Josh's Blog

Some brief thoughts on the election result so far, as of 1045 the morning after – Tories on 291, Labour on 248, Lib Dems on 51 and everyone else up to 27, 33 to declare. Pretty much everything I’m writing is just based on gut reaction, I’ve not done much maths or analysis beyond my reactions and feelings – only getting two hours sleep didn’t help. It’s a bit strange seeing it all from so far away, down a slightly dodgy stream of BBC World News and on the World Service.

First and foremost, I’m worried about how close the Tories are to an overall majority. I know they won’t get it alone now, not unless the next 42 seats are ridiculous, and that is some comfort, but they still don’t deserve it and their views, principles and policies still don’t even come close to matching the views of the majority in the country. I also have a strange pervasive dread of hearing the words “Prime Minister David Cameron”, and I don’t think it’ll wear any better with time.

I’m very pleased for Caroline Lucas of the Greens taking their first ever seat, despite the fact that it meant a Labour loss. On the flip side, I’m gutted for the Lib Dems, who deserved to do a great deal better – I was expecting somewhere in the region of 100-125 seats, and for far more of them to be taken from the Tories, neither of which seemed to happen.

Like almost everyone, as far as I can see, I’m pleased and relieved that Nick Griffin and his Nazi ilk didn’t win a single seat, though it’s really quite depressing that there are over half a million racist morons who voted for them nationwide… and that under PR, which I am still all in favour of (preferably via STV, including RON in the absence of a perfect system), they would probably have won more than one seat – a real worry, though obviously still no reason to continue propping up FPTP

Naturally I’ll be keeping a close eye on everything with great interest…

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