I really don’t understand the election that has just occurred in Britain.
We had a coalition government between Conservatives (Tories) and Liberal Democrats (LibDem). Many LibDem voters from the previous election were cross that their party went into a coaliton with the Conservatives to form a government. They felt that being with the Tories compromised their beliefs. So this time around, what did they do to change that? Vote LibDem? Vote Labour? No, they voted Conservative. What???? Most former LibDem seats went over to the Conservatives, the party with which the LibDem members said they did not want to be associated. Go figure.
Then we have the Scots and their nationalistic party. This all started with the Scottish Nationalist party saying they wanted to devolve from Britain. There were only about 4 million people eligible to vote for or against this out of a population in Britain of about 100 million. Of that about 1.5 million voted to devolve to a separate Scotland. So they lost. Come the election all of Scotland (a mere 4 million voters) voted for the Scottish Nationalist party (SNP). What??? Then they think they will get more powers from Westminster. Well, this mere 4 million get 56 seats in Westminster Parliament when there are only about 630 seats for the entire 100,000 million others. Now I know we don’t have proportional representation, for which I am thankful, but that is a lot of seats for very few people. The rest of us have about 1.5 million voters per seat. They have about 50,000 voters per seat. Not really fair. Even a party called UKIP which got 4 million votes only got 1 seat and the whole of Wales which has about 3 million voters, only has a handful of seats, so why has Scotland got 56 seats? And why did those people who did not want to devolve vote for a nationalistic party? The result is that they have put in the opposite of what SNP says it is, the Tories. Go figure.
By voting SNP they have given the Conservatives an overall majority, which means that if all the other parties got together they still can’t outvote the Tories. Why would the Conservatives bother with the SNP now? Why would they concede anything? Why would they bother with Scotland, a country with too few people and too many seats except, perhaps, to redraw the election boundaries?
No, I really don’t get it.
dr cedar 