THE 2015 U.K. ELECTION

The polls say that this election will be the closest ever. Time will tell if that turns out to be true or not, but one thing looks to be certain; the Liberal Democrats, the junior partner in the existing coalition, are going to get stuffed.

The U.K.'s First Past The Post electoral system, which has been in existence for hundreds of years, is viewed with incredulity in places like Denmark. Its advantages are that it is simple to understand, and tends to produce alternating strong governments of left and right. The disadvantages are that a party can end up with a Parliamentary majority without getting anywhere near 50% of the popular vote, and that third parties can get lots of votes without getting many (or, indeed, any) seats. Since Labour replaced them as the party of the left in the interwar years, the party most disadvantaged by the system has been the Liberals, now metamorphosed into the Liberal Democrats. Accordingly their main policy of the past 50 years has been a call to change the voting system to a form of proportional representation, the system used most widely in the rest of Europe (and in Britain for both local and European elections). Such a system would allow the LibDems' undoubted support to transform itself into seats, and so influence.

The big problem was getting a result under a disadvantageous system that gave the LibDems enough influence to pressure one or other of the two main parties into accepting a change in that same system. For election after election this did not happen. Then in 2010 the unexpected happened; neither the Conservatives nor Labour got a majority and the LibDems got 57 seats, enough to make them kingmakers. Form a coalition with us, and you will be in government; but the price is a referendum to change the electoral system away from FPTP.

Future historians will in my view look back at the events of 2010 and shake their heads in wonder. Because although the LibDems did form a coalition government (with the Conservatives) and did get their referendum as the price of their support, the proposed change was not to proportional representation, but to the Alternative Vote system, a tweaked form of FPTP which they had previously ruled out as insufficient. Why they abandoned their principal demand of the previous half century is not clear; perhaps the immediate lure of government went to their heads. However, the referendum result was predictable. Faced with a choice between a simple system which they understood, and a much more complicated version of it, which didn't really change very much, the conservative British electorate stayed with what they knew. The LibDems had blown it.  

Since then, their support has evaporated, and everything points to a wipe-out of their Parliamentary representation. Against that background, and perhaps ironically, reform of the electoral system could well resurface in the future, at exactly the point in time when the LibDems become irrelevant. That's because in this election, the Scottish Nationalists look set to get a lot of seats in Scotland despite not having a big share of the popular vote; while in England, the anti-Europe, anti-immigrant UKIP will get lots of votes without getting many seats. In both cases, the average voter will think that wrong.

Walter Blotscher