Category Archives: Governments and parties

Why Lib Dems don’t do as well as other parties

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My post on election campaigns not mattering now seems rather quaint, with the Lib Dems surging in the polls. Of course this is not completely novel, the idea of a 3rd party ‘surge’ was enough ingrained in popular conciousness for Spitting Image to joke about David Steel ‘feeling’ it.

Anyway what is perhaps becoming more clear is that even if the Lib Dems have the same percent of votes as Labour and the Conservatives, they do much worse in terms of numbers of seats. Most of the calculators put a 30% each election as something like Labour on 300 seats, Tories on 200 seats and Lib Dems on 100 seats.

I explained this on Tim Worstall’s site by:

It’s not so much the disposition of the seats but the FPTP system itself, which simply favours geographically concentrated votes. So say the Tories take 60 percent in all southern seats, Libs 30 percent and Lab 10 percent, and the reverse is true in the north. Nationally if equal no. of seats in north and south then vote share is Con 35, Lab 35, Libs 30. But Libs have no seats.

I wasn’t entirely sure if this was right, but I think it is essentially correct – the Lib Dems’ support is too widely spread, and they do reasonably well in most seats, not especially well in enough. Here is a chart of each party’s % share of the vote in the 2005 election, starting with each’s seat where they got the highest share of the vote in % terms, and ending with their lowest. So the 1st point on the chart is not a particular seat, but for each party the share of the vote they receivedin the seat where they received their highest share of the vote.

The box shows the share of the vote – 40% and higher – that typically wins you a seat. Of the 614 seats won by one of the three main parties, only 45 were won with less than 40% of the vote. Similarly in only 32 seats did a party get more than 40% and NOT win.

So taking the 40% line, one can see the Lib Dims get about 60 seats, the Tories 200 and Labour 350 or so – about what happened.

Now let’s assume the vote share – 35.3 Labour, 32.3 Tory and 22.1 Lib Dem in 2005 – becomes 29.9 Labour, 29.9 Tory and 29.9 Lib Dem – not wildly dissimilar to some recent polls.

Now the first thing to note is that the % share of the vote when a candidate will typically win will fall, to something like 37%. This is simply because the Labour and Conservative share has fallen, and we are in a three-way tussle.

But again we can see a good estimate of how many seats each party will get from where their line crosses that 37% line – the Lib Dems about 150, the Conservatives about 210 and Labour about 280. Now this isn’t quite what the uniform polls predict, that is because of a variety factors such as boundary changes since 2005, the particular makeup of some seats whereby Labour can win with a slightly smaller share than the Libs and so on. But it does show us why the Lib Dems fail to match Labour. And basically it’s because their vote is spread reasonably evenly, with still high % shares of the vote in the last 200 constituencies, whereas the Tory and Labour vote has collapsed.

This assumes a uniform national swing (UNS), so the Lib Dems have gained 8% of the vote nationally since 2005 and will gain 8% in every constituency. What they need to form a government is for that extra 8% nationally to be concentrated in seats 200-400, where it would win them the election.

little boats

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In re: the Volcano Flight Chaos, as all the TV stations seem to be calling it. I just heard the Tory transport spokesman say that what we needed was a “Dunkirk type flotilla of little boats” to rescue our fellow citizens stranded in, oh I don’t know, Frankfurt and Milan and places like that I suppose. In fact she said that she knew for sure that there was one raring to go right now, but it was being held back by the Border Agency, the same one the Tories say is helpless to prevent anyone coming or going from the UK. 

I also know of lots of people who want to solve the whole volcanic ash problem by blowing upwards through a really big straw. I have informed the authorities of my fine plan in many, many e-mails. But instead of rewarding this act of individual initiative and mutual aid, they simply fail to respond.

Govern Different

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Our friends at Foreign Policy (among others) report that the Prime Minister of Norway, stranded in the US by volcanic events in Iceland, is working with his new iPad to make sure things don’t get out of hand back home. No word on what kind of mobile he uses, though maybe he’s saving on roaming charges by using Skype?

Anybody else out there stuck? (Chancellor Merkel, for example, is in Lisbon at least through Saturday. Not sure if that qualifies as stuck.)

demonstrating uncertainty

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Hey ho, big media seems to have picked up what I suppose we’ll have to call Cameron’s China gaffe:

British Conservative Party leader David Cameron cited uncertainty over China as one of the reasons for Britain to maintain its nuclear deterrent, drawing an instant reprimand from Foreign Minister David Miliband. 

“Are we really happy to say that we’d give up our independent nuclear deterrent when we don’t know what is going to happen with Iran, we can’t be certain of the future in China?” Cameron said in a debate last night against his rivals in May 6 elections, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg. “I say we should always have the ultimate protection of our independent nuclear deterrent.” 

