Despite what the opinion polls are saying,
the pundits all tell us that the coming election is highly unpredictable. Maybe; the polls have been wrong before, and
things can change during a campaign. The
recent finding that the Tories are in the lead in Wales just ‘feels’ wrong, but
that could be affected by a large dose of wishful thinking on my part. And while Johnson is likely to prove a better
communicator than May (he could hardly be worse), he also has a massive propensity
for gaffes, and some of the people around him could also blow it by accident.
To get his majority and then get Brexit (phase
1) ‘done’, the PM needs only to get around a third of the electorate to support
his party, and there are certainly enough hard-line Brexiteers to give him such
a level of support, even if, as seems at least possible, he jettisons the
support of all other types of previous Tory voter in the process. If he achieves that, then under what passes
for democracy in the UK, he would claim a mandate for his deal, despite the
fact that a good number of those hardliners would prefer something even harder.
But overall, the biggest potential
obstacle to his success is another party, namely Nigel Farage plc. At current polling levels, they are likely to
make only a minor dent in the Tory vote, but their vote share could easily
improve over the course of a campaign.
If they were to poll around 12% (currently their status in the polls),
spread evenly over the whole of England, they would do no serious damage to the
Tories and fail to win a single seat, but at around 25%, spread less evenly, they
could start to win seats to a significant extent. It means that there is a ‘sweet spot’, at
around 20%, evenly spread, where they would win no seats but badly damage the
Tories. Put another way, at that sweet spot,
people choosing to vote for the party which most accurately represents their view
of the desired outcome of Brexit is the best way of ensuring that they don’t
get what they want.
Leaving aside (for a moment at least) my
own preferences when it comes to Brexit, the idea that the best way to stop Brexit
completely is to get those who want the hardest version of it to vote for the
only party openly offering them what they want underlines the broken nature of
the UK’s sham of a democracy. There is something
very wrong with a system which can potentially either give absolute power to
one minority or completely exclude another significant minority from any representation
at all.
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5 comments:
That's the iniquity of FPTP - originally designed to represent "constituency interests and values" but now reduced to a sham due to Party loyalty and whips ( among all sorts of other things). Arguably direct polling with 650 seats apportioned according to the regional results could give a more accurate "representation". You'd still have the problem of the peripheries like Wales Scotland Cornwall all having few seats as the concentrations of population are elsewhere. But that might stiffen the resolve to leave the Union.
Indeed, although I'm not sure that FPTP in the UK was ever actually 'designed' to do anything, or even selected as a conscious choice between options. It is, rather, the result of a largely random process of evolution from the way in which the first parliaments were selected rather than elected.
A lot in that. Outside Wales (and, I "think", Scotland), most constituencies had two Members.
The most promising alternative to FPTP is STV in multi-member constituencies (usually of 3-5 seats each).
"designed" insofar as a member was elected/nominated/selected/or sold the seat for a particular area, the constituency.
Interesting post on Mr Farage at Craig Murray's blog:
"the incredible disappearing farage and other electoral oddities"
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