Voters did not want 'mess' of coalition, says senior Labour figure
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Version 0 of 1. People voted for a Conservative majority government partly because they did not want the “mess” of coalition or other deals, Margaret Beckett, the former foreign secretary and head of Labour’s election defeat taskforce, has said. Beckett, who also led the No to AV campaign, made the argument as she dismissed growing calls for electoral reform after Ukip and the Green party only got one MP each despite millions of people voting for them. The Electoral Reform Society has branded the 2015 general election the “most disproportionate in British history” after it published an analysis showing Ukip could have won as many as 80 MPs and the Greens 20 under other systems. Katie Ghose, head of the ERS, said the problem was the UK “trying to cram multi-party politics into an old fashioned electoral system”, which led to many people frustrated at not seeing their choices reflected in parliament. But Beckett pointed to a survey suggesting people preferred to have a stable majority government led by one party. She said this undermined the claim of media commentators that voters no longer wanted to be governed by the main parties and would prefer a more disparate system. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Beckett said: “In 2010 they didn’t like any of us and didn’t give anyone a majority. But in 2015 they said, hang on a minute, we would rather have a majority government of one or the other than a mess.” Asked about the 4 million Ukip voters who elected only one MP, she said: “They wanted to register at least a protest or, being fair, many perhaps have decided Ukip stands for the things they want to see but there weren’t enough of them in order to give Ukip a substantial number of seats.” Beckett is leading an investigation into Labour’s defeat ordered by the acting party leader, Harriet Harman. Describing the new job, she said: “Basically, we need to know exactly what happened because there are lots of different patterns of voting in interesting ways, even though they are ways that are not welcome to me. We need to look and see and listen to people about what they actually think, as opposed to what other people are saying they think.” |