Most Votes, Most Seats

That's the meme that the Conservatives are pushing over in Britain right now: we won the most votes and the most seats, and therefore how dare the Liberal Democrats form an agreement with Labour! But do they have the most votes? Or the most seats? Well, that depends very much on how you draw the party lines.

Let's start with the results: the Tories got 10,706,647 votes and 306 seats. Labour received 8,604,358 votes and 258 seats. The Liberal Democrats received 6,827,938 votes and 57 seats. No other party came close to those numbers, so I'll leave it at that for the moment. It does look like the "most votes/most seats" point is correct, on those figures: no other party had as many votes or as many seats won as the Conservatives. But now, what if the Labour and Liberal Democratic parties decided to announce a full, formal coalition, in essence treating themselves as one party? Now we have our LAB/LIB coalition on 15,432,296 votes and 315 seats, bigger numbers than the Tories can claim.

But it's still not a majority for the "Progressive Alliance," so let's expand it a bit further. Let's toss in the Green, Social Democratic and Labour, Alliance, Respect, Trade Unionist and Socialist, and Scottish Socialist Parties into our Progressive Alliance. To be fair, let's also give the Conservatives an alliance with the Democratic Unionists, the UK Independence Party, the British Nationalist Party, the Ulster Unionists, the English Democrats, the Traditional Unionist Voice, and the Christian Party. Now we get our center-left coalition at 15,920,327 votes and 320 seats, and the center-right coalition on 12,568,548 votes and 314 seats; the left are still ahead on both counts. Still no majority, though, even if the 5 Sinn Fein MPs fail to take their seats, which moves the majority target to 323 rather than 326. The only MPs unassigned are the Scottish Nationalist Party (8) and Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales, 3). The left-wing coalition would then need 3 votes from these 11 nationalists, both of whom are right in the middle of its ideological ground, and the leader of the SNP has openly called for a big Progressive Alliance coalition. So by these calculations, the left clearly has more vote and more seats than the right, and possibly an absolute majority of seats. They definitely, for what it's worth, have a majority of votes: just the original LAB-LIB coalition has an absolute majority of votes.

How much of that is legitimate, though? I'd argue a fair amount is. Elements of all three major parties pushed the idea that the choice was really between Conservatives or Not-Conservatives, with David Cameron arguing that if you "vote for Clegg, you get Brown." Surely, someone who made that argument as his pitch to get an overall majority cannot complain if, having been denied that majority, Clegg ends up supporting Labour? (Not Gordon Brown, for what it's worth, who is stepping down.) Labour, for its part, urged Liberal Democrats to vote for Labour in LAB-CON marginals, and some elements of the Liberal Democrats made a similar call for Labour voters in LIB-CON marginals, both saying that they needed to "keep the Tories out." So there does seem to be a very real sense in which the two big left-wing parties were viewed, both by themselves and by their opposition, as united. Treating them as unified is therefore, I think, justified. The DUP in Northern Ireland has an arrangement with the Tories, as the SDLP has with Labour, so I think adding them to the respective coalitions is legitimate. The other groupings are more questionable; I don't honestly believe that the single Green MP or the Alliance MP would vote to topple a Progressive Alliance government. I also think most Green, Alliance, etc. voters would prefer that Progressive Alliance, and the UKIP and BNP voters would prefer the Conservatives over that Alliance. But the conclusion does not change from adding in those smaller parties: the left-wing coalition has far more votes and slightly more seats than the right-wing party.

So, the Tories have most votes, most seats? I don't think so.