Surprise, indignation in UK polls
There were two main reactions to the UK election: surprise and indignation. The surprise came from the fact the Conservatives won an outright majority of seats when all the opinion polls beforehand said this would not happen. The polls said the Conservatives and Labour would get 34% of the votes each. In fact, they got 37% and 30% respectively.
In Britain’s “first past the post” system, 37% of the votes was enough to give the Conservatives 51% of the seats. Why were the polls so wrong?
One possible answer is the “shy Conservative”. Britain’s privileged elite, the people who read the Guardian, watch the BBC, and attend Oxford and Cambridge universities, look down their noses at ordinary people who vote Conservative. Aware of this snobbery, many ordinary votes were too embarrassed to tell the pollsters they were going to vote Conservative.
Another possibility is that ordinary people were horrified at the thought of Ed Miliband, the unfortunate Labour leader, becoming prime minister.
The indignation came from the scandalous unfairness of the results, the shocking disparity between the number of votes cast and the number of seats won. Most of the headlines were about the extraordinary triumph of the Scottish National Party (SNP). It took 56 out of 59 seats in Scotland. But it only won 1.5 million votes. The United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) won 3.9 million votes – but only got one seat.
This is outrageous. The SNP needed 26 000 votes per seat. Ukip needed 3 900 thousand votes per seat – 150 times as many.
In terms of votes, Ukip is now the third biggest party in Britain but it gets fewer seats than parties getting far fewer votes. The Greens and the Liberal Democrats suffered similar injustice – but not as much as Ukip.
In SA we complain our proportional voting system denies us an MP answerable to us, rather than the party. This is true. But I think this disadvantage is greatly outweighed by the advantage of fairness. Under our system, Ukip with 12.6% of the votes would have got 12.6% of the seats – 82 seats.
This election has changed British politics. The SNP dominates Scotland. The once great Liberal Party has been demolished.
But most of all Britain needs to think about a fairer voting system.