From: jf@threel.co.uk (John Fisher)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: UK General Election (1)
Date: 6 Apr 92 09:35:07 GMT
Organization: 3L Ltd, Peel House, Ladywell, Livingston EH54 6AG, UK

Hello colleagues, friends, comrades, ladies and gentlemen.

This posting, in 3 bite-sized chunks, is about the UK
general election.  I've been fascinated to get the soc.motss
voter's-eye view of the US election, which is so much more
interesting than the regurgitated pap we get from the media
here, so I thought I'd reciprocate.  I'll really just be
doing my election homework while you listen in.  If this
doesn't interest you, now's the moment to hit DEL... 

The election happens on Thursday, April 9th.  If we elect
a new government, it takes office on Friday.

First of all, perhaps I should explain what's going on.  In
US terms, we're electing the legislature and the executive
in one go.  There will be 651 members of the new House of
Commons, each of whom is elected by the voters in a
particular area, or constituency, of the UK.  Whichever
party can get a majority of these Members of Parliament
(MPs) gets to form the new government, and its leader will
be the new Prime Minister.  The Prime Minister is not
directly elected. 

This arrangement gives the election a different flavour from
a US congressional election.  We aren't so interested in
our local MPs or their individual voting records or opinions.
It's the parties, their leaders and their policies which count.
Only in a very few places are the actual candidates personally
important.  Once they get to Parliament, the overwhelming
majority of MPs will vote as their parties tell them on most
issues and most of the time.

Last time, the seats held by the parties were as follows:

  Conservative             375 (also called Tory)
  Labour                   229
  Liberal/Social Democrat   22
  Scottish Nationalist       3
  Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nat)    3
  Northern Ireland MPs      17 (several parties)
  Speaker                    1 (an impartial chair)

This gave the Tories an overall majority of 101, so they got
to be government.  In fact, they've been the government
since 1979, and won elections in 1983 and 1987.  For Labour
to win outright, they need to win at least 326 seats, which
is 97 more than they won last time.  At present, the opinion
polls indicate that although Labour will be the largest
party, they won't have an overall majority.  What will
happen in that case is far from clear (we have no written
constitution, remember).  They could either make a coalition
with one of the smaller parties, or they could form a
minority government and dare the others to vote them down;
if this happens, another election follows at once. 

(I won't talk about Northern Ireland.  Their 17 seats are
also up for election, but apart from one semi-official Tory,
none of the mainland parties stand there, and the issues are
entirely different.)

The Liberal and Social Democrat parties, who fought the last
election as an alliance, have since merged into a single
party called the Liberal Democrats.  From the figures above,
they look completely unimportant, but this is not so.  You
have to look at the actual percentages of votes cast:

  Tory       42 %
  Labour     31 %
  Lib-Dem    23 %

The reason for the huge difference between the proportion of
votes and the proportion of seats is that each member is
elected on a "first past the post" basis.  In many seats,
the winner received fewer votes than the others put
together, and in fact the Lib-Dem came second in nearly 100
seats.  The wierdness of this situation is an election issue
in itself, with the Lib-Dems insisting that the UK should
adopt a proportional representation system. 

Here in Scotland, we have a different situation again. 
There are 72 seats, and last time they divided like this:

  Labour       50
  Tory         10
  Lib-Dem       9
  Nationalist   3

The UK is a unitary state, and there is no Scottish
legislature of any sort.  This means that for 13 years
Scotland has been run by a government to which the great
majority of Scottish people have been hostile.  The
resentment this has caused has increased the support for the
Nationalists, who want complete independence.  Currently
they are running at about 25% on the polls, second to
Labour.  Labour and the Lib-Dems are both proposing an
autonomous parliament for Scotland.  The Tories, currently
running third in the polls, oppose this. 

All this means that in many constituencies, especially in
Scotland, voters are faced with a quandary; by voting for
the party they really want, they might let in a party they
dislike intensely.  For example, in my constituency, Central
Edinburgh, there is a sitting Labour MP.  Second is a Tory,
and the majority is quite small.  I have a considerable
distrust of the Labour candidate, who has been very
equivocal on queer issues.  Should I vote for the Lib-Dem or
the Nationalist? By doing so, especially as many people look
like switching to the Nationalist, I could let in the Tory,
which I don't want to do, and given the closeness of the
parties, this could actually affect who becomes the
government.  In the end, I shall probably hold my nose and
vote Labour, but I know at least two other gay men who can't
face doing this. 

The election appears to many foreigners to be a curiously
low-key affair.  There are few parades, mass meetings and so
on.  Most of the obvious campaigning happens on TV, of
course; but it's very different from the US TV campaign. 
The time the parties have for their commercials is strictly
rationed on the basis of the number of candidates they have
standing and the number of votes they got last time.  The
charters of the TV services require strict impartiality in
their news coverage, and there are, you may be sure, people
with stop-watches checking for this at all the party
headquarters.  On the ground, each local party is restricted
by law in the amount of money it can spend (though there is
no such restriction for the national organisations), and
their most common technique is the exhaustive door-to-door
canvass, aimed at locating their supporters so that they can
be winkled out to vote on the day.  In the end, however,
most people vote; last time, it was 75%, and it sometimes
gets to over 80%. 

(to be continued...)

--John