Reform call as Tories win majority with 37% of vote
Campaign groups have called for the United Kingdom’s electoral system to be reformed, after David Cameron’s Conservative Party secured a majority despite taking just 37% of the vote.
UKIP and the Green Party attracted a combined five million votes, but won just two seats between them.
The results of Thursday's election highlighted the anomalies of a system that allocates seats not according to the parties' total number of nationwide votes but on the basis of 650 local 'first-past-the-post' contests.
Nationwide, UKIP took 12.6% and the Greens 3.8% of the vote, but their support was too thinly spread to win more than one member of parliament each.
Conservative leader Cameron earned a second term as prime minister with 11.3 million votes and 331 of the 650 seats.
But only one of those seats was in Scotland, where the pro-independence Scottish National Party won 1.45 million votes, half of those cast, and took 56 of the 59 Scottish seats.
By this morning, over 100,000 people had signed a petition launched by the Electoral Reform Society and Unlock Democracy calling for change.
It states: "The 2015 general election has shown once and for all that our voting system is broken beyond repair." It urges politicians of all parties to embrace reform.
Will Brett, head of campaigns for the Electoral Reform Society, said: "The fact that over five million people between them have voted UKIP and Green, and they have two MPs, strikes us as utterly absurd and a tragic denial of people's democratic wishes."
The group advocates a switch to proportional representation.
Complaints about the fairness of the first-past-the-post system are not new.
For decades it was the centrist Liberals, and their successors the Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems), who led the calls for change.
As part of the price for supporting Mr Cameron in a coalition after the previous 2010 election, the Lib Dems were granted a referendum in 2011 on adopting a modified version of first-past-the-post (FPP), in which voters would rank candidates in order.
The change was rejected, on a low voter turnout.
Advocates of FPP say it is a tried and tested system that for the most part has delivered clear election outcomes and stable governments.
But opponents say the Scottish question, the fragmentation of the old two-party-dominated political structure and the emergence of movements such as UKIP and the Greens have all bolstered the case for reform.
Under a system of PR, Cameron's Conservatives would still have been the biggest party in the House of Commons after Thursday's election but would have needed to rely on UKIP, with more than 80 seats, to scrape a majority.
In Scotland, the SNP would be reduced to half the seats, with the others split between Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
In that more balanced landscape, the political chasm between England and Scotland would be greatly narrowed.
Even before the election, that point was forcefully argued by Vernon Bogdanor, a constitutional expert who was Cameron's politics tutor at Oxford University.
"Distorted representation makes the UK appear more divided than in fact it is," he wrote in Prospect magazine in February.
"Proportional representation, therefore, would alter the dynamics of the conflict between England and Scotland and make it far more manageable."
No one expects Cameron to change the system that has swept him back to power.
But in the long-term, some argue, there are compelling reasons to re-draw electoral rules that divide much of Britain into fortresses held for decades by one party or the other.
That means that millions of people are effectively disenfranchised and elections are decided in a relatively small number of close-fought marginal seats.
While the current system gives Mr Cameron a mandate for a majority government, "it's not such a strong mandate that he can ignore the rest of the country," Mr Brett said.
"It's going to be hard to ignore electoral reform indefinitely."
http://www.rte.ie/news/2015/0510/700081-uk-election/
