Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-05-05 07:26:16 - Graham Ellis
It's the day of the general election - a chance for each of us to choose our representative for parliament in each of the 650 or so single-member seats (constituencies) throughout Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
In the majority of the seats, the incumbent (or his / her political party's appointed successor) should be elected without there being any "real" contest. The overall outcome - as to which party holds the majority of the seats - will be decided in perhaps 100 of the seats which are descibed as marginal, and in those seats each party has a core following of sheep who'll vote for them "come what may". The real decision comes down to the choice of perhaps 1 in 50 of the eligible voters in the country as a whole, and how effective each of the party's machines is in getting their supporters to bother.
In our Devizes seat, Michael Ancram of the Conservative Party won last time with 47% of the vote. That's a majority of nearly 12000 over the next canditate - the Labour party - with 25%. The Liberal Democrats got 21% (and yet there candidate this time tells us that she's "The only real alternative as Labour can't win here" - that's ... err ... and interesting piece of logic to say the least). I WILL be voting, although I'm not thrilled by any of the candidates. 63% of people in Devizes voted last time.
Once all the votes are in, they'll be counted - many overnight and some (for the more remote areas mostly) during tomorrow and results will be declared one by one. Once a single party has the majority of the seats, its leader will be invited to continue as (or to become) Prime Minister and he continues (or takes over) withe immediate effect. Very different to the system in, for example, the USA.
A thought. 47% of 63% last time was 25159 votes out of an electorate of 86000 - in other words, less than one person in 3 actually said they wanted Mr Ancram to represent them. Oh what a frail foundation underlies this supposedly solid seat.