A 'Well Hung' Parliament!!!

If the opinion polls are anywhere near correct, it seems we will be getting two general elections this year. I will explain why below.

In a parliament of 650 MPs, the magic number for a theoretical majority of one seat is 326 seats. In practise, this is reduced to 323 seats as the 5 Sinn Fein MPs refuse (not surprisingly) to swear allegiance to the Queen and cannot take their seats in parliament as a result.

To last a 'full' parliament of 5 years, it is estimated a 20 seat majority or 333 seats is the minimum required as around 10 governing party seats tend to come available due to deaths and retirements. These by-elections can be easily lost when in government. I suspect a 20 seat majority is also the minimum to take account of rebellious mavericks in either party - in Labour's case the number of rebels is usually even higher. There are also 4 speakers/deputies who by convention do not vote - 2 Labour and 2 Tory.

The current make-up of parliament (allocating notional, independent, suspended etc to previous party alignment) is LAB 351, CON 197, LIB 63, OTH 28. So the Tories have a lot to do.

UK Polling Report currently think the Tories will be around 20 seats short of a majority - i.e. will win around 310 seats, with Labour on 260, Libs 50 and Others 30 (mainly NI, Scots, Welsh Nats). So the Tories are expected to gain around 110 seats on this prediction, Labour lose 90 and Libs lose 15.

Ladbrokes think the Tories will get a working majority of around 20 seats, i.e will win around 335 seats, Labour on 225, Libs 55, Others 35. TORY +130, LAB -125, LIB -10. (Incidently, they also give odds on for a Green win in Pavilion and think only 2 independents will make it to parliament - sorry Esther!)

UK polling (YouGov) base their prediction on an agglomeration of the latest polls and what is called a 'universal national swing'. This has its limitations. It is a useful approximation of what is happening but has an inevitable time lag built in and ignores what is happening locally and crucially in the marginals - which are the only seats that actually make a difference to the result. It also takes no account of the effect of external factors - shy Tories still exist who do not admit their preference to pollsters, the effect of media (mainly press) bias over an electoral campaign and the available party advertising spend - all of which favour the Tories.

Ladbrokes base their odds on their profit margins and include ALL factors - for this reason I trust Ladbrokes guess more than UK polling.

But, after saying that, to gain 130 seats from the 150 or so that matter is a big ask for the Tories. It would be a turnover election to rival 1997 when Blair came to power on an unprecedented wave of enthusiasm. The Tories are just not that liked and they rely heavily on Labour's huge unpopularity bolstered by the Tory press. So I doubt they will get 335 seats - maybe 325 though. In a future post, I will look more closely at these 'marginal' seats.

Despite what the media will have us believe, it seems pretty impossible for Labour to get back into government with or without a coalition with the Lib Dems. To have any chance of forming a coalition, Labour need to win at least 270 seats and no recent opinion poll has put them within 1% of the Tories which is where they need to be to achieve this.

So the most likely scenario is the Tories with too small a majority to govern for long or to have to rely on Ulster Unionists and Liberals to prop them up. This probably explains the LIb Dems coded signals to the Tories on policy. The Lib Dem leadership know that despite their members leaning left, they are almost certainly only going to get into government by leaning right. The Lib Dems, if they stand for anything at all, should stand for electoral reform. But by leaning towards the Tories they have no chance of getting that one singly important policy.

The Tories will not play ball with coalition politics - they are ideologically opposed - I suspect they will give no ground to the Liberals and call a general election as soon as is propitious. It is in the Tory interest to paint any hung parliament as disastrous for Britain and hope that Labour leadership strife will finish off any Labour in opposition challenge. Indeed coalitions are more difficult under first-past-the-post because, just as one party government is unrepresentative of what people voted for, so is any coalition government.

The Tories might get 37% of the vote on a poor turnout yet still get near to 50% of the seats, this will skew any coalition away from what people voted for. While a majority of seats can be won on such a low percentage of the vote, there is no incentive for coalitions to stay together for a full parliament under our first-past-the-post system. Under PR, parties are forced to work closer together because they know that the GE will always mean a coalition partner is needed for parties with less than 50% of the vote.

The most I could see a Tory/Lib Dem government lasting is around 18 months and it could fall apart in as little as 6 months or even less. Hence why I suspect another general election in the Autumn. The Tories might offer some key posts - Ashdown for Afghanistan, Nick Clegg for Home Affairs, and maybe a role for Cable - but NOT the chancellorship - that is too important for the Tories with their cuts agenda.

