Sunday 10 May 2015

A Deeply Conservative Country


I had not expected any good news from the UK general election. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Labour apparatchik and Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, had lost his seat as an MP, that Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP, had failed to get his, and that I would probably in future be hearing much less from the weird Ed Miliband, now that he has resigned the Labour Party leadership. Small mercies in a result that only confirms that the UK is a deeply conservative country.
The election result unexpectedly gave the Conservative Party an outright, although small, overall majority, when previous opinion polls had only suggested it would have the largest number of seats in Parliament. The best summary of results for the UK, including breakdowns by region and constituency, the number of votes, changes in voting share, etc, can be found on the BBC website here.
In the wake of the biggest capitalist crisis for a generation or more, the share of votes for the two major political parties hardly changed. Compared to the previous general election in 2010, the share of the vote for the Conservative party went up a tiny bit; the Labour party’s vote went up by a tiny bit more. The big changes were elsewhere. The Liberal Democrat share of the total vote collapsed by 15.2 percentage points, offset by a rise in the UKIP share (up 9.5%), while the Scottish National Party got an extra 3.1% and the Green Party an extra 2.8% of the total vote.
The share of votes only counts as a measure of opinion. It does not lead to a seat in the House of Commons, which is determined by a first-past-the-post ballot in each constituency. So, for example, a winner with 20,000 votes gets the seat. If the runner up has 19,999 votes, then these votes go nowhere. A strictly proportional representation of votes in the 650 seats in the UK Parliament would mirror public opinion (assuming that voters fully agree with a party’s political programme). Comparing the seats implied by a PR ‘opinion’ with the actual seats gained, these are the results:

Share of vote
PR-implied seats
Actual seats
Conservative
36.9%
240
331
Labour
30.4%
198
232
UKIP
12.6%
82
1
Liberal Democrat
7.9%
51
8
SNP
4.7%
31
56
Green
3.8%
25
1
Others
3.7%
23
21
One can assign different scores on a spectrum of progressive to reactionary for each of these parties. But the overall picture remains depressing, although it is not surprising. In political terms, I consider half the UK electorate to be on a different planet, and the other half to be in a different solar system.

Tony Norfield, 10 May 2015