Wesley Stevenson
speaker
1,470 appearances
54 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard May 2015
Wesley Stevenson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yes, loyal listeners have been writing in to ask what difference proportional representation would have made to the election result.
For years, when there were only really two parties in British politics, the First Past the Post system delivered results that were pretty close to proportional representation.
Let's return to the election night of 1955.
I think the first thing to do is to look at the result so far in terms of seats.
Here you see the Conservatives, 339 seats.
But I think that when the final results are in, there are four more seats that are likely to go to the Conservatives.
In the end, the Conservatives got 344 seats.
That's 55% from just under half the vote.
And Labour got 44% of the seats from 46% of the vote.
So in terms of proportionality, well, it was a lot closer than this year's election anyway.
If you look at the average number of votes per seat for each party, the Conservatives averaged around 34,000 votes for every seat they got.
Labour, 40,000.
The SNP got their seats really cheaply with an average of 26,000 votes per seat.
Now look at the Greens, who polled more than a million votes for their one seat, and UKIP, who polled almost four million votes for their one seat.
There are a few estimates out there based on various different voting systems, but let's look at the straight PR system.
The proportion of votes equals the proportion of seats.
We invited the returning officer for Trumptonshire to read out the results under this new system.
Yes, and David Cameron might still have been Prime Minister if he was able to reach some arrangement with UKIP, because together UKIP and the Conservatives would have 324 seats, which would give them a very slim majority.
What about other voting systems, Wes?
The other systems are trickier to model.
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