Selling out.........

Who exacty did you vote for? Did you vote for your particular candidate because you believed in them or did you vote for the party that you believed in? Either way, as we await the result of the horse-trading between the Tories and the Lib-Dems, I noted that the boy Clegg was rather particular with his language as reported this morning on Radio 4. He made reference to discussing changes in the "political system" rather than what I thought he was interested in which was the electoral system. This suggests that a major part of the Lib-Dem proposal, electoral reform, will go straight in the dumper when they sign up to the Con-Lib-Dem coalition.

This hiatus gave me a little time to consider the issue of 'electoral reform' and how the results (based upon the BBC's stats here) of the election would look if the votes cast were reflected in the seats gained by individual parties. But first, a graph showing votes cast for each party plus total votes plus the size of the electorate.

Now to compare how the seats gained under the current 'first past the post system' would be altered were the seats gained to reflect the votes cast for each party.

So, the Lib-Dems are the real losers under the current system and a coalition under a proportional system would have made either a Con-Lib-Dem or a Lab-Lib-Dem government equally workable. It would also more truly represent the voting intentions of the electorate because, simply on voting numbers, the Lib-Dems are hugely under-represented. Will the boy Clegg fight his corner on this issue or will he fold in the face of David's charms?

Till we have a government, I'm still Niall Connolly