This letter in the local paper after the election results attracted a few replies last week.  I’ll be surprised if there is not more reaction this week.  When it first appeared I read it a couple of times and I am still not 100% sure what point the writers were trying to make.The letter was written by two Tory county councillors, Ancraman & Griffiths,  who appear to be upset that some people didn’t vote for the Tories and as a result ended up with councillors who were not Tories.  Their argument is that in some divisions where the Lib Dems won, a lot of people voted for UKIP of the BNP and that if those people voted for the Tories instead then the Tories would have won.

Well yes.  That is called democracy.  Those people who voted UKIP could well have been deliberately voting against the Tories as much as they were voting for UKIP.

The letter then goes into some sort of hypothetical discussion about how the Mid-Sussex seats would have gone under proportional representation.  Surely this is dangerous ground to tread on for representatives of a party that dominates the council (68% of the seats) despite getting less than half the overall votes?

One response was from a name familiar to readers of this site – and any other website or newspaper in the area – Richard Symonds.  I’m going to have to pull him up on something in his letter:  he says of the original letter “Outright party-political nonsense from two bad losers, methinks.”    It is worse than that.  They are not bad losers, but (like Spurs supporters) they are bad winners.

Having attracted less than half the votes in the county (48.41% on a 38.7% turnout by my calculations) they won 48 of the 71 seats – that is more than twice the total of all opposition seats added together.   Having given some examples of proportionality, they must be aware of that, but they are not ashamed to have such disproportionate dominance; instead they are complaining that they should have won even more seats.  They seem to resent the fact that the people who voted against them get even the few seats they did actually pick up.

I get the feeling that if they had ended up with 70 seats on the council, they would be moaning about the one that got away.  So.  Not “bad losers” Richard – they are bad winners bent on total control, which is an alarming thing.

The other objectionable thing about the original letter is that they conveniently ignore the seats in East Grinstead where the Tories won.  In one seat they beat the Lib Dems by 130 votes, while the Green party had 429 votes.  In the other they won by 255 votes while the Green had 300, but I don’t see Ancraman & Griffiths complaining that the Green voters let in the Tories – and to be fair I haven’t seen the Lib Dems complaining about it: they accept the results.

The implications in the argument are extremely dubious.  Are we being told that we should only vote for parties with a chance of winning?  Why not go the whole way and ban any other parties from standing is that is the case?   The whole system of first past the post will throw up anomalies and you can’t go around complaining about the ones that are against you while ignoring all those in your favour?

If only the Tories could be as gracious in victory as the Lib Dems were in defeat.

Ancraman & Griffiths said:

The first past the post election ended up with six Con and six LDems. However, if the proportional representation favoured by the Liberal Democrat Party had been in operation there would have still been six Conservative councillors, but only four LDems.

Both the Labour Party and the Greens would have had one each! So PR would have damaged LDems while first past the post got them six councillors.

Of course they were being very selective there and just looking at their own corner of the county, where their share of the seats was in proportion to the vote, but what about the bigger picture?

Just out of interest, the allocation of seats on the county council is Con 48, Lib Dem 21, Lab 2

If seats were allocated proportional to the votes the allocation would be Con 34, Lib Dem 21, UKIP 6, Lab 6, Green 2, BNP 1, Other 1

Unlike the Mid Sussex part of the county, the Lib Dems actually got the ‘right’ number of seats across the whole county. MAybe that is why they have not been complaining.

In case anybody thinks that I am making an argument for proportional representation… they would be right, but I have been in favour of it for a while now.  Even when Labour were getting more than their fair share of seats I felt it was wrong, so I am not jumping on a bandwagon now that we are gettnig fewer seats than our share of the vote under FPTP.