The magic 8,000 voters

Nov 7 2007 by Rob Merrick, Liverpool Daily Post

IN GORDON BROWN’S dreams, yesterday’s Queen’s Speech would have followed a thumping general election victory, confirming his “mandate” in No.10.

But, if the Prime Minister had triumphed in the poll planned for last week and then cancelled, none of the votes cast anywhere in Merseyside would have truly matttered.

That is the claim made in a new study condemning Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system, which alleges just 8,000 voters would have decided the result.

According to the Electoral Reform Society, those 8,000 lucky people with their extraordinary power live in just 25 marginal Labour seats, mainly in Middle England.

None, of course, are in Merseyside, where Labour can depend on its loyal, if tested, supporters to send MPs wearing red rosettes down to Westminster.

The 25 marginals – and nine target seats Labour needs to win to maintain its current majority after boundary changes – are tagged “Category A”. The study grudgingly awards “Category C” status to Lib-Dem held-Southport and Wirral West, also nominally a Lib-Dem seat because of boundary changes – meaning they are of some importance.

The Chester seat (Labour majority, just 973) is in Category A, so its swing voters would have mattered, but that’s as good as it gets.

The thesis is that, while Labour votes are piling up in the likes of Merseyside, Tory votes are similarly stacking up in the shires and leafy suburbs.

Allowed to take those votes for granted, the parties will instead target their entire election strategy on these magic 8,000 voters, plucked by geographical accident to decide the nation’s fate.

Worse than that, these voters are so crucial because they are uncommitted politically and vote on a last-minute whim – indifferent, but indispensable.

No wonder all the parties run scared of allegedly controversial policies that offer voters a clear, exciting choice. They may scare off those 8,000 undecideds.

In a democracy, all votes should surely be of equal worth? One cast in Bootle should matter as much as a ballot paper in Oxford, Stroud, Milton Keynes and the rest of Middle England.

As Ken Ritchie, the reform group’s chief executive, put it: “A mandate delivered by 8,000 people in the swing seats is no mandate at all.”

Labour’s manifesto once read: “We are committed to a referendum on the voting system for the House of Commons.” But that was in 1997 – and we are still waiting.

* WOULD-BE Liberal Democrat leader Chris Huhne has confessed to eating junk food – and blamed his days as a Daily Post reporter.

Mr Huhne, who worked on this paper in the 1970s, said: “I have a passion for black pudding, which I’m afraid I’ve had ever since working in Liverpool.”