I’ve been twittering away on some of these issues and a few others overnight/early this morning. Longer post is coming, but will probably focus on electoral reform to start with. However, a friend over on LJ asked some interesting questions and I thought I’d cross-post my answers.
Does failing to crush a government as unpopular as Gordon Brown’s bode badly for David Cameron in terms of public support for Conservatives and their policies?
I think so, and I hope so. I also suspect that if the Conservatives do manage to form a government, it will become very clear very quickly that Big Society doesn’t work and Compassionate Conservatism doesn’t exist. That combined with the harsh public spending cuts they’ll need to make may well prove Mervyn King right and make them unlectable for a generation, which would be a good result in my books. Of course the question remains of how much damage they’ll do to the country before they’re kicked out. I’m still hoping for Lib/Lab deal with a main priority of bringing about electoral reform in the next 18 months.
Does the fact that Liberal Democrat popular support in polls failed to translate to votes depress you, or give you hope for the electorate that a few television appearances were not enough to swing the election?
I think there are three significant factors here.
1. First Past the Post is an appalling electoral system. Here are the numbers as of 7am today: Lib Dem: 6202692 votes = 50 seats, Lab: 7803647 votes = 234 seats. Labour have 1.26 times the number of votes of the Lib Dems but 4.68 times the number of seats.
2. And this plays in with (1): Because FPTP is so incredibly bad, the scaremongering that both Labour and the Tories, as well as Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda machine, threw at the electorate (Vote Clegg, get Brown/Vote Clegg, get Cameron) clearly worked. I’ve not looked at the seat-by-seat numbers (and probably won’t – not feeling quite geeky enough), but I suspect that the LibDems got smeared between Labour and the Tories in marginals both ways.
3. Personally I think Nick Clegg didn’t play his cards right. He tried to have his cake and eat it. Declaring that he couldn’t work with Gordon Brown, cozying up a little too much with David Cameron, and at the same time trying to stay on the fence and position himself as the outsider is a bit too much of a contortionist’s act and he lost credibility over it.
For me the bigger story this morning is actually the failure of the infrastructure to cope with the turnout and the resulting disenfranchisement of thousands of people who turned up and were not allowed to vote. We had polling stations running out of ballot papers, as well as turning away people who in some cases had been queuing for hours from 9.30 pm onwards, and in one place 600 people who were registered to vote weren’t on the electoral roll. Two points about this:
1. The Electoral Commission appears to be most concerned with rule book thumping and thus with the handful of people who did get to vote after 10 pm, rather than with the thousands turned away. I am unimpressed.
2. (This came across a lot more strongly on Twitter than it did in mainstream media.) In a number of constituencies students (a lot of whom would be first-time voters!) seem to have been disproportionately affected by this failure of infrastructure. One returning officer fed us the line of “They turned up without polling cards and therefore took longer to process”, but eyewitness accounts talk of students being put in separate queues to “residents” regardless of whether they had a polling card or not, and disproportionately it was the students who didn’t get to vote.
This casts a very dark shadow over this election, and unless it is addressed quickly and decisively, the risk is that an entire generation get alienated from the political process because this was their first brush with it.