Of the four Lib Dem demands on policy (pupil premium, green economy, fair taxes, fair votes)- the Tories can offer two policies, the pupil premium which is their policy anyway and the 'green economy' which is suitably vague and fits in with Tory rebranding. On fairer taxes and fairer votes - the two policies that really matter, the Tories will give nothing but lip service - maybe some sort of commission set up to look into both, but nothing of any substance. And of course the Tories would look for the first opportunity to call an election and get out of such restrictions.

If the Tories scrape a small majority or get within single figures of a majority the first thing they will do is enlarge the constituency boundaries so that any election that follows in the Autumn will give them a majority on the 37% vote share they can manage to get. Coupled with their changes to media impartiality this could mean the May 2010 election being the last one to be held under any semblence of democratic fairness. If the Tories do fall 30 seats short then hopefully the Lib Dems will stop them in this gerrymander.

Then we could be heading for the perpetual hung parliaments they get in Canada under our first-past-the-post system - a 'well hung' system that has dragged reluctant Canadians to the polls 5 times in 8 years. Ironically only a PR system could prevent this instability by providing coalition government that truly represents what people voted for and providing a framework for parties to work together to deliver real improvements rather than the present destructive adversarial back biting.

Ever Heard Of 'The Wash Up'?

No, neither had I. But apparently it's where all the party whips get together and rush through legislation that they can agree upon. It is held behind closed doors - democratic eh?

Those dudes at Vote For A Change agree and are campaigning to have it televised. You thought you were living in a democracy? No neither did I, but in case you did, you are in for a shock.

Esther: Tell Us Your Voting History!

My problem with Esther Rantzen standing for parliament, in fact my problem with most independent candidates is they seem to think it is reasonable to not have any policies at all.

The most important question is - who have you voted for? I imagine she votes, so who was it in 2005 for example? Is she a disgruntled non-voter, Tory, Labour, Liberal or other? These things matter - they give us an immediate picture of her politics.

Where does she stand on the big issues? On Trident, the EU, and most importantly on redistribution of wealth. Where should public service cuts and/or tax cuts or rises be made? Is she a 'small stater', socialist or what?

Are people supposed to vote for her just because she is famous, seems nice and is off the telly? It seems so.

At least with some vacuous party hack we have some idea of which way they will lean on certain policies. Esther gives us no indication - this seems even more undemocratic. She has already stated she will take the full MPs pay and expenses, so what is the point of electing her?

Esther says she hopes there will be a 'dozen or so' independents in the new parliament. Quite simply there won't be more than 1 or 2. Their influence will be minimal. In Esther's case it seems thankfully so, thats if she does manage to get elected. Lets hope not.

Conflicted In Brighton Pavilion? John Harris Investigates.

If I still lived in Brighton Pavilion, I would find it a difficult decision to decide who to vote for. Nancy Platts is an excellent Labour candidate on the left of the party and personally very likeable. Caroline Lucas another great candidate in a offbeat party that nonetheless very much shares my views on equality and the environment.

John Harris investigates in this Guardian Film

Personally I still think Caroline will win by around 3,000 votes and that even if the Labour/Green vote (combined was 57% last time) splits right down the middle the Tories cannot win with just 27% support. Sorry Nancy, its close, but I would plump for the Greens better policies. The idea of propping up Bully Brown is only attractive to stop a Tory being elected, no matter how good the local Labour candidate is, a Green will bring a breath of fresh air to Westminster that is badly needed.

Here is my previous post outlining vote shares and with my prediction for the Brighton Pavilion result on May 6th.

We Need A Referendum On Tory Boundary Changes

Since the expenses row, the phrase 'hung parliament' doesn't sound so bad. The current hostility to MPs means a lot of the public warm to the imagery that the term conjures up - of MPs literally being strung up.

The current political and economic crises in the run up to the next general election, means we could be heading for dangerous constitutional territory. It is either an amazing opportunity to bring progressive and long overdue reforms, or it could be used for much darker purposes. The Tories have chose the latter.

If David Cameron does become PM in May this year, the Tories are planning an immediate and radical enlargement in the constituency boundaries for the following general election which could follow as soon as the Autumn. They are pretending that this will in some way 'clean up' politics.

The Tories claim that cutting the number of MPs from 650 to 585 will not just save taxpayers money (ignoring the fact that the Tories also quietly support a massive increase in MP salaries) but in some way they claim it will restore confidence in our MPs.

