The LibDems and the system

The LibDems, understandably, are resentful about the number of seats they won, which I admit was very low compared to their share of the vote. As Robert Tilleard comments, for achieving nearly a quarter of the vote they got less then a tenth of the seats. I wonder if I can offer some advice?

Firstly, the British system is not about voting for a party, it is about voting for a person to represent you. So in this respect complaints from a party are irrelevant. But no one claims that the First Past the Post (FPTP) system is perfect, only that it is the least bad.

The Tories suffered too:

In Scotland: Labour polled 1,035,528, which translated into 41 seats
The Tories polled 412,855, yet got only 1 seat

In Wales:Labour polled 531,601 for 26 seats
The Tories 382,730 for 8 seats

Those are even worse percentages of seats to votes than the LibDems complain of.

I have chosen this example because as everyone knows the Tories are not very popular in Scotland and Wales. They would have done far better to concentrate their resources on areas where they were likely to do well, rather than come second or third. The reason they don’t is that they feel they have to fight every seat in order to look like a national party.

And this is the Liberal problem – always has been. The reason they fight every seat is historical: they were once, when Lloyd George was with us, the governing party, and they still aspire to this: they think they have to offer a candidate in every constituency. They remind me of an athlete who comes second in every race demanding a share of the World Champion’s crown.

Of course, one of the reasons they so often come second or a good third is that they are the disaffected voter’s party. If we had a system in which they were likely to do very well, people might start to look at their policies, which are a ragbag of the clever and the insane. Europe, for example, is unpopular with the British electorate. If the two main parties had realised in time that the LibDems would be such a threat, they would have continually broadcast to a terrified electorate Nick Clegg’s speeches on further integration and Vince Cable saying how joining the euro would solve our problems. Their vote would have ben considerably lower if they had been scrutinised.

But they could do better under the present system. The solution for the LibDems is to abandon their blanket coverage and concentrate on places they do well. The South West is an example: if they had not bothered with candidates in a good 150 seats but love bombed the South West, turning themselves into a sort of Wessex Regional Party those second places might have been translated into firsts. As it is they put up candidates in safe Labour or Tory seats, the candidate gets 5,000 votes, nowhere near winning, and that five thousand votes are added to the total that they whinge about not getting them enough seats. It’s a bit disingenuous, really.

Back to the voting system. The human mind isn’t channelled along two or three fixed lines, it is nuanced. There are many strands of belief and opinion and government is achieved by coalitions of belief. Under the British system the large parties are the coalitions, each one has a left, a right and a middle and they just about manage to rub along together, Ken Clarke with Michael Howard, Tony Benn with Tony Blair. Under the continental system there are many more parties and they come together to form a coalition. The difference is that under our system you know the policies before you vote. Under the Continental system you get to find out about them after you have voted.