Long-term changes in voting patterns across the UK have significantly increased the likelihood of more hung parliaments in the future in some constituencies only 1.6% of the electorate turned out to vote. Britain has evolved into a multi-party system, but it still has an electoral system designed for only two parties.
New analysis shows a long-term trend of UK voters rejecting traditional twoparty politics, with more than one-third of voters (34.9 percent) opting for parties other than the Conservatives or Labour at the 2010 general election. The vote share for the two main parties was the lowest ever at the last election (65.1 percent) and has been steadily falling since its peak in the 1950s.
Parties other than the ‘big two’ have also become more successful at winning seats in the House of Commons and now regularly win around 85 seats collectively. A winning party therefore needs at least 86 more seats than its rival in order to win an overall majority, something that has happened in just seven of the 18 general elections since the war.
Currently for one party to secure a workable majority of 20 seats it needs to win at least 100 seats more than its rival, something that has happened in only four of 18 post-war elections.
Critics of the current First Past the Post voting system believe reform is needed citing the wrong election wins of 1951 when the Conservatives won more seats than Labour on a lower share of the vote and in February 1974 the situation was reversed, when Labour formed a government on a lower share of the vote. The current system means Labour only needs a three-point lead in votes in order to secure an overall majority, whereas the Conservatives need around an 11-point lead to govern on their own. But the range indicating a hung parliament is now in the region of 14 points, the widest it has ever been, making hung parliaments a more permanent feature of British political landscape.
Under preferential voting systems, such as Alternative Vote (AV), coalition parties can each ask the other’s voters to give them their second preferences, allowing voters to reward good governments or vote to break up bad coalitions.
By Shahanara Begum