This month has seen another couple of disastrous bi-elections for the Conservative Party, this time in Tamworth and in Mid Bedfordshire. Both were once very safe Tory seats, with all that entails yet have seen massive swings to Labour. As always with these things, those who lost try to second guess the reasons when everyone knows, that unless you ask everyone who voted, you will never know what was in their minds at the time. Even then they may not tell you the truth.
This time the main blame seems to be against the voters themselves, who either stayed away or voted for the wrong candidate. Whatever way you look at it, Labour won two bi-elections and the Conservatives lost.
The real losers, once again however, were the voting public, especially in Mid Bedfordshire. Here, Alistair Strathern, the successful candidate won the seat with 34.1% of the votes, a swing of 12.4%, while the Conservative candidate Festus Akinbusoye, who is the Police and Crime Commissioner, got 31.1% of the votes, a swing of -28.6%.
The situation is that 65.9% of the people who voted did not vote Labour yet somehow they won. I cannot understand how we can think of this as democracy. For someone whose job it is to represent all constituents, it is an auspicious start. It could be, under a single transferable vote, for example, that Labour would still have won, as the progressive vote was around 60% though we will never know.
Once again, our first past the post electoral system has shown how awful it is. Nobody should be elected to represent a constituency that does not carry a majority of the votes, even if the number of people turning out is small. Being a winner on a third of the turnout is simply not representative democracy.
Politics is highly complicated and nuanced. Giving voters a simple yes or no choice can never represent the breadth of feelings. As a minimum, the voters should be given a chance to say that if I can’t have A, then I would choose B. Even better, they should be given the chance to rank all candidates.
Yes, this would take longer to decide who has won the election but would ensure that the elected member was representative of the will of the people.
Electoral reform is well overdue in this country.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 