There is a great deal to be gleaned from last week’s UK election: an unexpected and highly consequential victory for the Tories, a major setback for post-Blairite Labour and a real question about whether Labour can manage to remain a potential majority party without its base in Scotland. For that matter, despite the failed independence referendum vote, is there a future for the United Kingdom? All that aside I wanted to note one eye-popping result that you may not have heard about if you’re only reading the top headlines.
One of the ‘good news’ items out of this election was that the surging UK Independence Party, right-wing populist and anti-EU party, completely fell flat, winning only a single seat in the next parliament. But that’s only part of the story.
The UKIP managed to get only 1 seat for almost 3.9 million votes. To put that in perspective, the Conservatives won an outright majority of 331 seats with 11.3 million votes. And Labour got 232 seats with 9.3 million votes. Another way to look at it is that UKIP got almost as many votes as the triumphant Scots Nationalists and the shattered Liberal Democrats combined.
Again, there’s no mystery as to how this could happen if you’re familiar with the UK voting system. And one might similarly argue that almost 50% of US voters got zero representation in the 2012 presidential choice or that millions of blue votes got zero seats in red states and vice versa in blue states.
Still, the UK has a mix of a parliamentary system, geographic constituencies with first past the post voting and a semi-multi party system (two major parties but other parties which draw significant votes) which taken together make this sort of odd result possible.
