"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried"

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried" Winston Churchill

Since Thursday, there has been a lot of discussion of politics and on the whole, I have kept out of it. I have decided to do this one post as a vent and share the link. If people want to read it then great, if not then they either won't have got this far or you can choose to leave now. I am going to TRY and keep my personal opinions out of this as much as possible and the majority of this post will be facts and the dispelling of myths. I will however tell you how I voted. I obviously don't have to but I feel to try and make this post as open as possible I should. I am expecting for this post to have and cause debate, however I would appreciate it if we can keep said debate good natured.

In both the General Election and the Broxbourne local elections I voted Conservative. In the general it was essentially because I felt that David Cameron would be a better leader than Ed Miliband,  and I was concerned about a potential coalition with the SNP. In the local elections it was simply this....No other party bothered to tell me that they exist or that they had a candidate.

Right that's my personal bit over.

Since the results became clear (and for a long time before) there has been a debate over the voting system in this country. It is obvious that First Past the Post only really works in a 2 Party system, and that one of the many proportional methods would be better. The BBC has an article about the different methods here. The article is from just after the 2010 election but it does show how each of the different systems work.

On the topic of proportional representation, I've seen a lot of 'if we'd have had PR the result would have been different'. Firstly it's worth pointing out that the same voting public (well about 2/3rds) that voted in this election voted against a form of proportional representation in 2011 by more that a 2:1 ratio.

My main point is this though. ..Yes, the result would have been different.  What I'll let you decide is whether 'different' would have been 'better' based on the below. A word of warning, I don't know the source of the below graphic apart from it was on a friend's Facebook and it's on imgur,  so I'm taking it with a pinch of salt.

GRAPHIC

This shows that the Conservatives wouldn't have a majority but would still be the largest party. By being the largest party and also being the incumbent, David Cameron would have the right to try and form a coalition first, according to cabinet office rules

The first party David Cameron would probably look at going into coalition with in this instance would be UKIP as they are also a conservative (little c) party. From my calculations this would give a total of 324 seats (242 CON + 82 UKIP). Although this wouldn't reach the theoretical majority of 326, it would reach the working majority of 324 (assuming 4 SF seats). If you add 4 DUP MPs to the figure it would create a coalition with 328 seats and a very slim majority of 2 seats.

If Ed Miliband had attempted to form a coalition based on these n0umbers then he'd probably start with the Lib Dems. This would give a total of 249 (198 LAB + 51 LIB). Next would be the SNP (despite what he promised during the election) and Greens bringing the total number of MPs to 304. Even if you throw in Plaid, TUSC, Alliance and 'others' then a Labour led coalition would still only have 315, 9 short of a working majority. There are 7 seats missing from the graphic which I am assuming 4 SF and 3 UUP.

Therefore under this scenario (obviously other forms of PR may have has different results) we would have ended up with a Conservative led coalition supported by UKIP and the DUP.

The second thing that keeps cropping up is THIS photo and allegations that this was on Friday/Saturday.  To clarify the photo was taken in 2004 prior to the Blair administration's reelection. To ensure a fair and balanced point, I must note that there has been a Champagne delivery to Downing Street over the past few days, but as The i points out "it’s Bollinger rather than Moet".

Another thing I keep seeing is "The Conservatives got a majority when 75% of the voting public didn't vote for them, what mandate do they have?". This is correct, however more of the population voted for them than anyone else, therefore they have more of a mandate than any other party. If we list the parties in order of percentage that DIDN'T vote for them we get this

Conservative - 74.99%
Labour - 79.38%
UKIP - 91.44%
Lib Dems - 94.67%
SNP - 96.79%
Green - 97.45%

The last election to have a party form a government after gaining MORE than 50% if the vote was in 1935 when the Conservative party won 53.5% of the vote. Even then turnout was only 71.1% so they got the vote of 11.76 million out of approximately 30.92 million registered voters. In other words 61.97% DIDN'T vote for them.

Unfortunately not everyone is, was or will ever be happy with whatever result a general election throws at us. We can't choose how other people vote, what we can choose is to respect everyone's right to vote, everyone's freedom to speech and everyone's right to a private life. So however you voted, remember that person who voted the other way is a person too, not an animal.

N.B. If you want to know where any of my numbers/stats came from then please just ask.