Europe 2014 - The Results are In

  The results are in now for the British portion of the European elections. I say British specifically because, at the time of writing, Northern Ireland has yet to declare theirs - but, since the electoral system is different and the motivations for voting revolve heavily around the nationalist v. unionist split which is not present elsewhere, I think we can safely proceed with the analysis. So, where do we stand?


UKIP Ascendant

  In a nutshell, this is the big political story of the day - UKIP have topped a national election for the first time ever, and they're loving it. Nigel Farage has been talking of political earthquakes for a while now, but it does now look as if he really might have gone and done it.

  Having said that, we must be careful not to overstate the impact of UKIP's victory. They got 24 MEPs out of 70 for Great Britain - just over a third - which is a not inconsiderable feat, but Labour was close behind on 20 and the Tories just behind them with 19. This does not represent a mass conversion to UKIP among the general population; it represents an almost three-way split in the vote between the three principal neoliberal parties in the UK. The amount of attention the mainstream media have placed on UKIP's victory is understandable from a sensationalist point-of-view, but is hardly justifiable academically - the Tories beat Labour in 2010 by a wider margin, but were unable to form a single-party government. Be clear - this is no landslide.

  It is, however, undeniably a major development in British politics. There are, it seems to me, three major factors behind the rise of UKIP - disaffection with the political classes, the perception of mass immigration from within the EU and a complete inability of the pro-EU side to articulate any kind of argument against the rampant media-fuelled Euroscepticism which has taken hold of the country. Exploitation of these three trends in popular opinion has allowed Farage to make good his promise and claim victory on Europe.

  The question is, what now? What does the success of UKIP at these elections mean for the general election in less than a year's time? Farage claims that UKIP will take a number of seats in Westminster in 2015 whilst the other parties seem to be of the opinion, wishful thinking or not, that this short-term boost will desert him and UKIP will find itself beaten well back into fourth. The first-past-the-post electoral system in use for general elections means that UKIP will have their work cut out - the party received nearly a million votes in 2010 but won no seats - but to suggest, as Philip Hammond has done, that all those who donned the purple on Thursday will take up the blue and the red again in less than twelve months is absurd. 

  Sadly, it is quite likely that UKIP will make their electoral breakthrough in Westminster in the next year - whether at the Newark by-election scheduled for the fifth of June or next April remains to be seen (I suspect the latter). It may even hold the balance of power, though I would deem that very unlikely, but even one UKIP MP should be a worrying prospect to anyone whose fondness for neoliberalism and xenophobia is anywhere near as limited as mine.



Where Have All the Lib Dems Gone?

  Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear... The Liberal Democrats, having fought the election as 'the Party of In', are O-U-T Out. Ten of the party's eleven MEP's fell to the scythe of public opinion, leaving poor Catherine Bearder (representing South-East England) the only member the UK liberal will send to Brussels when the European Parliament reconvenes in July. 

  Well, I can't say I'm particularly shocked - or that I'll be losing much sleep over this turn of events. The Lib Dems may profess to be the party of in, but it was their miserable failure to articulate the arguments for the EU - coupled with a stubborn refusal to tackle the issues it does have, such as its democratic deficit and the madness of the proposed TTIP deal - which caused them to suffer such a humiliating defeat. In essence, the Liberal Democrats are identical to the Tories and Neo-Labour in every way OTHER than their uncompromising support for the EU, and they failed to explain why that difference alone made them worth voting for over and above those two parties. Therefore, is it really any wonder that their votes were siphoned off?

  The protest vote, meanwhile, was essentially hoovered up by UKIP - with the those left-wingers who would never vote for Farage's mob in a million years defecting to the Greens instead - and thus was the Liberal Democrats' coffin sealed. Will we see a similar collapse next May at the general election? Quite possibly - some projections are suggesting a loss of a third of their Parliamentary seats. The devastation is unlikely to be as total as at Europe - public dissatisfaction with the EU was undoubtedly the main factor behind this disaster, and that should recede somewhat by next year - but I would not be surprised to see considerably less yellow rosettes on election night than in 2010.

  And frankly, I can't wait.



Labour and the Tories - Eds Are Going to Roll...

  I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.


  As far as the Tories and Labour are concerned, that was a close one - only one seat and 1.5% of the vote between them. For Labour, that's not good - not good at all. At this point in an election cycle, the Opposition should be trouncing the government in every poll. Taken together with the party's lacklustre performance in the local elections - an increase in only 338 councillors in the strongest Labour-voting seats - and its average poll lead of scarcely above the margin of error, this would seem to suggest that Labour are most certainly not on course for a majority in the general election. 

