UK General Election 2015 'North/South Divide'

Updated 6 Feb 2016 - This post was originally part of the UK General Election 2015 post.

According to the news media the UK apparently has a political North/South divide. If you look at the map from the BBC news site this seems obvious. However, the stark contrast in colours does not show the underlying voting.

Screenshot from BBC Election 2015 web page.

The map shows most of the British Isles. The largest island is called Great Britain (because it is the largest, not because it is better than any of the others). The next largest island is called Ireland. For those who really don’t know, Scotland is the large area (mostly coloured yellow) in the north of the island of Great Britain combined with most of the outlying small islands. The UK’s full name is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The northern part of the island of Ireland is obviously what is known as Northern Ireland. The rest of the island of Ireland (the white area) is the Republic of Ireland and is nothing to do with the UK - except that we share a land border and more than a little history and are both members of the EU. The UK is made up of a number of countries and areas with varying degrees of autonomy. Scotland is one of those semi-autonomous areas, Northern Ireland is another, another is Wales which is the large bulge on the West of the main island. England is most of the rest.

The UK is governed as a parliamentary democracy made up of an elected ‘lower’ house (the Commons) and a selected ‘upper’ house (the Lords). The Commons creates and amends or abolishes law and the Lords operates as a moderating influence. Each member of the Commons is elected as a ‘Member of Parliament’ (MP) by the population of a constituency. ‘The Government’ is whatever grouping of MPs that can command a majority in the Commons - usually the leader of the party with the largest number of MPs becomes Prime Minister (PM) and selects ‘Ministers’ to carry out the functions of the state, if no party has an overall majority in the Commons then Ministers might be drawn from multiple parties working in coalition. The Monarch has no political power but the government is referred to as ‘Her Majesty’s Government’. A constituency is an historically and arbitrarily allocated area which has been defined to hold roughly the same number of voters people as any other constituency. People do move about within the UK and so over time some constituencies end up with more voters people than others. As a result of this, periodically ‘boundary commissions’ will look at the balance of constituencies and re-draw the boundaries. Each constituency elects a single MP to the Commons. There are currently 650 constituencies in the UK and so there are currently 650 MPs in the House of Commons and each constituency should cover about 1/650th (0.15%) of the overall voter population. At a General Election all constituencies elect their MP for the forthcoming period. General Elections are held at least every 5 years and up until 2011 were announced by the government with a minimal notice period - sometimes simply because the government judged their chances of winning were better with an early election. In 2011 an Act of Parliament was passed to pre-define the dates of subsequent elections (at five year intervals) unless exceptional circumstances arise. In the event of the death or effective resignation of an MP, a by-election to replace them will be held in the affected constituency.

The first point to be made is that there are ‘only’ 59 constituencies in the whole of Scotland. This suggests that the voter population of Scotland should be 59/650ths (about 9.1%) of the total UK voter population. According to the 2011 census the voter population of Scotland is about 8.8% 8.4% of whole the UK - so that’s about right but could arguably be improved on - 8.8% 8.4% of 650 constituencies is about 57 55. Many of the constituencies are very large because much of Scotland is sparsely populated. In order to encompass about 1/650th of the UK voter population the area outside cities has to be quite large. The same census shows that England holds 83.6% 84.0% of the UK voter population and 533 constituencies (83.6% 84.0% of 650 would be 543 546 constituencies). This indicates that the voter population of England is slightly under-represented at the UK parliament as compared with the smaller countries of the UK. Just to complete the picture:

By simply looking at the map you could be forgiven for thinking that a third of the UK had voted for the Yellows and most of the rest had voted for the Blues with a small proportion voting for the Reds. (NB. In the UK the Reds are not Communist. In US politics the Republican party is usually designated red and they’re not Communist either. See the note about the use of colours at the bottom of this post)

The truth is rather more interesting: The population of Scotland is about 5.3m with about 4.1m (~77%) on the electoral roll. The ‘missing’ 1.2m are either too young or otherwise not entitled to vote or have somehow not been registered. About 28.9% of those entitled to do so did not vote or manage to register their votes. About 50% of the votes cast were for the Yellows and 50% for the rest of the parties. This means that out of an overall voter population of 4.1m, 1.4m voted Yellow and the other 2.7m did not. Many more did not want a Yellow MP (or could not be bothered either way) than did want that outcome.

The same sort of analysis also demolishes the idea that England is almost solidly Blue. Here’s the arithmetic: The population of England is about 53m with about 38.8m (~73%) registered to vote. About 34.1% of those entitled to vote did not do so. About 41% of the votes cast were for the Blues and 59% for the rest of the parties. So, out of a voter population of 38.8m, 10.5m voted Blue and the other 28.3m did not.

