Monday Call - August 2 2004 [Next planned update - Wednesday]
August 2nd, 2004
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Are the Tories right to cry “foul” over the “biased” electoral system?
The Tories are said to be drawing up plans to attack the “inbuilt advantage” in the electoral system that in recent elections has given Labour far more seats in proportion to votes cast than the other parties. In 2001 the Tories needed to get almost twice as many votes for each seat while the Lib Dems required three and a half times more.
Partly this was due to lower turnouts in Labour seats and that its incumbents did a bit better than the national average - both elements that its hard for the Tories to make a fuss about. But Labour did get the equivalent a 20+ seat bonus because its seats had on average much smaller electorates.
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But the real problem for the Tories was that people were so opposed to them that they switched parties to get them out costing 40-50 seats. Will this happen on the same scale as last time or will Labour also be the victim of tactical voting?
The small electorate in Labour seats bonus has been partly resolved through the boundary changes in Scotland that reduce MPs north of the border from 72 to 59 - something the spread-betting markets have yet to notice. The Welsh over-representation remains and in England Labour seats have, on average 6,000 fewer voters than the norm. At the next election these elements should give Labour a bonus of 12+ extra MPs.
But this is far from certain. The Respect victory in a council by-election in Stepney last week and the Labour losses to the Lib Dems in the cities on June 10 underline that all is not as it was in Labour’s small inner city seats where only a few votes need to change hands. There’s also the University factor discussed in the previous article.
The Tactical voting Labour bonus was by far and away the main distorting factor last time and was caused by people feeling so strongly that they wanted the Tories out that they switched from their normal affiliation. Estimates range from 25-40 of the extra seats Labour got at the expense of the Tories because of anti-Tory tactical voting. The Lib Dems got about 15 seats. But this is all part of the democratic process and the Tories can’t really complain - in any case they might be the beneficiaries next time round.
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The big unknown is the extent of the benefit, if any, that Labour will get from tactical voting. Might it even work against them with a net loss of seats?
We all need to be aware that Election Prediction calculators like Martin Baxter’s apply the changed poll rating to what happened in 2001 and assume that the Labour benefit will stay constant. The Labour spread betting prices are based very much on this with tactical voting continuing as it was and the Scottish anomoly remaining.
MAIN CALLS
Labour to win most General Election seats.
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One of the biggest factors behind the notion of \’unfairness in the electoral system\’, about which the Tory Party pathetically complain, is simply the relatively poor turnout in safe Labour seats. Poll data consistently tell us that Labour voters have a lower propensity to vote than Tory voters, but this is predominantly true in safe seats where their votes don\’t matter. The figures for average votes needed to elect an MP of each party are almost entirely meaningless; if Labour turnout was as high in safe seats as in marginal ones at the last election the differential in votes per seat would have been very substantially reduced.
Andrew - I agree with that. The one area where the Tories can complain is on the size of seats. The Welsh situtation has to be brought into line with Scotland and there needs to be a boundary review.
If Labour win an overall majority with substantially fewer votes than the Tories, as is possible within your margins of error in your Populus poll totday, then this will be an explosive issue. I can see big problems for the Government in the House of Lords and the courts. They will appear to have no mandate. The election result will be seen as a bit like the Hutton Report with Blair getting away with it again in spite of the facts. Minor details such as yours on poor turnouts in Labour seats will sound irrelevant.
The polls as whole suggest it is highly unlikely - barring some extraordinary wild-card - that Labour will not have more votes. If you average all published polls (not a bad guide I would suspect, now most are more rigorous about weightings and adjustment) the Tories have squeaked ahead of Labour only twice in this Parliament, August 2003, and May 2004, and there is certainly no momentum at all with the Tories at present. So I don\’t see any evidence to support the view that the Tories are going to win the popular vote; it seems much more likely to me that Labour will pull a few points up on where they are now and get a disproportionately large majority from a low (though winning) share of the vote. But I suppose if we believe that the Lib Dems are going to hold in the mid-twenties, the consequence is that the sum of Lib Dems + \’Others\’ will be over 30%, possibly as much as a third of the total vote. If that happens, and the Tories & Labour muster only (say) 68% between them that could break anywhere between Labour 38%, Tory 30% and, I suppose, 34% all.
I\’m not sure it would be explosive even if it happened. Look at the US in 2000 - yes there was a major dispute over counting votes in Florida but the fact that Gore got more votes than Bush across the country, while clearly frustrating for the Democrats, was never a big issue. As far as I know there was no court challenge to the basic electoral college system and nobody has seriously pursued a change to that system. Everyone knew the rules and the only question was whether the rules had been broken in Florida.
In the UK, the Daily Mail would be livid, the Lib Dems would probably get some mileage out of it but the Conservatives would be poorly placed to do anything as they have never criticised the underlying consitutional basis for elections in the UK. The constitutional law is clear so there is no question of a legal challenge - an MP wins a seat by getting a plurality of votes in the constituency and a government wins power by commanding the support of a majority of MPs.
Perhaps more interesting would be if the same happened between second and third place as nearly occured in 1983. I am not sure whether consitutional law is as clear on who forms the official opposition (unlike the question of who forms the government, you cannot test who forms the opposition by having a straightforward confidence vote in the Commons). Maybe somebody else knows whether there is constitutional clarity on this?.
Andrew you may be right - everybody seems to be focussing on the Tories - but all is not well in the Labour camp. Support down by a quarter since the General Election; membership at a 70 year low having lost almost half of those that were there when Tony Blair came to power in 1997; a total collapse in the popularity of the Prime Minister, and article like this one by former minster, Peter Kilfoyle, in the Guardian yesterday painting an appalling picture.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1274196,00.html
The huge drop in the number of councillors and lack of Labour activists is going to show big-time at the election.
We are in uncharted territory. The governing party has lost a large part of its support but this has not been picked up by the main opposition party. Predicting the coming election is going to be pretty tough.
James raises 1983 which interestingly was the last time when Labour\’s performance in terms of votes exceeded the polls. I think the opposition is the party with second most seats.
According to today\’s Guardian, Labour\’s membership has continued falling over the past six nmonths, down to 190,000 people. At this rate, it will reach zero in about six years\’ time. I note also that one in six local authorities now has not a single Labour councillor.