  Of course, anything could happen over the next year, and it's not looking too good for the Tories either - the peculiarities of first-past-the-post mean that they generally need a good two-point lead over Labour nationally to get a victory on the basis of uniform swing, and this they most certainly do not have. A hung Parliament, then, is looking increasingly likely - not that it hasn't seemed that way for some time - with the Lib Dems probably holding the balance of power. Still, political predictions are usually wrong, so who knows? - we might end up with a majority Christian People's Alliance government after all.

  If we do, I'm emigrating. 



Green Explosion? Not Quite...

  Natalie Bennett (the Green Party leader in England and Wales) suggested her party might treble its number of MEPs. Sadly, this was not the case - the Greens won only one additional seat, in the South-West of England, to add to their London representative and Keith Taylor's stronghold in the South-East. 

  This actually quite surprised me - I thought six was optimistic, but I would have thought a fourth Green was not an unreasonable expectation. Perhaps that's the old confirmation bias acting up again - it's not really a secret I vote Green whenever I get the chance - but the fact they are the only party with a sensible policy towards Europe (have a referendum because hey, we're a democracy, campaign to stay in and then do their utmost to fix the issues with its democratic processes and mad international trade deals) would seem to have made them the ideal choice in a European election. 

  Regardless, an increase of one might not sound amazing - it isn't - but it is, technically, +50% so I suppose that's something. Any other party would kill for an exponential like that. This increase is likely due to the fallout from the Lib Dems going into coalition with the Tories - as some on the left of the party have drifted into the Labour camp, still some others (realising Neo-Labour for the neoliberal pack of liars they are) will have turned to the Greens. As for the reason they didn't do better - that's a little trickier, but likely has something to do with UKIP attracting the majority of the protest vote, some of which would otherwise have gone to the Greens - especially considering 73% of UKIP voters are demonstrably left-wing. 



The Rise of European Fascism

  Those are some words which should scare the hell out of you. They scare the hell out of me. It's tempting, given that the only fascist MEP from the UK - the BNP's Nick Griffin - lost his seat, to think that these elections were a triumph for democracy. UKIP - who might be on the same right-wing populist spectrum as the BNP and others, but are relatively moderate by comparison - have swallowed up the BNP's support base and put paid to Griffin's vile organisation. It's very tempting, but it's also very narrow-minded.

  Because elsewhere in Europe, things are changing. For the worse. In France, Marine Le Pen's anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim Front National won the elections, gaining 24 MEPs; in Hungary the openly neo-Nazi party Jobbik won approximately 15% of the vote - a comedown from their general election showing, but still enough to claim 3 seats; Greece's Golden Dawn, the leader of which has a Swastika tattoo and much of which's leadership is currently in prison for racially-motivated crimes, claimed another three - their first ever MEPs. All across Europe, the far-right has either advanced or held its ground, with the result that this European Parliament will contain more fascists and fascist sympathisers than it will Greens and Liberals combined.

  The rise of UKIP in the UK is infinitely preferable to the triumph of these kinds of people on the continent, but it is all symptomatic of the same fundamental disease - the poison of right-wing populism: engineered by the media, fuelled by economic devastation and politicians' inability to connect with their electorates and exploited by thugs, racists and ultra-nationalist fearmongers across Europe. We need a fundamental change in our political culture, not just in the UK but across the EU - and indeed, across the Western world - or this sorry tale will only get worse. 




Postscript
This does relate to the EU, I promise. As some of you know, the EU and the USA are currently trying to force through a deal which will allow US corporations to sue European governments in secret courts for regulating their operations and to forcibly buy out essential public services such as the NHS. Please help to stop them by signing this petition.

Electoral Reform - Why We Need It

  So, there we are. European Parliament elections done and dusted for another five years. The results will start to come in Sunday night, once the other EU member states are done voting, and we should know the makeup of the Parliament in its entirety by Monday evening. Then comes the wrangling within the EU hierarchy over who gets to be President of the Commission - itself a very important post, having power over 28 countries and carrying a paycheque larger than Barack Obama's - but as far as we, the citizens of the Union, are concerned , it's all over.


The Problems with First-Past-the-Post

  Now, the more astute amongst you may have noticed that on that rather large ballot paper were the names of rather more candidates than at most elections. That's because the European Parliament operates under a different voting system to our own - they use Closed Party List (CPL), as opposed to the First-Past-the-Post (FPtP) system which is used for Westminster. This is a far more proportional system, producing a Parliament which is a much better representative of votes cast. Observe the graphs below:

  These two show the differences between votes cast in the 2010 General Election and the seats in the House of Commons which those votes translated into. This election took place using FPtP, and as you can see, the two are pretty different. 

  The standout point at first glance is the fact that UKIP and the BNP, having claimed 6% of the vote between them - nearly 1.5 million votes - won no seats at all. Now, I'm a fan of neither party, but surely it cannot be right that the views of so many people are simply discounted in this way by the electoral system?

  The second point to note is that the percentages of seats won by the biggest parties have been artificially inflated by the system - the Conservatives by 10.3% and Labour by 10.7%. This is a common feature of FPtP, which always favours these two parties above all others, and generally Labour slightly more than the Tories. 

  The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, have suffered a devastating cut of 14.2% to their own percentage - had this not been the case, the Lib Dems would have had the option of going into Coalition with Labour instead of the Tories, changing the entire makeup of government. The Greens also took a hit of 0.8% - four-fifths of their total vote.

  It should be pretty obvious that this system is undemocratic - it distorts the wishes of the electorate and is heavily biased towards the two largest parties - who also happen to be the most similar in terms of policy. Essentially, FPtP deprives us of our choice of representatives and thus of government. 


Why Does This Happen?

  The reason these distortions occur is because in each of the 650 constituencies for the Westminster Parliament, whichever candidate wins a plurality of votes - i.e. more than anyone else - wins the seat. This means that it is perfectly possible for an MP to be elected on the basis of less than half, or even less than a third, of the vote. Not only does this system waste the votes of anyone who votes for a candidate other than the victor, it also wastes any 'excess' votes for the winner - i.e. all votes over and above the number required to win the seat (one more than the closest rival).

  Let's take an example - my own constituency of Aldershot. The seat is a safe Tory seat, held by Sir Gerald Howarth since 1997. In 2010, the results were as follows:

• Conservatives:                                  46.7%
• Liberal Democrats:                          34.4%
• Labour:                                              12.1%
• UKIP:                                                    4.5%
• English Independence Party:             1.8%
• Christian Party:                                    0.5%

                                          [SOURCE: BBC NEWS}

  As you can see, I live in a pretty right-wing constituency, but that's beside the point. The Tories beat the Lib Dems by a healthy majority of 12.3%. Therefore, 12.2999'% of those Tory votes weren't actually needed to win the seat - we'll call it 12.3% for simplicity's sake - and were thus wasted. Similarly, all the votes for the parties which did not win the seat had no effect on the overall balance of power in the House of Commons - they were wasted too. This brings the total proportion of wasted votes to 66.6% - two thirds, in other words. 

  That means, in effect, that two thirds of the 45,843 voters who turned out to vote in Aldershot constituency in 2010 need not have bothered - the result would have been the same without them. No wonder, then, that 36.5% of the electorate in that constituency didn't bother to turn out - they understandably felt that they wouldn't make a difference. A shame, because if they HAD turned out then they would have been able to tip the balance away from the Tories quite easily - which is why apathy is NEVER an option for protest - but you can see the reasoning.

  When magnified to a national level, it transpired that 71.2% of all votes in 2010 were wasted in this way - nearly three-quarters. No wonder a third of voters nationwide don't bother to vote. In short, First-Past-the-Post is broken to the core. 

Closed Party List - What Is It?

  Closed Party List works in a very different way. Instead of lots of small constituencies, there are a smaller number of larger ones which return multiple members each - between three and ten apiece in the European elections. Seats are allocated within each constituency in proportion with the number of votes received by each party (see this article for an example of this in action). Parties each propose lists of candidates, which are ranked in order, and those candidates fill the party's seats in the order they appear on the ballot paper - i.e. if the Tories win six seats in the South-East, the first six candidates on the Tory list for the South-East will become MEPs. 

  CPL is a far more proportional system than FPtP, of that there is no doubt. These graphs, of the 2009 European Parliament election, show a much closer match between voting and seats won. The differentials in the vast majority of cases have been cut to within a few percentage points, meaning UKIP were able to claim second place - a feat which would be impossible at a Westminster election. 

  The one obvious discrepancy is the Tory party - a 10.2% gap between votes and seats is only 0.1% less than the gap in 2010, after all. At first glance, that looks to be a major problem - but it isn't, in fact. The reason why is quite simple, and it has to do with numbers of seats.
  
  At a basic level, there are a lot less MEPs than MPs - 73 for the whole of the UK, as opposed to 650. As seats are allocated proportionately, in a ten-member constituency such as the South-East of England, 10% of the vote is needed for each seat - but if there are 'spare' seats left over at the end of this process, they are distributed amongst the parties in order of how much of the next 10% they have. So, the Tories - who won 34% of the vote in the South-East - were given 3 MEPs in the initial distribution, and then a fourth in the 'second round' - essentially a free 6% of the vote.

  However, the South-East has rather more than 10 Westminster MPs - 84, to be exact. Therefore, if CPL were used for the Westminster elections, only 1.2% of the vote would be needed for each seat. This would significantly reduce the number of 'spare seats', and would bring the differentials in the two percentages down to a very minute level indeed. Therefore, this system - already far more proportional than FPtP when used at a European level - would become even more so.

