementation of voting for whichever party you want without the artificial constituency boundaries, total reform of how political parties are funded and introducing the idea of PR in Cabinet that’s required.  Whichever party has the greatest proportion of seats in Parliament should provide the Prime Minister for that is only right and correct but the Cabinet should be made up from representatives from all the parties in the same proportion as they are represented in Parliament.

It is only a system such as the one described above that will ensure that every vote counts.

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[1] Valid votes statistics are derived from the total number of votes cast minus spoiled ballot papers

[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/generalelection/general-election-2015-sixty-per-cent-of-people-want-voting-reform-says-survey-10224354.html