By Richard Wood
How Scotland votes at the ballot box will almost certainly not be reflected in the House of Commons come 4 July thanks to Westminster’s archaic voting system. Time and time again, First Past the Post skews the link between voters and their MPs, resulting in unrepresentative parliaments where seats don’t match votes. Here’s what’s happened in past elections and what could happen this summer.
Scottish Labour is expected to do well come 4 July while the SNP are anticipated to lose seats. However, the extent of this turning of the tides will be exaggerated by First Past the Post.
Until 2015, Labour constistenly won well over half of Scottish seats on less than half the votes. Labour secured 41 of 59 seats on just 42% of the vote in 2010. In 1997 they won 56 of 72 seats on 45.6% of the vote while the Conservatives lost all their seats but still won almost one in five Scottish votes.
First Past the Post consistently amplifies the support of the largest party, giving them a disproportionately large caucus at Westminster. The same has happened with the SNP since the yellow tsunami swept away Scottish Labour in 2015. At that election, the SNP won just under half of all votes cast, giving them all but three Scottish seats. Then in 2019, the SNP won all but 11 seats on 45% of the vote. All of these are truly unrepresentative results.
While the tides are once again turning in Scottish Labour’s favour, the currents are shaped by the underlying structure, a voting system which will likely to lead to yet another extremely disproportionate election.
Although mapping voting intentions onto seat projections has significant limits under FPTP – due to the system’s inherently chaotic nature – recent projections estimate Labour could win over half of all Scottish seats on a share of the vote between 30 and 40%.
READ MORE: First Past the Post set to fail the UK once again
The More in Common poll published at the end of May (fieldwork 22 – 25 May), puts Labour on 35%, the SNP on 30%, the Conservatives on 17% and the Lib Dems on 10%.
Under a proportional system, seats would match votes. And while we can’t know for certain what would happen under Westminster’s current voting system, Electoral Calculus estimates this would give Labour 29 of the 57 seats available. While only 5 percentage points behind Anas Sarwar’s party, the SNP would take just 16 seats – a significant fall from 2019. The Conservatives would win seven while the Lib Dem would win five. Under FPTP, seats won’t match votes yet again.
A subsequent poll by Survation suggests a similar outcome, indicating Scottish Labour could win 29 seats on just 36% of the votes.
The Additional Member System used to elect MSPs at Holyrood is far from perfect. This site has covered it’s flaws extensively – making the case for continuous improvement of Scottish democracy. But AMS at least ensures that that MSPs are broadly representative of how people vote unlike First Past the Post which lets down Scotland and the rest of the UK again and again.
READ MORE: 7 reforms to improve the Scottish Parliament
Replacing First Past the Post with a proportional system is the single most important transformation needed to improve Westminter. Proportional Representation isn’t a silver bullet but it will improve our democracy by ensuring that voters are fairly represented in parliament. Whoever wins on 4 July should keep that in mind.
READ MORE: Scottish Labour MSP “sympathetic” to Scottish electoral reform
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