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How Well Or Not Will Ukip Do At The Election

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Gromit | 08:30 Sat 18th Apr 2015 | News
11 Answers
How many votes?
What % of the popular vote will they get?
How many seats will they win?

My prediction is:

Votes: About 5 million.
Popular vote: 15%
Seats: 5


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I'm in two minds really. I can't help thinking they won't do as well as they want to or as a lot of people expect them to. Why do you think that Gromit?
Think they were looking at 10 or 12 seats weren't they.I am beginning to think that your 5 seats is optimistic. :-(
Our first past the post system of voting will mean that for a relatively high number of votes, UKIP won't get a correspondingly large number of MPs, which will leave a lot of people frustrated.

It's why the LibDems have campaigned for proportional representation for many years.

I suspect your figures are about right, and wonder what's UKIP's stance on PR is (I've looked but can't find any information on it).
I don't think they'll get any seats, UKIP are a mid term protest party. People can vote for them in all the other elections that no one really cares about. The GE is different, core voters will return to the core parties.
"Our first past the post system of voting will mean that for a relatively high number of votes, UKIP won't get a correspondingly large number of MPs, which will leave a lot of people frustrated. "

I've been spending the last month or so repeating this to anyone who's interested (and a few people who aren't, probably) -- my hope is that UKIP manage to hold on to approx 15% of the vote share and get essentially nothing for their troubles.

The preferred electoral system for UKIP is what is known as "AV plus", but should really be called the "mixed-member alternative vote". In this system, each voter is invited to cast two types of vote. The first vote works exactly like the alternative vote, ranking candidates in order of preference, and then the count proceeds by totting up first preference votes, seeing if anyone has made 50%+1 already, and if not then eliminating the last-place finisher and redistributing their votes according to second preference, and so on until someone has reached 50%+1. This will always happen.

However, this also only fills a half of the house. The voters' second vote is for a party they would prefer. These votes are used after the AV part of the vote has been completed, and what follows is MPs being chosen from the party list to fill the house until the overall representation is proportional, or as close to it as possible.

The advantage of this system is that it preserves a constituency link, at least for half of the people voted for, while also avoiding situations where MPs can win on a very tiny minority of the popular vote (at little at 29.4% at the 2010 election, and that record is likely to be beating this time around). Additionally, the smaller parties that will often be shut out at the first round of ballots still get a chance to have some representation anyway, in proportion with their total support.

The big problem is that unless the divide between directly elected MPs and the party list MPs exactly corresponds to the divide between houses, then you have two classes of MP in the House. I don't see how this can be resolved in any way other than splitting the houses (as in, this is a great way to combine electoral reform with Lords reform), and then retaining a modified form of the Parliament Act that establishes how the balance between the two houses should work. If the MPs from both parts of the election have equal power, you can see that this would be messy. One lot is elected basically to "make up the numbers" but voters have no control over the list (the perennial problem with any form of 'pure' PR -- you can't hold individuals to account), while another has a direct link to the constituents who voted for them> Why should they be equal? AV Plus, and equivalent systems, demand a House split and an addressing of how the balance should work, so is difficult to implement.
4 or 5 but could be wrong, they don't seem to be making any head way in Scotland at all.
latest version of PR from jim, better but still delivers confusion and parallysis. Surely everyone will use both votes for the party they want anyway.
which parties have reform of the lords in their 2015 manifesto?
That's not my version of PR -- I was explaining what UKIP want, and then analysing it. And it's 50% not PR anyway.

In the meantime you persist in wrongly categorising anything that is not precisely the same as what we have now as "PR" -- you really ought to stop doing that. I can appreciate that if you're happy with the FPTP system despite its myriad flaws then you won't be interested in debate, but at least show me the respect of understanding what I'm saying rather than constantly misrepresenting it.
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If it's any help, this was their 2010 result:

Votes: 919,549
Popular votes: 3.1%
Seat: 0
Gromit...according to Electoral Calculus, maybe only the one seat.

YouGov has an interesting Poll published this morning ::

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/04/18/public-most-embarrassed-vote-ukip-most-proud-vote-/

It seems that the stigma of voting UKIP may be holding their potential voters back. But does it really matter if its 1 seat or 5 ?

I agree with TTT here...UKIP are the classic protest vote.

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