The decline of the Labour-Conservative Duopoly

This is the first post of what I hope will be an interesting, and balanced blog that will hopefully raise points so far ignored by others.

There is a lot of talk at the moment of a percieved "democratic deficit" within British politics. I am sure this is apparent to the three major party leaders and their advisors more than ever at the moment, as the debate reverborates through out Pubs, Living Rooms and the Blogosphere: does our Electoral System needs reforming? This point has been and will continue to be debated throughout the foreseeable future, as the election campaign reaches its zenith.

The key issue here is not "Nick Clegg the saviour of Britain" or even the more perverse comparison between Clegg and the Nazis which has beeen doing the circuits over the last few days but rather the trend in the UK away from the Labour-Conservative duopoly, to elections yielding a more fractured result. Since Labours ill fated attempt to form a coalition with the Liberals in 1977, 10 Elections have yielded results with a single party achieving a majority of 40 seats or greater, the percentage of the votes needed to secure a large majority has gradually diminished (Labour in 1997 won with a majority of 43.2% and 35.2% in 2005) granted with this example Labours majority diminished during the 8 year spell but still had a huge majority in 2005, indeed this can be seen clearly by the mountain the Conservatives have to climb to achieve a workable government today.

These statistics can be read one of two ways:

• Firstly this reduction could be attributed to a reduction in voter turnout although this is likely to be redressed in May, with a siginifcant increase in voter registration.
• The British public has become more politically diverse: parties such as the Green Party, UKIP and most significanlty the Liberal Democrats have been chipping away at established Labour and Conservative support, thereby reducing the previously effective duopoly.

This election has seen twitter, facebook and the internet as a whole come to the fore, it will be interesting to see just what proportion of the sub 25 age group vote and for whom, the duopoly will continue in British Politics but it remains to be seen if Electoral reform, or greater politcal activism will change that.