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In October 1964 there was a general election, After 13 years of Conservative rule, the Labour Party won with a four seat majority. The new Prime Minister was Harold Wilson who, if you remember, had resigned from the cabinet in 1951 with Aneurin Bevan. Wilson managed to govern until March 1966 when he called another election and got a 98 seat majority.
The Labour Party didn't have a good time in government as we had another financial crisis and he was forced to reduce the value of the pound against foreign currencies. This actually helped for a while but not that long. On a personal history level, I was at school with one of Wilson's sons.
One of the strange things about our elections, and it happens quite often with our system of voting, was that the Labour party only got 4 more seats and yet had nearly a quarter of a million more votes than the Conservative party. I'm going to try to explain how this happens and I will make it very simple. Under our system, each constituency elects an MP. There are, at present, 650 constituencies, or areas, and each one has about 70,000 voters in England. It is slightly lower in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. The party who have the most MPs elected, is in power. That's the simple bit.
Sometimes no party has more than 325, half the total MPs, and so they may need the support of smaller parties to govern. This is happening now (2017) and happened in 2010. But, as I said earlier, it is not always the party with the most MPs who get the most votes. How is that, you may ask, which is lucky, because I am going to tell you?
Let's look at a simple little country with 5 MPs and, obviously, 5 constituencies. There are 20 voters in each constituency. In constituency 1, 2 and 3, Party C wins and each time they get 11 votes and party L gets 9 votes. In constituency 4 and 5, party L wins and each time gets 19 votes and party C only gets 1 vote. Party C now governs as they have 3 MPs while party L only has 2. Simple........except, bit of simple maths here, Party C had 35 votes (11+11+11+1+1) while party L had 65 votes (9+9+9+18+18). More people actually voted for the party that didn't win.
In a referendum it is different as all votes throughout the country count. We call our system a democracy, which means a system of government elected by all the people eligible to vote but it doesn't really work like that as you can see.
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