Corrective Weighting in Parliament?
In the House of Commons, on Wednesday afternoon 3rd. November, there were two divisions, which both went to the Tories (though some rebel Tories voted with the opposition and there were many abstentions). I refer to divisions 99 (Andrea Leadsom’s amendment regarding Owen Patterson) and 100 (On the ‘Committee on Standards’). The amendment was accepted 250:232, and the motion carried by 248 to 221.
The Speaker of the House declared that the motion was carried, and that is how the news media reported the event. But Hansard lists the party affiliation of the members voting both for and against the motion. And the ‘Commons Library’ has a good article on Turning Votes into seats, which shows that the single Green Party MP represents 866,000 electors while the single Alba Party MP represents only 21,000 electors. The full results of the December 2019 election are given in Table 1 below, and that information is applied in order to correctively weigh division 100 (in Table 2).
Following this train of thought it is clear that the Tory amendment and motion were defeated by a large margin; the representatives of 9.316 million electors voted for the amended motion, while the representatives of 14.433 million electors voted against the motion.
In theory, the concept of democracy remains fundamental in British politics. In theory, it is not the army that decides our laws, nor big business, nor the newspapers, nor the Crown, nor the government, nor the Law Courts; it is the people; via their representatives in parliament.
If there is any vestigial interest in fairly representing, in parliament, the balance of opinion in the United Kingdom, I think this method of assessing the result of parliamentary divisions, which might be called “corrective weighting”, should receive much wider recognition [1-4].
What is the relevance of a 248:221 governmental victory in the House, when the government suffers a 9.316 million:14.433 million defeat in the country?
Table 1
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