The Perpetual Hung Parliament?

After spending the early part of the week moving from Plymouth to Hove I've only just caught up on my RSS feeds. A post on Political Betting caught my eye as Mike Smithson comments on the difficulty Labour will have winning a majority without holding the bulk of their seats in Scotland. An IPSOS Mori poll on Scotland prompted this discussion as it found the Scottish Nationalists appear to be transferring their surge in support from the Holyrood election in May to Westminster voting intentions.

	2010		IPSOS Mori HoC VI
	Vote %	Seats	Vote %	+/-	Seats*	+/-
Labour	42%	41	33%	-9%	21	-20
Liberal Democrat	19%	11	6%	-13%	3	-8
SNP	20%	6	42%	+22%	34	+28
Conservative	17%	1	15%	-2%	1	+0
Other	2%	0	4%	+2%	0	+0

* Seats calculated on uniform swing using UK-Elect

The poll isn't altogether unsurprising; the main problem the Scottish Nationalists have had in making a breakthrough in General Elections has been the Labour argument that they can't win a majority so a vote for them will just help the Conservatives. This line appeared to be breaking down as in the recent Inverclyde by-election the SNP increased their vote share by 15.5%. Although could have dismissed as one off, with the result not affecting balance of power in Parliament, this poll is further evidence that Labour should fear the rise of the SNP in all elections. It certainly should not be ignored as IPSOS Mori's final poll before this year's Holyrood election was quite accurate.

For giggles, I ran the poll through UK-Elect to see how the 15% Lab>SNP swing would translate into seats on a uniform swing. It doesn't make good reading for either Labour or Liberal Democrat supporters as the former would lose half their seats whilst the latter stand to hang on to just three. From the current 11 Lib Dem MPs only Charles Kennedy, Alistair Carmichael and Michael Moore would return to Westminster as the SNP would sweep up their Scottish seats in this hypothetical scenario. The big problem for Labour is that such a result in Scotland would leave them 88 seats short of a majority if the rest of the country voted the same as the last General Election.

It's probably best not to get too carried away over one poll, especially as the next election is almost four years away and will probably be fought on new boundaries, but the SNP gaining some seats at Labour's expense is a likely occurrence in the next General Election. This is far more to do with the fact Labour over performed in Scotland in 2010, and the SNP have such a low starting point, than the current popularity of the two parties. The key issue here is an underlying, and often overlooked, aspect of British politics; the rise of third parties.

At the 2010 General Election 86 seats were won by parties other than Labour or the Conservatives. The result of that is whichever of Britain's two major political parties comes out on top they need to beat the other by 88 seats just to get a majority of 2. Anyone who can remember the Major years would vouch a majority slightly larger than two is advisable. Furthermore, third party representation in the House of Commons had been steadily increasing before the 2010 election, which saw a slight drop from 2005.

This increase in third party representation in Parliament, primarily as a result of the Liberal Democrats winning more seats, was hidden by the massive majorities Labour won with Tony Blair as their leader. The Conservatives' 48 seat advantage over Labour last year would have given them a majority in all post-war elections up until 1997. Instead, David Cameron ended up 20 seats shy, and more like 40 short of a workable majority.

The worrying conclusion from all this is that Britain could be heading toward a state of perpetual Hung Parliament. A In Canada three elections in a row resulted in no overall majority until Stephen Harper finally won a majority earlier this year following the implosion of the main opposition; the Liberal Party. The presence of a very strong regional party (Bloc Québec) and a reasonably strong third party (the New Democrats) were key factors in the failure of the two main parties to win a majority.

With the neither Labour nor the Conservatives stretching out a lead in the polls the a collapse of the Liberal Democrat vote seems the most likely way our deadlock will be broken. However, incumbent Lib Dem MPs are notoriously hard to shift and recent
polling has suggested they are recovering from their low point earlier in the year.

However the next four years pan out it seems likely that the major parties will have to stretch out a margin of around 60 seats to get anything resembling a workable majority. With the SNP seemingly ready to make a Westminster breakthrough in Scotland and 18 constituencies tied up in Northern Ireland the Lib Dems would need to lose two thirds of their seats to bring that figure any lower.

Beyond the next election it's not hard to imagine a reinvigorated Liberal Democrat Party (or if things go really bad, a new centrist party) enjoying relative success and with other minor parties, such as the Greens, getting to grips with the realities of winning constituencies under First-Past-The-Post it could be a while before we see another stable one-party Government.