But the main reason MPs are reviled, is not because there are too many of them, but because MPs are remote and unaccountable. They are unaccountable because most voters live in safe seats and the Tories are now the only party that wants to preserve this unaccountable electoral system that means most urban MPs are elected by only around 1 in 5 of their constituents. For urban councillors it is 1 in 10 constituents. Imagine living in a ward where your only council representatives both at borough and county level are BNP (Burnley, Stoke, Dagenham) who 'won' with just 29% of the vote on a 20% turnout - you can soon see how this system helps extremists and could become even more frightening as voters fragment more and more between the parties on offer or give up in frustration at voting at all.

And before someone says the rise of the BNP is all about Labour ignoring its core vote, I refer you to the London Mayor election in 2008 where 78% of BNP voters put the Tories as their second preference. All the evidence points to BNP voters being marginalised, Tory tabloid reading, urban working class Tories, alienated and frustrated by having no effective voice, living in the perpetually safe Labour seats that first-past-the-post foists on them.

Only under our present system does it make sense for the Tory press to foster anti-immigrant feeling amongst the working class as a 'wedge issue' to move working class voters to the right and towards voting Tory with the unpleasant side-effect of also increasing BNP support.

For the Tory press, this is a price worth paying as the current electoral system delivers many more Tory seats than BNP simply because only the largest party in an area win seats. So to the Tory press it doesn't matter too much that for every working class Tory they create they also create a working class BNP voter - as long as only the largest party gets seats - only the increase in Tory C2 voters will matter and it only matters in the marginals not the safish Labour urban seats. But even the Tory press does not want the BNP to actually win seats and a more proportional system would mean the Tories would have to find more positive ways to win votes otherwise the side-effect of a large minority of BNP votes would translate into BNP seats. Without the Tory tabloids pushing racist and anti-immigrant sentiment the BNP vote would collapse.

If there ever was a justification for our present first-past-the-post system, it was when there were two 'mass parties' with huge memberships hoovering up the vast majority of the votes, like the Labour and Tory parties did in the 1950s. Those days are long gone and will not return, because people want a bigger choice. Labour and Tory combined shares of the vote have dropped from well over 90% in the 1950s to around 65% today. As this continues to fall we will get more and more perverse results. A party 'winning' a general election with 35% of the vote and just 22% of potential voters giving them an absolute majority of 55% of the seats as Labour got in 2005 and the Tories might get in 2010, might begin to look nostalgic as we continue to get a 'one party' state on less and less votes in the future. We are not far away from a main party winning absolute power on 29% or even lower. There is no limit to how undemocratic first-past-the-post can go.

And the Tory proposals will not make MPs less remote either. In 1945 there were 635 MPs representing roughly 50,000 constituents each, now there are 646 representing around 65,000 constituents each. The Tories proposals will mean each MP has nearly 80,000 constituents. Rather than make MPs less remote, this is bound to increase the distance between MP and voter.

Of course it will also make a mockery of the so called 'constituency link' that supporters of the present system claim is so relevant. For example, in May Caroline Lucas is likely to become the first Green MP by winning in Brighton Pavilion only to find that she loses the seat in August for no other reason than the seat has been enlarged to be called something like Brighton & Arundel and include a swath of rural Tory voters who were previously outside the Brighton Pavilion boundaries.

Unlike the referendum Labour are proposing for the modest change of the system to the Alternative Vote (which leaves boundaries unchanged and simply means voters ranking candidates 1,2,3 rather than marking one candidate with an X), the Tories more significant change to the boundaries will happen without consulting us at all.

To enlarge the boundaries the Tories are proposing ignoring county, administrative and even geographic boundaries. The larger boundaries will also make it more difficult to maintain stable constituency numbers between seats - so will need more frequent reviews. This will make a mockery of the so called 'constituency link' - the voter will find that the MP they wanted to unseat has moved somewhere else after just one term. This is a big issue that will probably get little or no coverage in the coming general election. Yet it is a massive constitutional gerrymander that the Tories are proposing. We cannot let the Tories smuggle this massive change in under the radar. Hopefully the Tories will fail to get their majority otherwise we need to demand a referendum on this vicious Tory erosion of our democracy.

Michael Foot Was A Great Bloke (I Don't Care What They Say)

I wrote this song in the 1980s when he was still ridiculed in the media and before he died and had all the gushing tributes from people who previously slagged him off.

Words and Music by Neil Harding

Michael Foot was a great bloke
I don't care what they say
Just because he wore a duffle coat on remembrance day

They write these things about you
But I know its just not true
They write this stuff about you
But its a load of hoodoo

The party political broadcast of 1982
Was the best I've ever seen
But they assassinated you

Just as sure as Kennedy was shot
They put a bullet in your head
Just as sure as Kennedy was shot
Bang bang, you were dead