That item followed the results of the 2010 election.
I agree the "headlines" are politically incorrect and rather childish, but what do you think of the actual content of the piece? Would you , for instance, disagree that the relationship between the number of votes polled per party bears a rather strange relationship to the number of seats?
Remember, this was written before the Con/Dem alliance, at a point when speculation about a Lib/Lab pact was running rampant.
I recall at the time being rather puzzled myself, that after all the talk of change, not much did.
I wholly disagree with the content and the tenor of the article.
In more detail, a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system with separate constituencies is the system that the UK parliament has chosen. It has flaws, of course, but it also has benefits of the sort that proportional representation (PR) does not have. Most importantly - and perhaps paradoxically - FPTP means that extremist fringe parties almost never hold the balance of power, as they so often do in PR coalition parliaments.
But of course it's possible to have anomalies in FPTP between parliamentary representation and total votes cast. It's even possible to have extreme anomalies: imagine if there were only 40 constituencies, with 100 votes cast in each one. In Constituencies 1-39, Party A beat Party B by 51 votes to 49, but in Constituency 20, Party B beat Party A by 95 votes to 5. In that scenario, Party A would hold 39 parliamentary seats out of 40 (with Party B holding just one), yet Party B would actually have garnered a larger total number of votes.
That's an extreme example for illustration of course, but it's logical and defensible in a wider context, when one takes a more considered, intellectual approach to analysing FPTP versus other PR-based systems. And if the UK electoral system needs to change, then it is a separate matter from a whinge over the outcome of a particular election under that system. Everybody knew how the system worked before they went to place their vote (or not place their vote).
Regarding the formation of a government post-election, the unwritten constitutional rule is that the monarch invites the leader of the party with the most parliamentary seats to form a government. That seems fair to me - but again, if people have an issue with that, then it needs to be debated
before any election and formation of a government. Incidentally, if one were to adopt Campbell's "reasoning" in this area, then there would be chaos (and constitutional crisis) every time there was no one party with an overall majority (i.e. a hung parliament). After all,
by definition the combined seats of the parties excluding the largest party (e.g. the Conservatives in 2010) would represent over 50% of total seats.
But surely it doesn't take much common sense and intelligence to understand that the single largest party has the moral and electoral mandate to have the first try at forming a coalition. In 2010, had the Conservatives and LibDems (or the Conservatives and any other party/parties that took the total seats over 50%) not been able to thrash out a coalition agreement, then of course the next step would have been to see if Labour and LibDem could form a government. But to suggest that it would have been fair to exclude the Conservatives from having the first opportunity to form a government seems to me to be either the product of very poor thinking, or of an innate anti-Conservative bias, or both. In the case of Campbell, I suspect it might be both.
Personally, I think that for all its flaws, the UK's FPTP system is a good system which (on the whole) produces strong governments that are representative of the public will. Interestingly and ironically perhaps, one of FPTP's main benefits is that it usually - though not in 2010 - produces one clear "winner", which obviates the need for messy coalition politics.
With all that in mind, I thought that Campbell's article was ill-judged, intemperate, lacking in intellectual rigour and just plain wrong in many areas. In seeking to blame voters first and the system second, he was (in my view) exposing his shortcomings in political analysis. And his closing confident prediction was, of course, totally wrong and an inept piece of analysis in itself.
