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July 12, 2005
Chatham House Rules
Last night, a secret brotherhood of Conservative peers and MPs snuck into the Commons, their faces obscured by anti-social hoodies, lest any of their colleagues discover the direction of their divagations. Official rules prevent naming of names, or talk of much at all really, else I get hunted down, chopped up and fed to Lady Thatcher as part of the annual Conservative sacrifical barbeque.
Okay, so maybe it didn't happen exactly like that, but a meeting of MPs - it's tough material.
In short, ERS psephologist Lewis Baston addressed a dozen or so Conservatives about the anti-Tory bias in the UK electoral system. He showed them beautiful graphs about how the difference in seats on level votes has never got above 50 in favour of the Conservatives (and that was back in the 50s), and was as good as non-existent from 79-87, whereas since 92 it has been well in Labour's favour, almost hitting 150 in 2001 (in 2005 it was about 120ish - sorry for the vague figures, I'm working from a printout graph, not the original file).
There was also a lovely table to show that Con seats have had markedly fewer members of the electorate in them since, well, ever, so hush ye talk of the boundaries solving everything. The current redistribution could have as little effect as Con +7, Lab -5 and LD +2.
Reported reaction suggests clutching at straws or 'let's just wait and see if we can't get back in before Biblical Armageddon.' Speaking of which, does Tony get to claim squatter's rights if he stays in number 10 until May 2009?
Posted by pauldavies on July 12, 2005
Comments
Can't think why they won't embrace change. STV works very well for Fianna Fail, and no-one can accuse them of being pinkoes.
Oliver Heald told me in an e-mail that it is official Party policy to reduce the number of Westminster MPs to 525, making an average constituency size of about 84000. They are hoping, I suppose, that FPTP will the be biased in their favour.
Come on Tories... push for electoral reform before Labour do!
Posted by: Andrew Kitching at July 12, 2005 09:25 PM
Tories don't like anything that allows people to rank candidates because they believe (rightly, to a large extent) that there are a lot of people so congentially opposed to the very idea of a Conservative govt, that they will use the ranking system to shore up their petty tactical voting.
Whether this has too great an effect or not, you can understand their hesistancy.
Slightly more detail here:
http://www.makemyvotecount.org.uk/blog/archives/2005/06/why_british_pol.html
Posted by: Paul Davies at July 13, 2005 10:44 AM
Send it to David Cameron. He always replies.
A
Posted by: Andrew Kitching at July 13, 2005 06:48 PM
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