As the election approaches, it is worth asking how representative MPs are of voters. At the last election in 2001, not a single MP obtained the votes of 50 per cent or more of the total electorate in a constituency. Ironically, given the events of the last few weeks, the most "democratic" MP was Gerry Adams, who took 45.5 per cent of the total electorate in his Belfast West seat (his share of the vote was 66.1 per cent). But only seven others obtained more than 40 per cent of the electorate, Tony Blair being one.
In 341 seats, about half of the total, the winner got the votes of between 30 and 40 per cent of the electorate. In another 306, the victorious candidate took between just 20 and 30 per cent. And in four Scottish seats, the MP was elected with the support of less than 20 per cent of the electorate. The SNP member for Moray, Angus Robertson, has the unworthy distinction of winning his seat with the lowest percentage of the electorate anywhere in the UK, at just 17.4 per cent of the total number of possible votes.
Mindless middle class?
The disillusion of the chattering classes over the Iraq war, and their resultant hostility to new Labour, fills the media. Whether this will be translated into real votes against the government remains to be seen. But in the US, a new and related voting phenomenon has already emerged. The professional middle classes used to be the backbone of conservative political support. Yet in the 2004 presidential election, voters with postgraduate degrees split 57:41 in favour of Kerry. (And yes, I can add up: the other 2 per cent went to third party candidates.)
Of the 17 states (including DC) with an above average percentage of citizens with post-graduate degrees, 13 voted for Kerry. Of the 34 with below average postgraduate percentages, Bush took 27. There are two possible explanations. Either the voters with the highest qualifications are able to take a broader and more long-sighted view of the interests of the nation, or their common sense has been addled by too many deconstructionist ideas. The data does not allow us to discriminate between these hypotheses.
It's tough at the bottom
Like it or not, immigration and asylum will be key issues in the British election. There is a plethora of confusing and often contradictory statistics. But until recently the evidence has been very sparse in a surprising area: does low-skill immigration tend to reduce wages at the bottom end of the income distribution?
Simple economics would suggest that it does and now there is some data to back it up across European labour markets. According to housebuilders George Wimpey, the arrival of workers from the new EU countries has pushed annual wage increases down from 5 per cent to zero in Britain. In Germany, there is widespread concern about downward pressure on wages in low-paid, labour-intensive sectors. According to Eberhard Haake, head of a customs taskforce on illegal employment, hourly wages of €3-4 used to be "extreme cases" but now "we see people working for just 50-80 cents an hour." Michael Knoke of the IG Bau construction union makes a link between unemployment and illegal immigration: "Since 1995, official employment in construction has dropped by a half but there has been an inflow of 500,000 illegal workers."