Tom Harris

Of Britain’s ‘red regions’ and ‘blue regions’

It is almost impossible to spend a great deal of time reading about American politics before one bumps into the concept of ‘red states’ and ‘blue states’. This concept talks of a divide between American states which are left-leaning and generally support the Democratic Party in Presidential elections such as Massachusetts, California and New York, and between those who are more Conservative and tend to support the Republicans, such as Texas, Utah, and Nebraska. It speaks of the polarisation and changes in regionalisation of American politics. Yet while this is much discussed in the US, Britain now splits into ‘red’ and ‘blue’ regions in much the same way, a much less discussed phenomenon.

Region	Conservatives		Labour		Liberal Democrats		Others
	Votes	Seats	Votes	Seats	Votes	Seats	Votes	Seats
South West England	42.8%	36	15.4%	4	34.7%	15	7.1%	0
South East England	49.9%	75	16.2%	4	26.2%	4	7.7%	1 (Green)
London	34.5%	28	36.6%	38	22.1%	7	6.8%	0
East of England	47.1%	52	19.6%	2	24.1%	4	9.2%	0
West Midlands	39.5%	33	30.6%	24	20.5%	2	9.4%	0
East Midlands	41.2%	31	29.8%	15	20.8%	0	8.2%	0
Yorkshire and the Humber	32.5%	18	34.7%	32	23.0%	3	9.8%	0
North East England	23.7%	2	43.6%	25	23.6%	2	9.1%	0
North West England	31.7%	22	39.5%	47	21.6%	6	7.2%	0
Wales	26.1%	8	36.2%	26	20.1%	3	17.6%	3 (Plaid)
Scotland	16.7%	1	42.0%	41	18.9%	11	22.4%	6 (SNP)

So from this table we can see the polarisation and regionalisation of British politics. There aren’t too many surprises. Scotland, Wales and the North of England are very Labour, the South East and East are very Conservative, London, the Midlands and Yorkshire are more mixed, and the South West is dominated by the Tories but with a strong Lib Dem component. Yet the sheer monolithic nature of large parts of the UK is clear. Scotland’s monolithic Labour dominance is much discussed, but in the South East the Conservatives came very close to an absolute majority of the vote. This has important ramifications for our democracy.

Once Labour and the Conservatives held a reasonable proportion of seats in all the regions of Britain, but now several regions are unassailable monoliths. The result of these changes is a reduction in the number of marginal seats. Whereas more than 160 seats could be said to be marginal in the 1950s, as of 2010 the number is closer to 80. This is important because marginal seats are an important part of how FPTP functions. The theory runs that Labour and the Conservatives should have a large bank of safe seats either side, then there is a large series of marginals in the middle, a bigger uniform national swing should mean taking more marginals and therefore winning a majority. As the number of marginals of declines it therefore becomes much more difficulty to win a majority. This can be demonstrated by noting that there is just more than 80 marginals, now let us imagine that Labour gains 80 seats at the next election, it would have just 338 seats, just thirteen seats above a majority. Yet of those 80 marginals many are already held by Labour, so even to achieve this modest outcome Labour needs to win seats that are, on paper, safe. So this polarisation of voting patterns results in a far higher chance of a hung parliament

It also has ramifications for national legitimacy. If it were not for the Coalition, David Cameron would have only one MP in Scotland, and therefore Scots would rightfully question the legitimacy of their policies. Similarly a government featuring Labour would suffer legitimacy issues in England, where the Tories won a majority. This is not conducive to stable government therefore.

The regionalisation of British politics is self-fulfilling in many ways. As British politics regionalises further ambitious politicians abandon areas where they have lesser chance of being elected. Southern Labour Party politicians abandon the South, and Scottish Conservative party politicians abandon their home. This loss of talent results in a lesser infrastructure, and as such regionalisation begets regionalisation. At the same time parties begin to become seen in a regional sense. So the Tories may be seen as anti-Scottish, and, to a lesser extent, Labour as not matching the values of the South. Unless both major parties make attempts to truly reach out to those regions where they do poorly the trend will continue, and the result for British politics will be more hung parliaments, election campaigns increasingly concentrated on the Midlands, and a more divided country.