‘A High Tea for the Tories’

Let us stop attributing Mrs. Thatcher’s victory to the will of the British people and instead reflect on the true cause--the peculiarities of the British electoral system. Candidates for the House of Commons run in 650 separate districts, and the one who gets the most votes wins.

Fair enough sounding on the face of it. But this method, which we use to elect our own members of Congress, has two rather undemocratic features to it. The first of these is that, when more than two candidates are running in a district, one of them can win with a mere plurality of votes, even though more votes were actually cast against him or her.

The second peculiarity is that in order for a party to receive representatives proportional to their numbers in the general electorate, it must win that same proportion of district-wide elections. But if a party’s support is spread out rather evenly throughout the country, with few strongholds in specific areas, the party will be grossly under-represented--or not represented at all--in the House of Commons.

A combination of these two features gave British voters what they did not want--five more years of Mrs. Thatcher. The Conservatives received only 43% of the popular vote yet won 58% of the seats, Labor received 31% of the popular vote and got 35% of the seats, and the Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance received 23% of the vote yet won a mere 3% of the seats. A similar outcome was true, I might add, in the previous election of 1983.

If the British had what most of the rest of Western Europe has--a system of voting that allots seats in Parliament according to the percentage of the national vote each party received--the last two British elections would have resulted in no party receiving a majority of seats in the House of Commons, and a probable Labor-Alliance coalition government.

The British people did not crown “Maggie III,” their system did.

MICHAEL SAMETT

Los Angeles