Recognising that I may well have missed comment on one particular subject, I heard Nicola Sturgeon say this morning that half of the electorate voted SNP, looking at the BBC figures it shows that, from a turnout of 71.1%, SNP polled exactly 50% of the vote for 56 of 59 seats
Considering the accusations that the Tories are not a legitimate government, cannot the same be said of the SNP right to speak for all Scots as they only received 1454436 votes out of a possible 4094784
Well the point is that the SNP got slightly more than 50% of the votes in Scotland, whereas the Conservatives got just 36.9% of the vote in the UK.
Taking votes as a % of the
electorate, as you have done, seems to me a bit silly if you are evaluating which of the parties should make up the legitimate Government. The people who have not voted have apparently chosen not to express any opinion, and it makes far more sense to consider the proportions amongst those who have chosen to express an opinion (You could make a counter-argument in principle about spoiled ballots but the numbers involved are tiny so aren't really going to change anything).
On that basis, the SNP's share of the vote in Scotland was 50.0% The Conservative's share of the vote in the UK was 36.9%.
If more than half of those who choose to express an opinion vote for you, then it looks a bit hard to deny that must give you some kind of legitimate moral right to speak for those people - which appears to be what Nicola Sturgeon is claiming. In fact, according to my sums, that SNP share is more exactly 49.97% - very slightly below 50%, which in my view somewhat weakens any argument that they have a right to speak for Scots, though it's a very tiny difference.
On the other hand, nationally, little more than 1/3 of the people who voted chose to vote Conservative. Nearly 2/3 of those who voted chose not to vote Conservative. In my view, by any reasonable moral standards, those figures make the idea that the Conservatives have some legitimate (in the moral sense, obviously not in the legal sense) right to rule the UK to the exclusion of all other parties look absurd. But thanks to our silly electoral system, that is exactly what the rules allow to happen.
Incidentally the 36.9% the Conservatives got on Thursday is exactly what Labour got in 1979 - when Mrs. Thatcher first won. I'm pretty sure no one in their right mind would claim that should have given James Callaghan's Labour Party had any kind of moral right to govern after that election - clearly, on the basis of 36.9%, he didn't. If you consider that a party's moral right to govern is determined by what proportion of those who vote vote for that party (which seems very reasonable) then - well, if 36.9% didn't give Callaghan any moral right to form the sole governing party, then neither does it give David Cameron any moral right to form the sole governing party. But, once again, that's the idiocy of our electoral system...
