Bias in the Voting System

I have just noticed the headline in today’s Daily Mail which claims  that the “voting system is biased towards Labour because of uneven size of constituencies.” It is based on a report by the think tank ippr, though what is in the original does not bear out the Mail headline.
Since we are going to hear a lot more argument about voting systems between now and the May referendum we had better get this one straight. The current ‘First Past the Post’ voting system is not “biased towards Labour”. The uneven size of constituencies is, but that is a separate matter.

What the FPTP does is give an unfair advantage to parties whose votes are geographhically concentrated at the expense of those whose support is spread widely but thinly. In England, that is a bias in favour of both Labour and the Conservatives at the expense of all the others.

Labour also has a small advantage over the Conservatives under the present constituncy boundaries, but that is a relatively recent development arising from the a rather smart presentation which a Labour party official named David Gardner made to the Boundary Commission in the 1990s. (Gardner is not a paid party employee any more, but Ed Miliband is understandably anxious to get him back.) In the 1980s, the Conservatives were the principal beneficiaries of the FPTP system.

The coalition government has passed legislation which simultaneously promised a referendum on the FPTP voting system and imposed a redrawing of constituency boundaries. The referendum may or may not reduce the bias in favour of the two big parties. Redrawing the boundaries will certainly benefit the Conservatives at the expense of Labour.

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