Hung’ing around

While the politicians work out their deals, the good old British system of First Past the Post (FPP) has thrown up yet another abomination of a result. After all the debates, poster campaigns and door knocking ( I actually did get a knock from John Redwood this time), we are still no closer to having a definitive new government.

For me two big issues, 1) again the Liberals are denied a fair result for the number of votes cast and 2) the sight of hundreds of people denied the right vote.

Surely this skewed election result finally proves FPP does not deliver a true representation of what people want and that a Proportional Representation system must be adapted for all future General Elections.

With regards to the queues of disenfranchised voters who could not cast their vote, yes the Electoral Commission have said that they will launch a full enquiry. But last time I looked, we were supposed to be the mother of parliaments as well being a country that  sends Election monitors over the world to check on other Countries elections. So how come we couldn’t seem to run what everyone knew would be a very important UK election. I hope that the report from the Electoral Commission does find out what went wrong and we never see these sorts of sites on the streets of the UK at election time again.

With regards to the way the vote went and what how many votes got what; I created this table. It shows very well what is wrong with the FPP system.

Interestingly if the turnout was 65%, that means 35% of eligible voters did not cast their vote, which in actual ‘person’ terms means that 15,900,000 people did not or could not cast their vote.

Also, if the Liberals only got 3% less number of votes cast than Labour, then how come they got 201 less seats! That means that 1.8 million votes cast (the difference between Liberal & Labour brought in 201 more seats for Labour!

Further, as can be seen from the votes cast, it seems that Conservative seats come cheap at only 34,967 votes per seat, whereas to gain any of the 57 Liberal seat over 119,000 votes were needed for each seat!

FPP seems a very wrong system to me and the sooner it is changed to give a better representation of truer voting in the UK, then the better democracy will be for it.

I’m going to look in more depth at the figures, the Guardian newspaper has been collecting a lot of interesting information about this election, which I think I will delve into later.