… The Conservatives issued a statement saying, “David Cameron was demonstrating the extent of uncertainties in the world, not saying China is a threat to the U.K.” 

So he did actually mean China – I mean, inasmuch as he meant anything. What does he think is going to happen in China that requires Britain to have nuclear weapons?

Cameron’s said some not bad things in the past about distancing Britain somewhat from US policy, but he’s done some deeply flaky things in foreign policy more generally. There’s his European parliamentary alliance with Latvian SS nostalgics, that bizarre trip to Georgia in 2008 and now this. 

Maybe it’s basically because he’s a classic Tory little Englander who doesn’t really think about abroad, except that it’s where you go skiing and where the au pairs come from. But it can’t help that he’s got people like Michael Gove around him when his thoughts do turn in that direction. 

It would be kind of ironic if Cameron did take power and the US, which actually controls the use of our “independent deterrent”, decides to take it away on the grounds that he can’t really be trusted with it. I mean, he’s not demonstrating uncertainty here so much as adding to it.

the long awaited Jamie Kenny endorsement

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Outsourced to Porter: 

The party will introduce a freedom bill, regulate CCTV, reduce local council surveillance, restore the right to protest, protect free speech, offer guarantees to investigative journalism, scrap ID cards, end plans to spy on email and internet connections, scrap ContactPoint, reduce pre-charge detention to 14 days and scrap secret evidence. The Lib Dems go much further than the Tories on the DNA database and offer wholehearted support for the HRA. 

On civil liberties, the Lib Dems win hands down.

I’m not a Lib Dem. I’m really just parking my vote there. I’ll probably vote Green once the crusties are ready for prime time. Good luck to the folk further left, but I don’t do movements. I’m a retail politics guy. 

Meanwhile, if you think that this stuff matters you should vote for it when it’s offered by a major party, especially since we’re now at the stage when it clearly doesn’t matter to either the government or the opposition. It’s way past time that social authoritarianism stopped being a cost free political option. And voting Lib Dem is the only realistic way I can see that you can at least try to make that happen.

specialness news

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The Tory manifesto calls for a “special relationship” with India, apparently combined with a “strong and effective” relationship with China. This is an exact copy of US policy, even if our special relationship with them isn’t so special anymore. We’re going to be special on our own. 

This obviously raises the question of what side Britain would take if Sino-Indian rivalries got really serious. The obvious answer involving potential conflict between nuclear powers that account for one third of the world’s population would be to encourage neither side to do anything drastic. And that would be difficult to do credibly if one of the countries involved is “special” to you. 

Also, does that mean a Tory run Britain would take the Indian view on Kashmir? Because that ain’t the view of British Kashmiris, presumably including the ones in the Tory Party. 

Interestingly, the Tories also want the other two BRIC countries as permanent members of the UN Security Council, which among other things would give them all an excellent opportunity to caucus together.

put the knife down

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I was trying for a bit of cheap election snark by comparing what we’ve heard so far from Brown, Cameron and to a lesser extent Clegg to the speech patterns of schizophrenics. It doesn’t really hold up. Schizophrenic speech is free in the most fundamental way, full of random association, stuffed with neologism, repetition and the bizarre juxtapositions generated from crossed synapses and odd biochemical combinations.

I got the wrong end of the stick. Current political speech is more like that adopted by people talking to schizophrenics, and, in particular, trying to get them to co-operate in some way. There’s nothing internal about it. It’s concocted rather than originated. The aim is basically negative: to close down neural pathways and opportunities for mental association and to shepherd the listener down the desired pathway – to a future fair for all, for instance, where we are all in it together. Just get down from the ledge and get into the ambulance…that’s right…one step at a time…this way. Don’t worry. We have plans for you. We are in the future business.

PR

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I’m a great supporter of proportional representation, in particularly STV, and not a foul-weather friend like Gordon Brown (my election 2005 first thoughts were “55% of the seats on 36% of the vote though. Can we have PR?”). Thus I was quite surprised last night in Nick Clegg’s interview to see that he didn’t seem to be aware that a party could win most votes but not most seats. It was quite strange – he genuinely didn’t seem to understand Paxman’s point. I guess he might have been pretending not to understand, in order to ignore it, and I suppose it would hardly lose him votes.

Tories’ marriage policy

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Well if this is right, and it is the Telegraph, the policy is as expected, it’s not a support to marriage but a subsidy to not working. And it will be paid for by a tax on successful banks. What’s not to like?

I’d say Lord Carey has been duped.

Last night, Lord Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, said: “The recognition of marriage in the tax system is a long overdue restatement of the centrality of this institution to the common good of our society.

But that describes his entire life. A subsidy to marriage would be – e.g. – a £200 cash payment to married couples. This simply penalises the hard working couples.