Beware what you wish for...

Taking the BBC results table, which still has one constituency to declare, and using some Exel™ jiggery-pokery you get this table.  That is, taking the popular vote and allocating the proportion of seats dependent on the proportion of the electorate that voted for that party makes interesting reading (don’t forget the rounding!).  Bare in mind that I have not read any papers on how proportional representation actually works, or indeed if people knew that we didn’t have a first past the post mechanism would they vote differently?  I’m sure they would.  So this table is not necessarily representative of a PR Election but it does make you think about the level of negotiation needed to reach agreement.

Swing-o-meter

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/2432632/UK-General-Election-2010-political-map.html

Given that we need a 19.5% swing to liberals to get a hung parliament, is there really any chance of electoral reform?

I tried to post this yesterday but forgot to press the go-live button on the blogger dashboard. Less than prophetic in the most depressing way. Don’t try pressing the reset map button, it doesn’t work. Unfortunately we have all voted and the count is coming in. After all the haggling and horse trading is complete the botched government that is left will almost certainly be a travesty to the Popular Vote. Liberal Democrats have 8% of the seats from 23% of the electorate voting for them.

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/

Jimmymandering

Not sure if any one else has seen it or not, but there is a general election in the UK on 6^th May 2010.  It’s clear that voter apathy has lead to poor turnout at general elections in the UK previously.  This graffiti-pedia page has the UK ranked joint 25^th.  My personal voter turnout has been just as poor, as until recently I lived in the constituency of Henley with such Conservative luminaries as Michael Heseltine and Boris Johnson – so I felt my vote would not make any difference either way against the swathes of Tory Heartlanders.  Currently the MP is John Howell, no I’d not heard of him either.

 

Last year we moved home only 4.3 miles away from where we used to live.  It struck me that we may just have moved far enough to be out of the Henley constituency and be in a position where at last my vote would actually count! So after a little bit of research I discovered I have indeed shifted from the Henley constituency to the Wantage constituency.  With a renewed vigour I started to brush up on the political agenda’s of each of the main parties and then looked for the current incumbent.  It turns out to be Ed Vaizey  a conservative, onetime close pal of the neighbouring Cameron family until a recent faux pas.  More conservative than Margret Thatcher, so again I think my vote has become redundant. 

 According to the Telegraph it would take a swing of 19.5% to switch from Conservative to Labour in Wantage – it would have switched to Liberals first clearly but still a similar swing is required.

This is the spread of votes at the last election in Wantage:

During my recent fervour of interest in government and politics I downloaded the 75Mb conservative manifesto, so perhaps I’ll précis it for you in the next blog.