Over the years I spent endeavouring to keep students from dropping off during lectures on British politics, I used diligently to collect visual aids and other hopefully entertaining diversions.
Nowadays there’s so much educational technology that you hardly need lecture at all, and indeed I don’t.
Hence my frustration recently when I came across a new potential teaching aid and had no one to inflict it on. Then I thought of you, reader – a ready-made audience with whom to share my new toy: ‘How much is your vote worth?’
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OK, it may lack the flashy superficial appeal of, say, Grand Theft Auto, but it’s about the real world, is far less anti-social, and completely free.
No, not an app or a video game, but it is what its creators, the , choose to call an ‘online interactive tool’.
Go to the society’s website, follow the links to ‘Find out how much your vote is worth’, and it’ll be right there in front of you. Insert your postcode and it’ll tell you, in micro-seconds and to the last penny, how much was spent by all candidates in your constituency at the 2010 General Election.
Plus – wait for it – the number of electors who voted, and thus, without having to do the sum yourself, how much your personal vote was worth to the parties who were battling to win it. Now don’t tell me that’s not as exciting as Grand Theft Auto.
Certainly, I was excited – because my Edgbaston vote turns out to be one of the most valuable and sought-after in the whole of Birmingham; yes, including Sutton Coldfield, and indeed the rest of the metropolitan West Midlands.
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The calculation is shown in the table: total candidate spending of £58,690.71, divided by the 41,571 turnout, equals £1.41 per vote – or, as I like to think of it, per voter.
I’m obviously chuffed, but, to be honest, I also feel a little like Ronnie Barker in the timeless Frost Report sketch satirising the British class system.
I look down on lots of Ronnie Corbetts, because their votes in most of the other Birmingham wards were worth less than half or even a third of mine.
However, I have to look up, at least a bit, to the Hall Green John Cleeses with their £1.43 votes.
And that, of course, is the point the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) is making with its study underpinning their interactive toy – Penny for your Vote? If one of the basic principles of democracy is that all votes are of equal value, it’s one that in this country we effectively ignore. In our single-member constituency, winner-takes-all system, the value of your vote to the parties and candidates who compete for it depends entirely on where you live, indeed on your postcode.
It’s not that Hall Green and Edgbaston are posher – no, really it isn’t: see Sutton Coldfield – but that the drawing of our current constituency boundaries made us, at least in 2010, one of that minority of marginal seats whose outcome was likely to decide the whole election.
Hall Green was a three-way marginal. Labour’s Roger Godsiff eventually won with something to spare, but throughout the campaign both Jerry Evans for the Lib Dems and the Respect Party’s Salma Yaqoob were felt to have a definite chance.
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It’s not that surprising, then, that the contest produced both Birmingham’s highest turnout and highest candidate spending per voter – though unusually the winner in this case was comfortably outspent not only by the Lib Dems and Respect, but even by the fourth-placed Conservative.
In Edgbaston the Lib Dems were rather squeezed out in the head-to-head showdown between Labour MP Gisela Stuart and the Conservatives’ Deirdre Alden.
Here too the Conservatives slightly outspent Labour, but Labour won by 1,274 votes in what was easily the city’s closest result.
In no other Birmingham constituency was the eventual majority less than twice that total.
By comparison with Hall Green and Edgbaston, these seats were generally treated by the parties as either relatively safe or almost unwinnable, and so the electorate’s votes weren’t fought over as fiercely.
In short, they were worth less: in six of the seven constituencies between 40p in ultra-safe Ladywood and 64p in Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming’s Yardley.
That leaves Erdington, the seat vacated by Labour MP Siôn Simon, but for which the two principal challengers were both already widely known in their own right: trade union leader Jack Dromey and local city councillor Robert Alden.
In this instance Labour was the bigger spender and Labour won, but it was another duel that for much of the campaign looked closer than it finally proved, which may account for its vote value of £1.14.
The overall and sadly familiar message of the ERS study, however, is that, if you want to be really valued, go somewhere other than Birmingham.
The seriously high rollers in the 2010 election were scattered around a diverse range of constituencies, sharing in common only that they were either three-way marginal or seats targeted by a third party or Independent or both.
There were several cases where the candidates spent collectively more than £2 per vote, but topping the list by miles, with spending of £3.07, was Luton South, Labour seat of one of the more outrageous parliamentary expenses fiddlers, who faced no fewer than 11 challengers. These included TV presenter, Esther Rantzen, whose 4.4 per cent vote share of 1,872 votes cost her campaign nearly £13 each.
Least valued seats, at or around 20p each, were all ultra-safe for either Labour or the Conservatives, with Bootle being cheapest of all at 14p.
Taking the two extremes, the Luton South candidates spent 22 times as much those in Bootle, which the ERS would surely not be alone in finding a pretty shocking and depressing measure of an electoral system that we passed up the opportunity to change a couple of years ago.
Returning to Birmingham, although you can’t get this information directly from the ERS’ online toy, I was interested to see which candidates in especially the more marginal constituencies spent most in total – on advertising, accommodation, public meetings, transport, staff – and how close they came to the limits to which they would have been permitted to spend.
The formula for candidate spending limits distinguishes between the ‘long’ and ‘short’ campaigns.
In the first, from January 1 2010 to the dissolution of Parliament on April 12, the limit for a candidate in an urban constituency was £25,000 plus 5p per registered elector – roughly £28,000 in Birmingham constituencies.
During the short campaign, up to polling day on May 6, the limit was £7,150 plus 5p per elector – roughly £11,000. The total maximum spend, therefore, was around £39,000, and in a six-candidate constituency close to a quarter of a million – more than ten times the total actually spent in most constituencies.
The final column in the accompanying table shows how much was spent by the winning candidates in each constituency and what proportions these totals were of their permitted limits.
None came seriously close, but the highest proportion was Andrew Mitchell’s in the very non-marginal Sutton Coldfield. Mitchell’s 27,300 votes cost over £1 each – more than three times that of Rob Pocock’s 10,300 Labour votes, though even that was expensive compared to the Greens’ 535 votes, which cost apparently not a penny.
I find it hard to argue that there’s wanton extravagance and exploitation in this particular part of our electoral system, though there may well be in other parts. The problem here is the arbitrariness. The term ‘postcode lottery’ is wildly overused – frequently for variations between policy choices consciously and collectively made by elected local councillors. The value of your vote, though, that really is a postcode lottery.
* Chris Game is from the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham