Election 2015: A Little Post-Match Analysis

  Well, I did not see that coming.

  The fact that nobody else did either is little consolation: the Conservative Party has won a majority of 6, and David Cameron will return to No.10 Downing Street as Prime Minister. Whilst most people anticipated that the Tories might well win largest party, no-one thought that they would manage to win outright. The pre-election polling has never been so drastically wrong, even in the 1992 debacle.

  So, is it time for everyone to the left of the Tory neoliberals to curl up in a corner and cry? Well, no. The temptation may be great, but I feel it is one that we should resist; for now, at least. All is not quite lost just yet. Here is a quick rundown of the major events of election night, and exactly what they mean for the future of this country.

The Conservatives won a majority of twelve. Clearly, a Tory government is not the result I or many others on the left wanted. The failures of the Conservatives over the last five years are stark: Real wages have entered their longest period of sustained decline in at least 50 years, the UK's GDP per capita is still lower than its pre-recession peak, the deep cuts to welfare have resulted in dozens of deaths and left hundreds of thousands of people destitute, the top-down reorganisation of the NHS has wasted millions and allowed creeping privatisation to continue... I could go on, but I'd only bore you. Suffice it to say, the Tories have had a terrible effect on this country.

However, all is not entirely lost. The Conservatives may have won a majority, but it is a small one; a much reduced majority, in fact, from that the Coalition has enjoyed since 2010. This means that Cameron will find it increasingly difficult to govern as backbench rebels - of which there will be many, you may be sure - hold his party to ransom. The corollary of that, of course, is that he may have to step up the anti-Europe and socially conservative rhetoric to appease the Tory old guard. So, the effects of this small majority may be good or bad, but the new government is certainly going to be far from stable.

The leaders of the three main opposition parties have resigned. Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband and Nigel Farage have all resigned as leaders of their respective parties. In Miliband's case, this is reasonable; under his leadership, the party lost seats and suffered electoral wipeout in Scotland, due at least in part to his personal inability to connect with the electorate. He represents the metropolitan champagne socialist branch of Labour, and this was obviously not something the people of the UK could believe in. 

Clegg's departure is also fair enough. The Liberal Democrats have been reduced to just 8 seats in the Commons, putting them in joint-fourth place with the DUP. From their impressive performances at the 2005 and 2010 elections, this is a long way to fall, and Nick Clegg's decision to take the party into coalition is certainly responsible.

The resignation of Nigel Farage (having failed to win South Thanet) is, quite frankly, the best news I've had all day, but it is also worrying. Farage has been the figurehead of UKIP for so long that his departure (however temporary I suspect it may be) could cause UKIP to collapse (a very good thing), or it could allow the far-right elements within the party to take over. Make no mistake, Nigel is by no means the worst of the bunch, and a UKIP pulled even further to the right is a scary prospect.

Scotland went SNP in spectacular fashion. The SNP swept to victory in Scotland, claiming all but three of the country's 59 seats. The huge bloc of nationalist MPs that Nicola Sturgeon will be sending to Westminster (led pretty soon, I suspect, by our old friend Alex Salmond) will be a thorn in David Cameron's side. He know's that his small majority means that a few rebels could rob him of the ability to govern, and the SNP will hammer home any advantage they get. However, their principled tradition of not voting on matters which do not affect Scotland will limit considerably their effectiveness. This may leave David Cameron with carte blanche to do as he wishes in England, a worrying prospect.

Turnout remained low, though it increased slightly to 66.1%. The continued refusal of a third of the country to cast their vote is a problem. Those who do not vote as a point of principle are unfortunately indistinguishable from those who simply can't be bothered; those who are frankly unable to find any political party they are capable of giving their support to count just the same in the minds of our political masters as those who just don't care. The fact that turnout is traditionally lowest among those groups (young people, ethnic minorities, the unemployed) who the Tory government will be targeting over the next five years makes this an even bigger issue. 

