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I’ve long disliked our voting system. It has given the Labour and Tory parties absolute Westminster power for years. But by their share of the popular vote they’ve been minority governments. That also correlates with a long-term decline in turnout, a decreasing engagement with politics, and many voters finding their votes count for nothing because they live in a ’safe’ seat: Only about 100 seats changed hands in this election.

These days I live in Glasgow. The definition of safe Labour territory. All seven constituencies here have returned Labour MP’s this time around, as they have done for years. But I got to wondering what the actual share of the vote was, and how behind Labour is this city, really?

The problem for me with the electoral system is that the way people vote has fundamentally changed. We used to vote for local candidates to represent us in parliament: our system – one that’s been unchanged for a long time – reflects that with local constituencies and individual names on the ballot paper. There was no broadcast media when it formed. However, despite this, voters now vote for and associate primarily with parties – and not individual candidates. This perhaps most recently exemplified by leadership debates, to the way the media reports the election, and the decline in local engagement (Glasgow South had just one hustings). I’d therefore suggest most voters would be hard-pressed to name their “preferred” party candidate as they go to vote: rather they’re mainly looking for party symbols.

I know there are proponents of First Past The Post – amongst them my returned MP – but low turnout in ultra-safe constituencies, and the disenfranchisement of many, is the price that’s paid. The electorates desire for representation by different parties are ignored, and often (although not in my constituency) more people vote for other parties than the winning candidate, than support them. This is not a long term sustainable approach.

I don’t hold for arguments for ’strong’ governments being ‘necessary’. Coalitions work in Germany, and many other places. They work very well in Scotland, as also does a minority government right now. To suggest we can’t get used to coalitions is to dismiss the electorate as unable to cope with compromise. Goodness me, wasn’t it actually refreshing to hear our politicians reflective about compromise this morning?

But is Glasgow as deeply Labour as it’s reputation suggests? I’m a bit of a statistics nerd, so I grabbed the published election results for Glasgow, and sliced and diced them to look at what the picture actually says about the preferences of Glasgow voters. You can download my spreadsheet here.

The detail is 417,578 people were eligible to vote in Glasgow, and 229,223 did so. A turnout of 54.89% – Compare that to the national average turnout of 65.1% (as of 4pm). 10% lower where there is a predominant assumption that Labour will win. To me that suggests that FPTP in safe seats (which is most), does not encourage engagement. Even if you add a little for the fact that the dynamic in Scotland is different, with the Scottish parliament controlling much of the ‘domestic’ agenda we see picked over in the national media.

If we look at how the votes were cast, based on the four main parties across the region, the SNP secured 17.32%, the Liberal Democrats 13.70%, Labour 56.2%, and the Conservatives 7.63%. Other parties just 2.83%. If we take the total vote and allocate out Glasgow’s 7 seats based on that – in a simple proportional way (it assumes people would have voted the same in different systems, but as we have no measure of what their preference would actually be, it’ll have to do), Labour would get 4 seats, the SNP, Liberal Democrat and Conservatives would get 1 seat each. Quite interesting to compare it to the Glasgow regional votes in the 2007 Scottish parliament elections (Labour 38.2%, SNP 27%, Liberal Democrat 7.2%, Conservative 6.7%, Green 5.2%).

So in short, 43.8% of people in Glasgow, who cared enough to vote, did not support the Labour party, for which the city is assumed to be loyal. Of course, Labour is still very much the dominant party even looked at this way, but it’s not the 100% support that the 7 returned Labour MP’s suggest. Plus turnout across Glasgow was 10% lower than the national average. If people actually felt their vote would matter, how much higher would it have been?

We have the system we have. Congratulations to the MP’s who were returned, and I trust and hope they’ll execute their tasks well.

My issue with the system remains that as a result of voting patterns shifting to parties, not candidates, and the voting system not reflecting that, a large proportion of the electorate are disenfranchised. Their votes do not count, because the boundaries are arbitrary, and we insist on returning the candidate with the most votes, not candidates that reflect the will of the people.

Solutions? I think the Scottish parliamentary electoral system is excellent. We maintain the constituency link that’s so important, and have regional MSP’s who are allocated based on share of the vote. The only draw back is the party list system that has, so I’d argue for a wider involvement of the public in selecting candidates – a primary of sorts – before they go on that shortlist.

I know many people disagree it’s necessary to reform our voting system (not least, my MP), but the cost of not working to revise the system to ensure that it reflects the wider will of the people will be reducing turnout, reduced engagement in politics, and a continuation of the strange situation where a handful of ‘marginal’ seats determine who actually takes power. The voters in a hundred or so constituencies are where Governments are decided, not the country as a whole, and that can’t be right.

Glasgow may well always be heavily Labour, but it saddens me that a large minority of voters – such as myself – are being ignored, simply because we have an outdated voting system that reflects a bygone age.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 7th, 2010 at 6:17 pm and is filed under British General Election, Glasgow, Politics, Scotland, UK, Voting reform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.