Josh's Blog

Through all this fuss about whether MPs for Scottish constituencies should be able to vote on devolved matters in Westminster (ie, vote on laws which don’t directly affect Scotland), it’s important to note that contrary to popular belief, when counting only English MPs, Labour does currently have a (slim) overall majority. This has been carefully avoided by the media, who have reported as if England is all Tory, and Labour needs its Scottish seats to hold a majority. In fact, Labour has an overall majority even if you ignore Scotland and Wales (and they don’t field candidates in NI.) Given that English seats comprise a shade under 5/6ths of all parliamentary seats, it would be pretty damn hard to form a majority government if you didn’t have a majority in England! Labour don’t have a majority when you count total English votes, but since we don’t do that and any way of doing it (PR) would come up with completely different numbers anyway, probably pushing the government into a Lib/Lab coalition, it’s pretty irrelevant.

Here’s the numbers: of the 531 English MPs, 286 are currently Labour, 193 Conservative, 49 Liberal Democrat, and 3 of other affiliation/independent. This equates to Labour holding 53.86% of English seats in Westminster; not a large majority, but only slightly smaller than their majority of 55.2% when counting all UK constituencies.

It’s a convenient assumption, with the number of Scottish ministers we have, that Labour’s majority in Westminster only works because of the Scottish constituencies, but at the end of the day that just isn’t true. We also need to remember the fact that there are 646 UK constituencies, meaning that 82.2% of constituencies are English, making it logically impossible for England to be dictated to even by Scotland, Wales, and NI together, let alone just one of the three other nations.

Figures sourced from analysis of election results on wikipedia.com

After all the “will he, won’t he?” that followed conference, Gordon’s decision not to call an election means that I’ve now finished my internship, the wild ride that it was. I’m sure he took my continued service into account when making his decision, but had to go the way he went (and in all seriousness, did exactly the right thing, though he should have decided far earlier).

So, I’m all done, and now fully unemployed and job hunting (and signing on next week…). There is some good news though; I have an interview at UCL on Tuesday, and a possible other interview with a smaller company before too long. It’s just getting to that time when a load of my applications are shortlisting (the UCL one was one of the first I applied to in this slew), so with any luck I’ll get a few more emails soon.

So, wish me luck, and I hope you’re all OK.

Saw Gordon’s speech today. For me, the first taste of real conference action (and really making my work seem worthwhile, to be a little part of all this). The speech was really really great – the new policies announced, avoiding stooping to the level of the Tories and Lib Dems; totally ignoring them even, not announcing a general election (well, duh… even if he was to do it around now, he’d do it during Tory conference.) Above all though, it was a prime minister’s speech, one of a statesman, and one of a fantastic leader for the party and the country, and he should have laid to rest all concern over his legitimacy by now.

One thing I didn’t like was the small focus on the EU. (nb: I firmly believe that we need to be more involved in Europe, not constantly seeking opt outs, and making the Union all we can make it. I think concern over tradition and our currency is largely unfounded and we shouldn’t let it get in the way of our future.)  We could have done with more talk over Europe. It wasn’t going to happen in something this high profile, of course, but I wish it would.

Anyway, a great speech, really glad to have seen it. To quote someone from the LP message boards: “In Gord we trust”!