  
Criticisms

  Despite the obvious benefits in terms of proportionality, and therefore for the health of our democracy, there have been some criticisms of the CPL system put forward. The main ones are:

• Coalitions: CPL, being a form of Proportional Representation (PR), would create a House of Commons far more split between the parties. To form a majority government under this system, a party would have to win an absolute majority of the vote - 50.1%+ - something which has not happened since the Conservatives did it in 1931 (and they formed a coalition anyway, due to the Great Depression). However, it is arguable as to whether this is necessarily a bad thing - coalitions are unusual in the UK, but par for the course in most EU countries, and are better representations of the views of the electorate than single-party governments
• Representative Disconnect: The large numbers of representatives CPL would create for each constituency would likely lead to a disconnect between MPs and voters - people would not know who to go to with their problems. An obvious way to fix this problem would be to simply assign each proportionally elected MP to a constituency - since no MP in the country, through a combination of split votes and poor turnout, was actually voted in by a majority of their constituents in 2010, the oft-quoted argument that this would mean having an MP one did not vote for does not hold
• Confusion: The ballot paper under CPL is simply more confusing than under FPtP, and this could theoretically lead to more spoilt ballots. However, the problem is nowhere near as acute with CPL as with other PR systems such as STV (used for the Northern Ireland Assembley elections) 

Conclusion 

  Overall, I think it is clear that CPL is a far better, more democratic electoral system than FPtP. Implementing it for Westminster elections would vastly improve the strength of our representative democracy and significantly cut voter apathy, as people begin to realise that their vote really does count under CPL. Less confusing and more proportional than other PR systems, the only real concern is the propensity to create coalitions - but then, I do not personally think that a bad thing; imagine, if you can bring yourself to do so, a UK which had had not a Coalition Government but a pure Tory government for the last four years. 

  I shudder to think.

People (Without) Power

Victorious candidates by party

  It occurred to me the other day that many of my friends are astoundingly apolitical - that is, they have no real appreciation of what the political establishment is up to and, whilst they have opinions which could be described as political views, they tend not to associate problems in their own lives with the failure of the governments whose policies are ultimately responsible. Why, I wondered, is this?

Interesting map showing second-place
candidates by party

  I suspect the answer is, at least in its fundamentals, quite simple: politics is seen as boring. Politicians are grey men in greyer suits, who shuffle around on dull stages delivering bland speeches on uninteresting topics to audiences of sycophants and equally incomprehensible media types. They are not, in short, the kind of people that the public associate with the ideals and principles which motivate them. Idealism requires passion, and few of today's crop of political masters displays anything close to that.

  This basic disconnect between politicians and the rest of society, particularly the younger generation, is growing ever more pronounced. Membership of the 'big three' parties has plummeted since the high point of over 4 million in the early '50s to a low of around 400,000 today. More and more people are being turned off by the empty promises and hollow platitudes of the political class, and voter apathy is setting in, big time.

  This is a BAD THING.

  On the face of it, voter apathy looks like a bad thing for politicians - it means, after all, that they aren't connecting with the public. Time to pull their collective socks well and truly up, then? Well, no. When you think about it, voter apathy is actually hugely beneficial for the politicians. At the last general election, for example, turnout was only 65.1% of the electorate. This means that 34.9% of the adult population of the UK did not take part in the election, and therefore that the politicians could safely ignore over a third of the country. 

  If this was a freak occurrence, then such a move would be risky, but it is not - over the last five general elections, the average turnout has been just 67%, meaning that a third of the population consistently skip polling day, and therefore can have their opinions discounted by the political class. It is this kind of apathy which allowed the Labour government to be re-elected in 2005 with only 35% of the electorate's support, essentially eliminating the government's democratic mandate at a stroke. But that didn't matter - they had an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, and so could force their legislation through when nearly two thirds of the population didn't want it in the first place.

  Turnouts for local and European elections are even more shocking - 42.3% for local, 33.52% for European. And they're both averages - the most recent results are even lower. This means that local councils and the EU Parliament, often criticised for being undemocratic, really are just that.

  It's been a little statistic-heavy today, and for that I apologise. But this stuff's important - the lessening interest in what's going on around us is allowing politicians to ignore large sections of society and - since it's been shown that the younger, poorer and more ethnically diverse the cross-section, the less likely they are to vote - it's the people who are being most disadvantaged by the current political paradigm who matter least to the politicians who seem hell-bent on ruining our lives. 

  So, the moral of the story is, vote. Get yourself down to the ballot box at every opportunity and make a difference, even if it's only a small one. Sure, you have only one vote - but if that entire third of the electorate were to turn up at the polls in 2015, that's a hell of a lot of ones. And if you can't bring yourself to put a cross in any of the available boxes, so equally repugnant are the choices before you - and believe me, I sympathise - do something about it. Campaign, march, set up a political party, stand for election, write a cynical blog on the internet - anything to shift the political consensus in the direction you want.

  That's democracy, after all.