A PR Win

According to the Guardian,

Ukip wins European elections with ease to set off political earthquake

According to Labour,

Tories won every European election for last 20 yrs. Coming 3rd in a national election for 1st time in memory is a disaster for Cameron

and

David Cameron is the first Tory leader to lose a Euro election for 20 years.

According to the BBC,

It will be the first time a national election has not been won by the Conservatives or Labour in 100 years

…and I’m sure I saw a similar remark from the Conservatives. My point is this: A multi-seat election is not something you win or lose. It’s a tempting but unhelpful way of thinking. Nobody believes that the author at number two in the New York Times bestseller list has in some way lost. The aim has never been to figure out which single party is the best, it has always been to construct, in a unbiased and open way, a small group of people who broadly represent the views of the general population. That the algorithms we currently use for this don’t especially work is a separate issue.

Certainly if one party does come out with a clear majority in any given parliament, it’s reasonable to say that party ‘won’ the election. In a two-party system it’s fair to say the other ‘lost’ the election. But that is still a simplification of the underlying mechanic of creating a representative group of leaders*. The problem is that the British media, public and political establishment haven’t updated their vocabulary to handle the EU elections. The BBC and Labour quotes above explicitly call it “a national election”. It’s not. The UK isn’t even a constituency in the EU election. “North West England” is a constituency, but even there you can’t meaningfully ‘win the election’ because it returns eight MEPs and you don’t even get a bonus point if your party gets all of them.

The result is a very strange and misleading view of the whole affair. In fact, the European Parliament comprises a huge number of parties, which coalesce into larger ‘political groups’. Policy is then decided by consensus. No single group has ever formed a majority government, and this is by design. It’s looking like the largest political group in the new EU Parliament is the somewhat Life-of-Brian-sounding ‘European People’s Party’, with 28% of the seats. They fielded precisely no candidates in the UK. The second largest, with 25% of the seats, is the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, represented in the UK by Labour. UKIP represent ‘Europe of Freedom and Democracy’, the smallest official political group in the EU, with 5% of the seats and six larger groups ahead of them.

UKIP themselves comprise 3% of the parliament. That’s a win for UKIP, certainly, but it’s patently stupid to say ‘UKIP won the election’ as if they’re now running the EU. The impression that they did is an illusion created by looking exclusively at the one country where they stood and then misunderstanding what the results in that country mean.

Nobody wins when you report something you don’t understand.


*A little idle Googling doesn’t seem to be enough to guess what the idea was when designing the supremely broken UK Parliamentary elections, which do routinely return a single party with a clear majority. There have almost never been more than two viable parties anyway, and the House is very much designed for a Government and an Opposition, but then, when it was all set up we didn’t have formal ‘parties’ as such so I would guess the idea was to just elect a bunch of people and let them squabble until some of them can form a government, much like we did in May 2010.