by Rab Bruce’s Spider

One of the many faults of the First Past The Post voting system is its tendency to disenfranchise what can often be the majority of voters in a constituency. The winner is the candidate with the most votes, but that doesn’t mean it is the majority of votes, because voters are able to vote for a number of candidates and their preferences can be spread over a wide number. FPTP works best if there are only two candidates, and even then it has flaws.

A consequence of this splitting of votes is that it provides the opportunity for all losing sides to cast accusations at other losers along the lines of, "If you’d voted for us, we would have won!"

To which the response, "But if you’d voted for us, we would have won!" is normally equally valid.

Such recriminations are pointless because this is exactly how FPTP works in a multi-candidate situation, and these woeful cries serve no purpose at all except to create further tension between the losing sides, which is precisely what the winning side wants.

FPTP lends itself to tactical voting, and you can’t blame voters for taking advantage of that.

The other result of this bizarre system is that it can lead to some other misconceptions. For example, Ruth Davidson is currently basking in the glow of media adulation since her – or, rather, the Conservative Party’s – 13 seats in Scotland are being credited with swinging the tide for the Tories. Now, while this is true to an extent, it is not the whole picture. Arithmetically, if those 13 seats had been lost, the outcome of the General Election would have been different but, since it was a UK election, one could just as easily argue that 13 of the seats won by the Tories in England were the ones which swung the result, particularly those with narrow majorities.

The reason the media are fawning over Ruth Davidson, and even suggesting she leads a separate Party to Theresa May’s Conservatives, is that they are desperate to hammer the SNP. The actual arithmetic of seats is a distraction. What matters is that the UK is hurtling towards Brexit with no apparent leadership and no plan. Concentrating on issues like vote share and what might have happened if voters hadn’t voted tactically are academic.