The Big Boundary Con (Part Deux)

A couple of weeks back I blogged about the fact that the electoral system in the UK is somewhat biased in favour of the Labour party; using the example that with Labour and the Conservatives both gaining 35% of the vote, Labour would have about 100 more seats.  Given the commentary there has been recently on the surge that the Liberal Democrats have experienced, this seems like an ideal time to revisit the issue.

An opinion poll published yesterday for The Sunday Times showed Labour lying in third place following the Leaders' Debate on Thursday evening.  The figures were:

Conservatives: 31%
Liberal Democrats: 29%
Labour: 27%
Others: 13%

If you feed this data into the BBC calculator, you get something that looks like this:

National result based on ComRes poll for Sunday Times (18/04/2010)

Now if you look closely at the figures and the outcome, you may well notice that something appears to be amiss.  Namely, the fact that Labour are lying in third place but that they still have the most seats.  As well as that, take a look at the Liberal Democrats.  They are two points ahead of Labour and two points behind the Conservatives, but they still trail both parties by 175 and 134 seats respectively.

This got me thinking, and I ended up having a little play with the calculator.  I decided to see how low I could take the Labour vote share whilst still keeping them as the largest party.  This was the result:

National result based on my own input

The figures I used in the above example are as follows:

Other: 30.7%
Liberal Democrats: 29.8%
Conservative: 22.6%
Labour: 16.9%

As you can see, the Labour party are now the fourth placed party in terms of popular vote but still remain as the largest party in the House of Commons.  In fact, the number of seats is the complete opposite of the share of the vote.  The biggest injustice here is the number of seats gained by "other parties".  In return for almost one third of the popular vote they receive just one twentieth of the seats in the House.

When the least popular party can still be the largest party in the House of Commons, it is clear that there is something fundamentally wrong with our political system which must be changed as soon as possible, and I will discuss that in my next post (hopefully tomorrow!).

In the meantime, please have a play with the calculator (here) and let me know if you can keep Labour as the largest party with a vote share of less than 16.9%.