Sir John Curtice
speaker
115 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 19 Jul
Sir John Curtice’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
the electoral system is very unkind to you, as it was to reform back in 2024.
If, on the other hand, you have a geographically evenly spread vote and you're well ahead in the polls, as reform have been, the electoral system is potentially very kind to you, as it was in the local elections.
in England at the beginning of May.
If you are a smaller party, you'll want your vote to be geographically concentrated, like Liberal Democrats managed in 2024.
So the truth is, therefore, the problem with the system is that
Although it's a system that we rely upon to determine who should control power across the UK as a whole, actually the distribution of seats depends very, very much on how the votes are distributed across the UK.
And it's very, very difficult, I think, to link the fact that how many seats you get depends on geographical distribution rather than simply how many votes you've got across the country as a whole.
but of course we've never been in that position inside the uk we've never had somebody actually managing to win a half of the vote what is true i mean that the classic defense of the system is that at least you've got two parties who dominate the electorate that between them they can both get around 40 percent of the vote and one of them ends up being a bit more popular than the other and the electoral system exaggerates the lead they have in terms of votes in
to what in terms of seats that gives that party an overall majority and then the argument is that well therefore that party is in power for four or five years if it does things well the electorate know who to give credit to if it does badly they know who to blame and if they don't like what's happened the last four or five years they can turn to the alternative big party
and hold the outgoing government to account.
That's traditional argument in favour.
But we are now so, so far away from a world where two parties dominate our politics.
We are in the world of five-party politics.
And under those circumstances, certainly that traditional argument
It doesn't hold in the way that it might have been felt to have done so for much of the post-war period.
Well, they've certainly not got the party that they voted for.
Yes, it means that the number of people who are going to be satisfied with the result locally is going to be lower.
And, you know, we saw this again in the local elections at the beginning of May with five-party politics.
Many, many a seat was being won, not necessarily with 23%, but certainly many, many a seat being won with little more than around a third of the vote.
And, of course, you can then argue whether or not is this sustainable in the long run.
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