Yesterday, Tony Blair's Labour Party won the British general elections. The US isn't the only country whose electoral system produces distorted results. Formerly left-wing Labour won 35.2% of the vote, the Conservatives garnered 32.3% of the vote and the progressive Liberal Democrats obtained 22.1%.
Yet the relative close popular vote totals were not reflected in the seat totals. Labour took 355 parliamentary seats, the Conservatives 197 and the Lib Dems 62. Two are undeclared at present.
Most analysts concluded that the result is exactly what British population wanted: another Labour government, but with a reduced majority (47 fewer seats). The British public was angry at Blair for his role in the Iraq debacle and his close alliance with President Bush but were happy with his handling of the economy.
It's a good result for the Liberal Democrats, who are the progressive alternative to the increasingly right-leaning Labour Party. The Lib Dems benefited from being the only major party to oppose the Iraq aggression.
Results from Northern Ireland were less promising. 14 of the province's 18 seats (and a combined 48%) went to the two extremist sectarian parties: the DUP (of the infamous Rev. Iain Paisley) and Sinn Fein (the political wing of the IRA). The two traditional moderate groupings, the Catholic SDLP and Protestant UUP, got 3 and 1 seats respectively; percentage wise, they barely outpolled, combined, Paisley's gang.
It's sad reality that the BBC was shaken to core when a single reporter on a morning radio show essentially said that the Iraq invasion was based on false pretenses. As a result of that statement which is now widely acknowledged to be reality, the leadership of the BBC was forced to resign and the corporation restructured. Yet, the three men most responsible for the aggression (Bush, Blair and Australia's John Howard) were each given another term in power.
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