The number of big names who lost their seats is shockingly high. They call it a Portillo Moment when a political heavyweight falls at the ballot box, but there have been so many this time around that they might have to change the name. Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander, Scottish Labour Leader Jim Murphy, Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, Business Secretary Vince Cable, Energy Secretary Ed Davey, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander... the list is huge. Most are from the Labour or Liberal Democrat parties, and many fell to the SNP in Scotland, but the decimation of the upper ranks of the main political parties - together with the planned departures of old leading lights such as William Hague, Jack Straw, Malcom Rifkind and Gordon Brown - means that the new House of Commons will have a very different dynamic.

The number of women MPs increased by a third. A piece of uncomplicated good news, for a change, and pretty self-explanatory. Before the election 23% of MPs were women; now it is 29%. That is, of course, still 21% short of the ideal, but it is a marked improvement and one we should be very pleased about. One of these new female MPs, the SNP's Mhairi Black, is also the youngest MP elected since 1667, a huge achievement only made more impressive when you consider she took the seat from Douglas Alexander.

The UK's electoral system is STILL very, very broken. I will end with perhaps the most important point: the discrepancy between vote share and seats in the House of Commons continues to be a huge issue. The SNP won 56 seats with just 4.7% of the vote; meanwhile the Lib Dems won 7.9% but only 8 seats. UKIP won a single seat with 12.6% of the vote, the Greens one with 3.8%. The Tories and Labour are separated by 99 seats but only 6.5% in the vote. You get the idea - there is little real connection between vote share and seat share, and this is disenfranchising madness. You can read my article on PR for a solution to the problem, but the short answer is this: we desperately need as electoral system which ensures that Parliament represents the wishes of the people. It's called 'democracy' - you may have heard of it.


  These are just some of the most important results of May the 7th - much more will become apparent over the coming weeks. In the meantime, it is important that the progressives among us redouble our efforts to convince the public that the Tory message of cuts and rampant neoliberalism is not the only way, and far from the best way. May 2020 awaits.

The Curious Case of Douglas Carswell

  Douglas Carswell was first returned to Parliament in 2005 for the Essex constituency of Harwich. A Conservative Party member since 1990, he defected to UKIP in August 2014 and stood down as MP for Clacton, triggering a by-election which he won by a landslide.

  Since then, Carswell has been one of the principal figures in the UKIP surge and an outspoken member of the party leadership. He also, however, has been reported as clashing with UKIP leader Nigel Farage on a number of occasions - something he has, of course, denied.

  But it is clear that Carswell is something apart from the mass of Ukippers. Whilst he is in line with general 'UKIP-py' policies such as opposing equal marriage for same-sex couples and scepticism about anthropogenic climate change - as well as, of course, the core UKIP mission of getting the UK out of the EU - he is something of a radical when it comes to other areas.

  Particularly of interest is his dedication to electoral reform. The Daily Telegraph named him their Briton of the Year in 2009 for his commitment to shaking up what he calls 'that cosy little clique called Westminster'. In a speech at the UKIP conference on Saturday, he outlined his proposals for changes to the electoral system.

  First on his list is recall elections. The coalition has introduced a form of this in the Recall of MPs Bill, but this is a weak form of recall which only allows voters to replace their MPs if they are sentenced to more than a year in prison or the Commons Standards Committee bans them from the House for 21 days. Carswell believes that real reform means having a threshold at which a simple petition can trigger an election - in his proposal, 20%.

  Another policy of his is to mandate that ministerial appointments are confirmed by the relevant House of Commons Committee. This procedure already occurs in the USA, and would prevent the Prime Minister from appointing favourites who do not command the confidence of the House as a whole.

  Of course, the jewel in the crown of these reforms is replacement of the archaic Single Member Plurality (or first-past-the-post) system with which we choose our MPs. Moving towards a more proportional system would, of course, benefit UKIP hugely - but it would also make Parliament far more democratic. My own article outlining the reasons for reform can be found here.

  All of this is rather sensible, and somewhat removed from the immigrant-bashing, Thatcherite-plus rhetoric of the majority of UKIP's leadership. Douglas Carswell and Nigel Farage have seemed strange bedfellows since the beginning, but now with the election campaign beginning in earnest, the differences between the two may become more important.

  It is far too early to say whether the fault lines of some future split have emerged, but one thing is clear: Douglas Carswell is a UKIPper apart.

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.