A further key point which might have escaped some: The Yellow party only stood for election in the 59 Scottish constituencies (of which they won 56, the other three constituencies were won by Red, Blue and Orange - one each). People in the rest of the UK could not have voted for them if they had wanted to. This means that the Yellows could never achieve an outright win to control the Commons but that they could hope to control enough seats to hold the balance of power in a hung parliament. As the Blues did win an overall majority, all the other parties will have little chance of getting their policies enacted in the Commons.

So here are the results by UK-wide voting.

* Regional parties - not UK wide.
+ By tradition, the Speaker’s seat is not assigned to any party.

A few points in case you missed them: The Blues got 36.9% of the UK votes but 50.9% of the seats. The Yellows got 4.7% of the votes but 8.6% of the seats. The Oranges got 7.9% of the votes but only 1.2% of the seats. The Purples got 12.6% of the votes but only 0.2% of the seats.

To try to compare the policies of the various UK parties and assign them to a left-right or even Nolan Chart scale is probably futile but assigning some sort of political score to the package of policies voted for is also probably the only way to reveal if the claimed North/South split really does exist. Very few parties will admit to being either Left or Right or Libertarian or Totalitarian but will instead use weasel words such a ‘left-of-centre’ or ‘right-of-centre’ or ‘moderate’ to describe themselves - and will denigrate all their opponents as extreme or ineffective. Some parties hold multiple policies usually associated with both distinctly Leftist and Rightist movements at the same time (I’m specifically thinking about parties that espouse both Socialism and Nationalism - a combination of policies with a very bad history.) so categorising them would be difficult.

So, what ‘North/South’ divide actually exists among the population? There isn’t one. In each constituency we get a divided opinion but only one MP. We need to compare the policy packages of the various parties and avoid falling for the media laziness of simply assigning a block colour for the winning party and saying that Scotland voted Yellow and England voted Blue or that the North of England voted Red and the South, Blue. It’s worse than lazy - it’s not true.

You might by now think that the UK voting system should be changed perhaps to ‘better reflect the will of the people’ or to prevent entrenched political parties dominating the results of elections. In May 2011 (just 4 years ago at the time of writing) the UK held a referendum++ on the question: At present, the UK uses the “first past the post” system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the “alternative vote” system be used instead? The result was a firm No - but only 42.2% of those eligible to vote did so. Of those that voted, 68% voted No and 32% voted Yes. In other words, only 13.5% voted for the change and 28.7% voted against; the other 57.8% at best did not care or at worst did not understand the question. Some political parties have had electoral reform as part of their policy package for many years. They have yet to be elected to power.

In the above post instead of using the names of the political parties I used the colours assigned by the BBC in their Election 2015 web page. The only exception being the ‘Green Party’ whose assigned colour happened to be green. Names of political parties often imply claimed political stances and I wanted to avoid provoking an emotional reaction to the names and focus on the facts instead.

Update 10-Aug-2016:

++ The UK has only ever held three UK-wide referendums:

1975: Do you think the UK should stay in the European Community (the Common Market)? (Yes/No). Result: Yes 67.2%, No 32.8%, Turnout 64.5%.

2011: At present, the UK uses the “first past the post” system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the “alternative vote” system be used instead? (Yes/No). Result: No 67.9%, Yes 32.1%, Turnout 42.2%.

2016: Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? (Remain a member of the European Union/Leave the European Union). Result: Leave 51.9%, Remain 48.1%, Turnout 72.2%.

Note that two of the referendums were about remaining part of the European project. The other was about the voting system for representation at the UK parliament.

Update 20-Nov-2016:

A report a couple of days ago about an attempt by some MPs to block the adoption of the recent boundary commissions’ recommendations to set new constituency boundaries and reduce the overall number of constituencies (and therefore MPs) from 650 to 600 in time for the next scheduled general election in 2020 - but I suppose you can’t expect turkeys to vote for Christmas. In the report I discovered that the constituency boundaries are drawn to encompass roughly equal numbers of voters, not the population as a whole, so I have edited some of the calculations above to reflect this.

The 600 proposed new constituencies are each intended to include 74,769 (+/- 5%) voters - so presumably this number is 1/600th of the registered voters. This suggests the number of voters in the UK is 44.8m rather than the 46.4m shown above. I don’t know where the missing 1.6m voters went.

In order to reduce the number of constituencies obviously some must disappear completely and some must increase in size. The boundary commissions are accused by various interested parties (MPs and political organisations such as parties and unions) of setting the boundaries to the advantage of one political party over another thus skewing any general election based on them. It’s an unenviable task. One of the complaints about the recommendations is that many people are not on the electoral roll - despite the fact that failing to register can render an individual liable for a fine of £80 - and that many of these unregistered people might favour one political party rather than another. That said, if they can’t be persuaded to register, I doubt they would vote either. One thing though: if there is an upsurge in voter registration, then the newly defined boundaries may need changing again.