Parties. Votes. Seats Seats in
Obtained. proportion
to Votes.
Liberal 352,334 59 38
Labour and Socialist 35,997 2 4
Unionist 255,589 9 28
Totals 643,920 70 70
Every Scottish Unionist member of Parliament represented on an average 28,400 voters, whilst a Liberal member represented less than 6000 voters. The figures repay still further examination. One of the Unionist seats—the Camlachie division of Glasgow—was only captured as the result of a split in the Ministerialist ranks. The other eight seats were won by majorities ranging from 41 to 874, amounting in the aggregate to 3156. If therefore in these constituencies some 1600 Unionist voters had changed sides, the Unionist party, though numbering more than a quarter of a million, or 40 per cent. of the electorate, might have failed to secure any representation at all. With the single-member system more than a quarter of a million of Scottish Unionists only obtained representation as it were by accident. In the same election the Liberals in the counties of Surrey, Sussex, and Kent, numbering 134,677, found themselves without a representative.[5]
The underrepresentation of majorities.
The failure of existing electoral methods to provide representation for minorities not only unduly emphasizes racial and other differences between different parts of the same country, as in Ireland, but often leads to a complete falsification of public opinion. The results in Birmingham and Manchester in the election of 1906 may serve as a text. As a result of that election these two towns were represented in Parliament as being absolutely opposed to one another—a heightened contrast which was a pure caricature of the difference disclosed by the polls. Manchester (including Salford) returned nine Ministerialists; they were elected by the votes of 51,721 citizens, whilst the votes of their 33,907 political opponents counted for nothing. Manchester was solid for Liberalism. Birmingham (with Aston Manor) was represented by eight Unionist members elected by 51,658 citizens, but here again the polls disclosed a dissentient minority of 22,938. The total number of votes in Manchester was 85,628, and in Birmingham 74,596. Manchester (with Salford) has one more member than Birmingham (with Aston Manor), because of the larger population and electorate of the former area. The Ministerialists of Manchester and Salford were equal in number to the Unionists in Birmingham, and it is interesting to observe that the former obtained additional representation because their opponents were more numerous than were the opponents of the Unionists in Birmingham.
The combined results of these two districts disclose the crowning weakness of a system of single-member constituencies. Taken together the Unionists numbered 85,565, the Ministerialists 74,659, and if the net Unionist majority of 10,906 had been spread over the whole of the two areas it would have yielded in each constituency the very respectable majority of 640. If their voting power had been evenly diffused the Unionists might have won the whole of the seventeen seats, whereas they were, as a result of the election, in a minority of one. This possible inversion of the true opinion of the electorate may perhaps be more clearly understood from another example taken from the same election,—the results of the polls in the county divisions of Warwickshire.
WARWICKSHIRE (ELECTION, 1906)
Electoral Conservative Liberal Conservative Liberal
Division Votes. Votes. Majority. Majority.
Tamworth 7,561 4,842 2,719 —
Nuneaton 5,849 7,677 — 1,828
Rugby 4,907 5,181 — 274
Stratford-on-Avon 4,173 4,321 — 148
—————————————————————-
22,490 22,021 469
The Conservatives, who were in a majority of 469, obtained one-fourth of the representation allotted to the county. Similar examples can be given from nearly every election. Thus the figures for the five divisions of Sheffield in the election of December 1910 were as follows:—