My (sort of) ideal election result

Now I'm no longer constrained by having to fight for every vote the Lib Dems can get I thought I would have a bit of fun with a hypothetical election result.

My sort of ideal result* in 2015 would look like this:

Conservatives: 35%
Labour: 32.5%
Lib Dem: 12%
UKIP: 13%

Now before you all accuse me of going mad, allow me to explain.

One of my overriding ambitions in politics is to get electoral reform for Westminster. And a result like above would damn the current system in two different ways. Here is what the Electoral Calculus seat calculator predicts from the above national result:

Conservatives: 295 seats
Labour: 302 seats
Lib Dems: 25 seats
UKIP: 0 seats

Labour 24 seats short of an overall majority.

So despite the fact that the Tories would have got 2.5% more of the vote than Labour they would have 7 fewer seats than them and even with the Lib Dems would be unable to form a majority. This would massively highlight the iniquities of the current system. It would be very amusing to see how excruciating this would be for the Conservatives who are so viscerally opposed to any change in the electoral system being hoist by their own petard in this way. Also knowing that the elevated UKIP vote would certainly have split the vote more on the right than the left and also knowing that if AV had won (that the Tories did the most to ensure failed) would also have saved their skin.

The other major point and the reason why I wanted UKIP to poll higher than the Lib Dems is because immediately we see that despite getting 13% of the vote, UKIP get no seats whereas the Lib Dems on 12% get 25 seats. This is of course utterly preposterous and would again be evident for all to see.

One of the problems in trying to persuade people of the merits of electoral reform is that it is difficult to talk in terms of theory. People need to see concrete evidence of what we are talking about and to actually feel the democratic deficit of FPTP in action. Even then I am not convinced that a one off election result like this would be enough in and of itself to provoke a big enough backlash to trigger a change in the system.

But it would be a good and very entertaining start.


*If we can't get the weird quirks we see here then I would rather the Lib Dems did better than 12% as I think they deserve to. As it happens though what I have predicted here is not beyond the bounds of possibility if the economy continues to recover and UKIP maintain their polling levels and manage to get in on the pre-election leaders debate.

How First Past the Post could save the Lib Dems in 2015

We Lib Dems really dislike First Past the Post.

A post, yesterday

In fact I'd even go so far as to say that we hate it.

We hate the distorting effect it has on our politics. We hate the way its ossifying influence helps to keep the red/blue duopoly of our system. We hate the way it keeps smaller parties (not just ourselves but e.g. Greens and UKIP) out of power or even in some cases parliament altogether.

So I think it's fair to say we are generally not fans. And yet in 2015 the First Past the Post electoral system for Westminster could perversely be the thing that saves us. Let me explain how.

The Lib Dems got 23% of the vote in 2010 but only just over 8% of the seats (which meant 57 seats). As unfair as this is (and I regularly bang on about this as regular readers and listeners to my podcast will know) the reason is because the majority of that 23% of votes were wasted. When I say wasted I mean they were cast in seats where we didn't get an MP. In other words our vote was not very efficiently distributed given how seats are actually won.

But because of the way FPTP is structured we don't need to get 23% in order to return 57 MPs. In fact theoretically we could get way less than 23% and still hold all our existing seats. We could even get less than 8% of the vote and get 57 seats.

With 650 seats up for grabs the way to be certain of getting 57 seats is to make sure you get 50% of the vote in 57 of them. In reality you can often win seats on less (in some cases much less) than 50% but for illustrative purposes let's assume that's what we want to do. So if each seat has 1/650th of the voters we can see that the percentage of votes we theoretically need is actually

(100 x (57/650)) / 2

Or around 4.4% of the vote.

Of course this assumes an absolutely perfect distribution of our vote, i.e. getting exactly the votes we need (50% each) in the seats we are targeting and zero votes everywhere. In reality this would never happen. But what this demonstrates is that FPTP is almost infinitely elastic in the lack of correspondence between number of votes cast and number of seats.*

It doesn't take a massive leap from this to see that if the Lib Dems are very smart and target their resources with ruthless efficiency they have a reasonable chance of retaining most of their seats. When combined with the incumbency factor that many Lib Dems are expert at using to their advantage it becomes a potent scenario. The casualties of this of course would be all those candidates running in all the other non-target seats. If we follow this through to its logical conclusion then in order for this strategy to work they would get next to no or perhaps actually no help. We could see a large number of lost deposits. But I suspect the leadership would see this as a small price to pay if they get to retain a solid number of MPs.

Come 2015 I suspect the Lib Dems will get more than the 8% - 10% we are currently seeing in the polls. It will probably be into the teens perhaps around 15% in my view. But even if it isn't and it actually ends up being 10% or even lower, First Past the Post offers us plenty of scope for gaming the system to return us far more MPs than a simple "Universal Swing" analysis would suggest.

The only question really is whether the party leadership is ruthless enough to follow such a strategy and thus use the invidious and rightly despised First Past the Post system to its full advantage.


*As an aside here consider that UKIP could get 10% or even 15% of the votes and would still likely get zero seats because their vote is quite evenly distributed across the country which is an absolute killer for political parties under FPTP.

Why Labour won't win the election in 2015

I wrote a piece last week for Independent Voices in which I argued that in my view Labour will not be able to win a majority in 2015 because of the corner they have painted themselves into on the cuts.

You can read it here.

Coalition Negotiations 2015. A Play.

Scene opens on a nondescript room somewhere in Whitehall, 9th May 2015.

Labour Lead Coalition Negotiator: "Well, thank you all for coming today. Obviously it's been a fairly gruelling election campaign but the fact that no party managed to achieve an overall majority has led us to this point. If we can come to some agreement over the next few days then we have a chance to form a majority coalition."

Lib Dem Lead Coalition Negotiator: "Absolutely. We very much hope that we can reach such an agreement between our parties. I have with me a document which forms our red lines if that would help."

LLCN: "OK, thanks. That might help speed things along a little bit!"

(Laughter)

(LDLCN hands over a document to LLCN)

LLCN: "Er, this is your manifesto."

LDLCN: "That's right."

LLCN: "I don't understand."

LDLCN: "They are our red lines. We insist on having every single thing in our manifesto implemented in full."

LLCN: "But surely you must understand that is not possible?"

LDLCN: "On the contrary. We thought you would actually insist that this be the case."

LLCN: "Er, I really do not understand what you are saying here. Why would we want that?"

LDLCN: "Well, for the last 5 years you and your Labour colleagues have taken every opportunity to tell the public that we have renaged on various parts of our 2010 manifesto. You have attacked us for not blocking tuition fee rises, for the NHS reforms, for allowing the Conservatives to reduce the top rate of tax and for putting up VAT amongst many other things. We have taken a big political hit for having compromised previously and as our chief critics for having done so we assumed you would totally understand how we are not able to budge an iota on our manifesto for fear of being accused of the same again."

LLCN: "Er...."

LDLCN: "We'll leave you to decide whether you want a coalition on these terms. It is a take it or leave it offer. Good day!"

(The Lib Dem contingent exit)

(Confused faces, swanee whistle, curtain)