If The Election Had Been Proportional

Now, I have covered the issue of "proportional" voting before, and concluded that the only truly proportional method is a single vote for a party only, with all votes across the country aggregated and seats allocated (by party list) proportional to the total votes cast for each party.

Inevitably there would be rounding issues, and it might even be necessary to allow the total number of MPs to vary by plus or minus a few to make it work properly; but that is the only genuinely proportional system in the known Universe.

I have calculated what would have happened if parliamentary (Commons) seats had been allocated on the basis of proportion of votes cast earlier this month. I cannot allow for tactical voting, but it would probably have more-or-less cancelled out over the nation as a whole. Most of it was anti-Conservative anyway...

The table below shows how things went, and also would have gone under this system...
The two end columns show that there is indeed a significant disparity between numbers of votes cast and seats, especially with the top three parties, but also with some of the smaller parties; and how many seats each would have had under my truly proportional scheme. Note that the one outstanding result has been left out of these calculations, but is unlikely to have more than a trivial effect on the national picture anyway.

As one can see, the outcome would have been even less decisive (to quite a degree!) and the BNP would have had twelve seats. UKIP (the do-nothing party) would have had twenty seats, the English Democrats one, Respect-Unity one as well, and the loony lefties Greens six. On the nationalist front: the SNP would have almost doubled their Westminster presence, Plaid Cymru would be up by one and Sinn Fein down by one.

As discussed before, such a system completely breaks the existing MP-constituency link (there wouldn't be any more constituencies, in fact, only polling and vote-counting districts) so it would be a completely different set-up.

Of course, huge multi-member constituencies, as propounded by those in favour of the half-way house AV and STV methodologies, are almost the same anyway (and don't be fooled by anyone who claims otherwise, especially as political opponents sharing any electoral area work against each other, not with each other, as experience shows) and are neither fully one thing nor the other.

What the electorate needs to decide, one of these days, is which is more important: proportionality or local representation. Also, is a half-way house (of one form or another) of any worh, or is it just a form of tokenism with its own fudges (e.g. "second preferences")?

I cannot answer this definitively. All I can do is present the evidence or what could happen, express my own views (as I have previously) and let the nation as a whole ponder the alternatives.