Originally Posted by Lid
Apologies if some-one already posted this, but that MP is wrong to claim that 50% of the electorate voted Labour at the last general election. Unless of course he is only referring to his own constituency, but he has not made that clear!
If you include the no-shows, Labour only received 22% of the electorate's vote at the last election. If you exclude the no-shows, it was elected by just 35.3% of those who voted.
You are right, both with the figures and with the point that he didn't make it very clear. He is, though, a politician. They make a career of being deliberately obtuse. If you write statements with built-in wriggle-room, you can always pretend you meant something else when you're picked up on it. Clarity is the very last thing you should expect.
However, in this case, he did say that the reason HE is in Parliament is because 50% of voters voted for the labour party. And the only voters that could have voted for him would be those in his constituency. Those that voted elsewhere couldn't have affected whether he was elected or not. So, while it may not be worded particularly well, even I can't really criticise him on that point. Though I have to say, my immediate reaction was exactly as yours - 50% certainly didn't vote for Labour nationally. Nowhere near 50%, when measured either as a percentage of those that voted, and even less as a percentage of those that could have. That's partly what I meant when I referred to that election as being a sham. It's rigged, in that the system builds in an almost unchangeable bias towards maintaining the status quo of the
system, and limiting any real variation to national government to one of two options, neither of whom have much incentive to change the overall system since, between them, it serves so well to keep one ion power and the other in opposition. It does not, in any real sense, reflect national opinion on issues and as such can't really be claimed as a mandate to follow the Party line. That, instead, is a dogmatic political philosophy rather than any real attempt to represent constituents. And that's why Clelland's logic, as well as his sense of appropriate letter-writing style, is flawed.