Well, the bulk of the results for the General Election are in and it promises to be a somewhat interesting and curious few days. The Conservatives, quite rightly, are saying that the results show that Labour simply does not have a right to govern, the problem is they never had one to start with. The Liberal Democrat vote is up nearly 1%, which doesn’t seem to matter seeing as they lost (at time of writing) 10.5% of their seats. It is simply ludicrous that we call this type of score keeping a ‘democracy’. As it happens the candidate I voted for was not elected. Therefore I’m ‘represented’ by someone who doesn’t share my view on many key issues. In fact the new MP doesn’t even represent the majority of voters in his constituency either.
According to the BBC the current results are as follows:
| Party | Seats | Gain | Loss | Change | Votes | % Votes | % Change |
| Conservative | 291 | 95 | 3 | +92 | 10,152,097 | 36.1 | +3.9 |
| Labour | 247 | 2 | 87 | -85 | 8,211,677 | 29.2 | -6.3 |
| Liberal Democrat | 51 | 7 | 13 | -6 | 6,426,742 | 22.9 | +1.0 |
I’ve already posted a similar table below, and today I want to draw attention to something else about it which makes no sense.
If you divide the number of votes by the number of seats, you see a strange phenomenon. Those 291 Conservative seats correspond to the 10 million votes they won, which means each seat ‘cost’ 34886 votes. Labour seats ‘cost’ 33245 votes, and a Lib Dem seat ‘costs’ a whopping 126014 votes. Again, lets look at this a different way. The 268024 people who voted Green have 1 person representing them in parliament, and the 539841 BNP voters don’t have any effective representation. Regardless of what we think about any one parties policies and views, the whole point of a democratically elected government is to reflect the views of the people who elected them. That clearly doesn’t happen in the UK.
We are still waiting for the full results, 34 seats still have to declare, and it seems certain that the Conservatives will be hard pushed to form a working government (as it should be with only 36% of the vote), and yet a Lab/Lib coalition would be in pretty much the same position with roughly the same number of seats (and a 52.1% share of the vote).
I think the question we’re all thinking is, how the hell will this play out?