Winner Takes All

Like most people, I am becoming rather bored of all the Margaret Thatcher funeral  business - but there's one big political point worth making, I think.

Which is that Margaret Thatcher won three general elections in a row - so when push came to shove the voters sided with the Conservative Party - and gave Margaret Thatcher and her Ministers a mandate to govern the country.

Now I don't see - as a democrat - how you can gainsay that achievement because  even if you fought against the Thatcher Government - as I did throughout the 1980s - the electorate decided, in a democratic vote, to give the Iron Lady their majority support.

Because the arguments of the Labour Party, the Liberals, the Social Democratic Party and the smaller, more left wing parties - all failed to strike a chord with the voters in sufficient numbers to prevent the Conservatives gaining enough MPs to form a majority government - in 1979, 1983, 1987 and in again 2002 (although the last Tory victory was under John Major, of course). 

Where I do think the critics have a fair point is that all of these Conservative victories - indeed all the Labour victories that followed under Tony Blair (1997, 2002 and 2007) - were all achieved with barely 40% of the popular vote going to the 'winning party'.

So it was the First Past The Post (FPTP) or the established 'Winner Takes All' voting system which exaggerated Conservative support amongst the wider electorate - when they were really just the largest party under FPTP rules - and, of course, the same practice operated to Labour's benefit in more recent times.

The term 'dictatorship of the minority' was coined to illustrate the fact that monumental political changes were being pushed through by the Westminster Parliament - by a government which did not enjoy popular support across the UK.

In Scotland, for example, the Conservatives were fast becoming an endangered species - yet still their agenda prevailed - which helped build support for a Scottish Parliament and perhaps, ultimately, Scotland's independence as well. 

Now the answer to this state of affairs is obvious - a fairer voting system on the basis of proportional representation (PR) - which now exists for every other election you can mention - those to the Scottish Parliament, Scotland's 32 local councils as well as the European Parliament of course.

But I've yet to hear the Labour leader - Ed Miliband - commit his party to fairer votes at Westminster and to PR in future UK elections - and until I do I'll take what he has to say with a great big pinch of salt.