Twists and turns likely in British election

Not only the Labour government is under scrutiny, but also the British electoral system

ITS ALL getting very exciting in Britain. Psephologically speaking . . .

The Conservative Party has seen its lead cut to just two points in 60 key marginal seats, according to a new Channel 4/ You Gov poll which confirms recent trends of a sharply narrowing gap with Labour and the real prospects of a hung parliament after a likely May election.

Thirty nine per cent of voters said they would vote Conservative and 37 per cent Labour.

The swing to the Tories against the 2005 election result is two percentage points stronger in the marginals than on a national basis, where a similar two-point margin – seen in one poll last week although most show a more likely five- to seven- point gap – would actually give Labour an overall majority despite a minority vote in the popular poll and leave Gordon Brown in Downing Street.

And, perversely, if the election went the way predicted by a recent ComRes poll, with the Tories on 37 per cent and Labour, 32 per cent, experts say the latter could end up with some 294 seats, to the Tories on 277. Hung parliament territory – a majority is 324.

Such are the vagaries of the British first-past-the-post (FPTP) system and the way constituencies are drawn that often wild discrepancies are thrown up between popular vote and party seats. The Tories are said to need a clear 10 per cent lead on Labour to clinch their absolute majority.

Currently, though not always, Labour is the big beneficiary of this iniquitous system – following the 2005 election the party took 57 per cent of seats on the basis of 36.4 per cent of the vote , while the Lib Dems, on 23 per cent of votes, 10 per cent of seats. The Tory seats and vote shares roughly tally.

In the past it has worked the other way. In 1955 the Tories beat Labour by 344 to 277 seats with no more than a 3.1 per cent lead in the popular vote, and in 1970 by 330 to 287 with 3.4 per cent. But in 2005, although the Tories had a fractional lead in votes in England, they took only 198 seats to Labours 286.

Part of the reason is the decline in two-party dominance. In 1955, the two larger parties shared 96.3 per cent of the vote. With the resurgence of Liberals and then Lib Dems, as well as nationalists of various hues on the Celtic fringe, that figure has plummeted to 67.3 per cent at the last election.

Yet, despite the advantage of the status quo to them, Labour, battered by the expenses scandal, has at long last acknowledged that electoral reform must be part of a reform package to reconnect it to voters. The Commons voted last month to put a change in the electoral system to referendum in October although the likelihood, of course, that the parliamentary numbers will have changed in the interim makes the poll far from certain.

There is little doubt the move is also a Labour sweetener to the Lib Dems to entice the party to support a possible minority Labour administration.

The system on offer to the British voter is known as the “alternative vote” (AV) and is essentially that used generally in Australia and in Ireland in byelections – voters rank candidates in order of choice in single-seat constituencies.

It is one, among others, that has been canvassed here by witnesses to the Oireachtas committee on the Constitution, not least because it would eliminate what is seen as one of the central deficiencies of our STV system – intra-party rivalry within constituencies.

The problem with AV is that although voters are given a chance to rank candidates and preferences are transferred the result is by no means guaranteed to be proportional – indeed it can be even less proportional than FPTP. It’s quite possible, in theory, for the largest party in a three-corner fight to end up without any seats at all.

As Garret FitzGerald pointed out in these pages last year such aberrations – which in Canada some years ago saw a defeated government emerge from an election with only two seats – are likely in countries where there are relatively small regional variations in party share. “If the alternative vote had been used in 43 single-seat constituencies in the 2007 general election,” he argued, “Fianna Fáil, with less than 42 per cent of the vote, would still have won 32 or 33 of the 43 constituencies – thus securing about 75 per cent of the seats with less than 42 per cent of the vote.”

But with Fianna Fáil down around 22 per cent in the polls, were AV used today it could produce a wipeout, possibly even eliminating the party from the Dáil.

As a consequence, in the debate here, there is general acceptance of the need to restore proportionality by combining AV with a top-up system in which up to a third of TDs would be elected from party lists. Not so in Britain where, admittedly, with an electoral map that reflects wide regional differences in party shares, a simple AV system would be more likely better to reflect poll shares. More likely, but not certain. It would be an interesting gamble.

But first we’ve got to get through an election.

psmyth@irishtimes.com