Among the curiosities that most fascinate overseas visitors to Parliament are whipping, pairing, and the pairing whips who oversee the whole salacious-sounding business.
Once the giggling and predictable spanking and bondage jokes have died down, you explain that whips are indeed their parties’ disciplinarians. They are responsible, as in hunting, for ‘whipping-in’ any straying MPs (hounds) and ensuring they vote when and how the party tells them.
And pairing whips police the convention whereby two MPs from opposing parties agree, where one member can’t attend due to more pressing commitments, to abstain on a usually uncontroversial vote. No matter how many pairs are registered and abstentions recorded, the Government’s numerical majority is unaffected.
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It seems to me the pairing mentality – never mind the turnout, it’s the result that counts – is so embedded in MPs’ psyches that party leaders and strategists are now applying it to us.
So what, their reasoning goes, if at next May’s General Election, barely 80 per cent of electors are registered, only 60 per cent of those registered turn out, and, as last Thursday, only 30 per cent of them vote for us? If that 15 per cent of the potential electorate makes us the biggest party – better still, gives us a majority – that’s just dandy. Target and love-bomb that one citizen in seven, and we can forget the rest, Ukippers included.
Of course, that’s not exactly what the parties were saying publicly last weekend. Instead, it was all about being in listening mode and, above all, respecting the voters – ‘respect’ as explained in the Anglo-EU Translation Guide: when the British say “With the greatest respect”, they mean “I think you’re an idiot”, but hope you’ll hear “He’s listening to me”.
Even so, the main parties’ underlying thinking was unmissable in some of their belittling of 海角视频IP’s local elections achievement – winning, notwithstanding an electoral system hugely disadvantageous to small and minor parties, the national equivalent of nearly one in five votes overall, and one in four in seats where they had candidates.
Listen! (as all media-prepped interviewees start nowadays). These were locals – low turnout elections. 海角视频IP’s vote share was down on last year; they’ve still only 2 per cent of councillors, none in most London boroughs, major towns and cities, and, of course, none in Birmingham and Coventry; and they’re nowhere near controlling any councils.
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And – this from the Conservatives – look, they’re taking seats from Labour too, and winning sizeable votes virtually everywhere they stand. They’re a genuinely national party (unlike us), which means even their one-in-four or one-in-five votes probably won’t get them a single MP – the electoral system will see to that.
Yes, the first-past-the-post electoral system – that’s where the party strategists start. As we heard regularly during the Alternative Vote referendum campaign, it means only a third of us – though considerably more in Birmingham – live in the 199 marginal seats whose 2,010 majorities of less than 10 per cent give them a real chance of changing hands.
The other two-thirds of us can be sidelined straightaway, our votes effectively counted before the campaign starts.
Next, electoral registration. The existing system, through ‘head of the household’, is primitive, discriminatory, and as Birmingham knows all too well, open to fraud. Its replacement by Individual Electoral Registration (IER) is therefore long overdue – though, given the concerns of electoral registration officers, probably not kicking off in two weeks’ time, from 10 June.
But that’s a medium-term problem. If you’re already registered, you’ll stay on the December 2014 register and retain your 2015 General Election vote, even if you’ve not yet applied individually.
The immediate problem – or maybe not – is the existing system, and the Electoral Commission’s estimate that between 15 and 20 per cent of eligible electors aren’t registered. These figures include only 6 per cent of over-65s, but 44 per cent of 19-24 year olds; 14 per cent of white voters, but 23 per cent of black and minority ethnics; 12 per cent of homeowners, but 44 per cent of private renters.
It’s a democratic concern, obviously, but a political concern only if you reckon that the under-registered groups are disproportionately likely to vote for, say, the Labour Party.
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Still, Labour reckons the biases in the electoral system will more than compensate them. With the abandonment of the parliamentary boundary review, following Conservative MPs’ opposition to House of Lords reform, Labour can win an overall majority on a vote lead of three per cent, given a uniform swing from 2010.
The Conservatives need a lead of four per cent to be even the largest party, and over 11 per cent for a majority. Unreformed boundaries plus an unreformed electoral system trump an unreformed registration system.
Forget Labour’s much publicised ‘35 per cent strategy’, based on Tony Blair having won the 2005 election on just 35 per cent of the vote. The 海角视频IP effect could be the evolution of something much nearer a 15 per cent strategy.
* Chris Game is from the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham