UK Elections & Bermuda: A New Arithmetic
[written by Larry Burchall]
Will Thursday’s national elections in the UK have an impact in Bermuda? They will. But not quite in the way that you might first think.
At the outset, Britain’s Labour Party seemed set to win the larger number of Parliamentary seats while the Conservatives were expected to pick up the next largest group. The Liberal Democrats were expected to get the rest. No one party was expected to win the whole of the 316 seats necessary for a normal majority government in Britain’s 630 seat House of Commons.
Gordon Brown, UK Prime Minister and Labour Party Leader
A week is a long time in politics, and in one week and several gaffes, fortunes and outlooks changed. The most famous and probably most damaging gaffe was Gordon Brown’s description of a lifetime Labour Party supporter as a “bigot”.
Now, with just forty-eight hours to go before those millions of Brit voter’s make their final decisions, it appears that the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats could each pick up a bigger share of the popular vote, while the Labour Party will have to settle for an even smaller share than was predicted just fifteen days ago.
It is entirely possible, now, that the coming out from nowhere Liberal Democrats could grab even more Parliamentary seats in the 630 seat House of Commons. That’s where there will be an invisible impact on Bermuda and politics in Bermuda.
Bermuda has thirty-six constituencies with an average 1,200 Registered Voters in each. Ordinary thinking says that a candidate would need 601 votes to win in any constituency. However, this ordinary thinking ignores the reality that will be unveiled, in the UK, on Friday 7th May. Just seventy-two hours from now, the world will see that the arithmetic of voting can play strange games and can throw up unusual and unexpected results.
In Bermuda, the same applies. In a hard-fought three-way contest in any 1,200 Voter Bermuda constituency, a winning candidate will only need 401 votes to win – if every Voter votes!
But if, as in the past, twenty percent of Voters never turn up at the polls, then, in the same hard-fought contest, in the same 1,200 voter constituency; then only 960 Voters will actually turn up and vote. With that, a winning candidate will only need 321 votes to win – if the vote is EVENLY split between all three contesting candidates.
But if only two candidates are strong, and the third is weak – taking perhaps only 100 votes; then the constituency winner will only need 431 votes to win. In essence, in Bermuda as in the UK, in a three-way split, smaller groups will have bigger national impacts.
We will see that sort of arithmetic working in this UK election.
In Bermuda, with its wrong time Tax and Fees and Costs increases, today’s PLP government is facing largely self-inflicted general economic unrest and unhappiness. Its general stock is being pulled down by steadily and incrementally increasing unhappiness with some of the overall results of its twelve-year tenure in office; and by the performance of some of its leading lights.
In Bermuda, there are now two other political parties vying for votes.
There is also a traditional history of voters following well-known patterns of voting behavior. Patterns of always voting, sometimes staying away, and of switching votes.
With all of this, Bermuda is likely facing a next election that may well reflect a brand-new arithmetic of the kind that will likely be demonstrated by those millions of individual voters in the UK.
Watch Friday’s UK national election results.
