by Mike Johnson features@algarveresident.com
Mike Johnson is a freelance journalist who worked in the Algarve for more than 20 years. He now lives in Plymouth in the UK and comments on world topics which fascinate him.
Here in England (where I am!) we are used to being seen as rather eccentric, sticking to old ideals and customs and stubbornly refusing to keep in step with our friends and neighbours.
We still drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road and insist on continuing to deal in our traditional sterling currency while the rest of Europe has adopted the Euro. It’s not that we don’t like change, it’s simply that we think our way is best – for us. That attitude may be about to change in one important sphere – politics.
At present in Britain, a General Election must be held within five years of a party gaining power. It can be less, of course, if the governing party is defeated in a Vote of Confidence in the House of Commons or if the leader of the governing party decides, for whatever reason, to call an earlier election.
There are moves afoot to change that to a four-year fixed-term parliament, as is the custom in many other countries,
Also, at present, the manner in which an election is decided is under scrutiny. We have traditionally used the first-past-the-post system, a term relating to the British love of horse-racing, which means simply this.
There are 646 seats in the present parliament. Each MP represents a constituency – or electoral district – none of which is equal to any other in size or population. The winner is the candidate who wins the most number of votes in each constituency.
On the face of it, this seems a reasonable system. In the 2005 election, Labour won 356 seats, the Conservatives 198 and the Liberal Democrats 62. However, it does not always represent the will of the people nationally.
Over the years, the Labour Party has mainly drawn its support from urban and industrial areas, whereas the Conservative seats were in the counties and the shires. Again, looking back to the 2005 election, this system meant that Labour won 55.2 per cent of the seats, but only 35.3 per cent of the national vote. Smaller parties may win thousands of votes around the country but still not win a seat.
It’s the Liberal Democrats who are pushing for a change to the system as they got 22 per cent of the vote in 2002 but won only nine percent of the seats. They favour the Single Transferable Vote system which is every bit as complicated as the name suggests.
What it basically means is that voters have a multiple choice of candidates and, instead of just putting an ‘X’ against one name, they select the candidates in order of preference – 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. When a candidate reaches a pre-determined ‘quota’ of votes necessary to win, the remaining votes for him or her are transferred to the second choice and so on.
This system, the Lib. Dems claim, would give a fairer division of seats and, by implication, they would have a greater say in government. Whether this will ever come about is a matter for conjecture. It has only been discussed as opinion polls, prior to the election, had put the three parties neck and neck.
This could, thus, result in a ‘hung parliament’ where no one party has an outright parliamentary majority and deals have to be done to enable two or more parties to work together to form a government.
There have been only two hung parliaments in recent British parliamentary history. In 1974 there was no outright majority, Labour winning 301 seats compared with the Conservative Party’s 297. Harold Wilson formed a minority government which lasted only for a matter of months. In the subsequent new election, Wilson had an overall majority of three. The only other was in 1929, when Ramsey MacDonald’s Labour party won 287 seats, 32 less than the combined Conservatives and Liberals.
One factor greatly contributed to the popularity and subsequent improvement in the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats in the present General Election. This was the rather surprising agreement between the three major parties to hold a series of three head-to-head television debates in the run-up to Election Day.
This followed the success of similar debates in US presidential elections. The public was hungry for such an event but, up until now, the politicians had resisted it.
From the halfway point of the first debate, it became evident that there could only be one winner. We all knew the policies – or lack of them – being put forward by Gordon Brown and the Conservative leader, David Cameron. They were both familiar faces to the public due to their frequent television appearances. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, was, however, largely an unknown quantity.
In the event, Brown, although by far the most experienced of the three, looked uncertain and even shifty. His advisers had tried to teach him to smile naturally, and he had been given some carefully-prepared quips, but he still didn’t look comfortable in these surroundings. Cameron tried to calm down his usual hectoring style but couldn’t resist putting on the occasional superior air. Clegg, on the other hand, came across as the fresh-faced newcomer, full of ideas and distancing himself, as far as he could, from the other two.
The viewing public loved him and his ratings soared in the next day’s opinion polls. We wondered why on earth Gordon Brown had agreed to the debates in the first place, when it was obvious he had the most to lose and Clegg the most to gain.
The other advantage Clegg had was that, being the leader of the minority party, it was unlikely he would have to fulfil any of his popular policies – unless, of course, the General Election resulted in a hung parliament.
In the two subsequent debates, little changed except that David Cameron strengthened his position and Nick Clegg faltered slightly in the third. One certainty is that Gordon Brown has not come over well and was actually in third place in the polls published immediately after the final debate.
Of course, I am writing before polling day, and things might change dramatically during that period and, at the moment, the outcome is still wide open.
My hunch is that the electors may well forget the impact of those debates and finally make their decision on who puts over the most convincing arguments during the next seven days.
It’s interesting that Tony Blair has now entered the fray in an effort to boost Brown’s chances. How the public will react to this is an unknown factor as Blair was not, by any means, the most popular figure when he handed over the premiership to Gordon Brown.
So who will win the race? For what it’s worth, if I were a betting man I would still put my money – but not much – on Gordon Brown being first-past-the-post by a short head.
However, he would still need the support of the Liberal Democrats to form an effective government. That’s the way the British political system works.
