Beeminder is demanding that I blog today, but I’m not really feeling it, so I’m going to phone this one in, sorry.
I was trying to write something intelligent. Maybe something about delta debugging, maybe something about voting systems. When the dust settles and we have some data maybe I’ll do an analysis of what this election would have looked like under Random Ballot or something.
But, well, right now I’m too depressed, so here are some very ill-formed and ill-informed thoughts on the UK general election that is causing that impression.
This was a lot better than I feared, slightly worse than I expected, and a lot worse than I’d hoped it would be. I never expected a Labour majority (and I’m not the biggest Corbyn fan so would have felt only modestly positive if we’d got one), but I did think Labour might have been able to form a coalition.
Instead we get a Conservative + Democratic Unionist Party (think a more right-wing Irish version of the Conservatives. This is probably not a very fair description but I’m not very inclined to provide a fairer one) not-quite-a-coalition.
I confess I forgot completely about the DUP as a factor (English centric bias, sorry), and the Tory wins in Scotland were a complete surprise to me (Somewhat English centric bias, mostly that the Scots I know very strongly conform to the stereotype of Scotland being very left wing even though I know the reality is different), but I’d be lying if I said I ever really had a very firm sense of how the political landscape was going to go. I was mostly going on a mix of general knowledge and dread.
The dread turned out to be pretty warranted. Although I’m enjoying the schadenfreude of May losing her majority, this isn’t really much better than we started with. The DUP are terrible, and a Conservative/DUP alliance is going to be an improvement on the Conservative majority replaces in only three ways:
- Their majority is smaller
- They will be less able to get things done due to internal disagreements
- They might go for a softer Brexit than they otherwise would have.
There’s also the argument that Brexit is going to be a disaster for whichever party deals with it, so in the long run this might be better by making the Conservative government pay the consequences. I’m not entirely sure I buy the calculus here, but it’s at least a small glimmer of hope.
Mostly I feel like as usual this election underlines the need for a better electoral system. The popular vote is so close between Labour and Conservative, with neither of them that close to a majority.
It is of course invalid to project how people would vote under a different voting system from this, but counting up the minority parties it is at least suggestive that if we’d had a more proportional system then we’d have likely been in the territory of the progressive alliance many people were hoping for – Labour + SNP + Lib Dem comes to 50.4% of the vote. Add the greens in and you’re up to 52%. Of course, in reality, that 52% of the vote came to 47.5% of the seats, so a small win became a small loss instead.
Oh well, so it goes. Another five years of something resembling this government.
Unless someone calls another general election I guess. So give it six months?