LONDON: Scotland’s nationalists were seen as winners in Britain’s election and the UK Independence Party losers — but the latter won more support, highlighting peculiarities in the voting system that are prompting calls for change.
Despite getting almost 2.5 million more votes than the Scottish National Party (SNP) nationally, the anti-EU Ukip won only one seat at Westminster, compared to 56 for Nicola Sturgeon’s bloc.
“We’ve always been here to believe that Britain needs to get back its democracy, we shouldn’t be governed from Brussels, but what’s interesting is what’s happened in our own democracy,” said Ukip’s Nigel Farage, who quit as party leader after his bid to become an MP failed.
“The time has come for real, radical, political reform,” he added.
The discrepancy between vote share and representation is a result of Britain’s “first-past-the-post” (FPTP) system.
Under this, the government is formed by the party that wins a majority of seats in the House of Commons based on votes in each constituency, with the overall national vote share counting for nothing.
The system, also used to elect the United States Congress, tends to promote two-party politics and dilute the influence of smaller parties.
It also favours parties, such as the SNP, whose vote is concentrated in a small number of places rather than those, like Ukip and the Green Party, whose base is spread more evenly across the country.
As Farage fell on his sword, the Greens too were demanding change.
“I’ve been saying for some time that the clear loser from this election was going to be the FPTP election system,” party leader Natalie Bennett told BBC News.
“If we had a fair proportional system we would have 25 seats. It’s very much not friendly to us.”
The Electoral Reform Society (ERS) has long campaigned for a more proportional system of representation, arguing that FPTP was no longer appropriate in a country where support for fringe parties was on the rise.
“This result is yet another example of why FPTP is not fit for the modern era,” ERS head of communications Will Brett told AFP.
“People used to vote for the two big parties but they don’t any more, they vote for six or seven parties. And yet we still have a voting system that tries to squeeze all of those multiple presences into a two-party framework.”
Before the Conservatives won the election outright, polls suggested the vote would yield a second successive hung parliament, prompting a public debate on how to create a system more suited to multiparty politics.
Although the Tories upset the odds and secured a majority of seats — albeit with just over a third of the votes — Brett insisted that the impetus for change had not gone away.
“This is what FPTP does, it creates artificial majorities,” he said. “That the Conservatives have done it (won a majority) is hardly a ringing endorsement, it just reveals more of its flaws.”
He added that the relative stability of the last Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition had shown voters were becoming more open to the idea of multiparty politics.
But the strongest catalyst for change could be the meteoric rise of the SNP, which wants an independent Scotland.
“The traditional Westminster voting system so stoutly defended by Labour and the Conservatives has abruptly turned against them in Scotland,” The Scotsman newspaper said in an editorial.
“There’s little doubt, though, that the likely over-representation of the SNP — and the equally marked underrepresentation of Ukip — will provoke a level of debate about the future of first-past-the-post previously unseen at Westminster; and could lead to a historic reshaping of British politics”.
— AFP
