Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Electoral politics.

So, if you're reading this and you're not Weasel you may want to abandon about now.
Down the years Ms random Doubt has asked many questions about my homeland. "How?", she says "is this place so politically conservative yet socially fairly liberal?"
I always explain this away with the vagueries of the three party system. "Approximately 26,000 voters vote for the Conservative candidate, whilst approximately 16,000 vote for the Liberal Democrat and approximately 12,000 vote for the Labour candidate" says I, "Therefore more people vote against the Tory than vote for him but he gets in based upon the division of the other two parties".
So I gets to thinking in my massive geek thinking way, "I wonder how this would pan out across the county if I looked up all the votes cast for all the candidates in the last election and added them all up and sorted them according to party and saw which party would come out on top? Would Norfolk as a whole (remember, South Norfolk is only one of about 8 different constituencies) replicate this pattern or would there be a different trend apparent?"
So I looked all the results up, the internet is a gift for such things, if only therapy were so simple.
The final tally.

Votes cast in Norfolk in the May 2005 Parliamentary Election.

Conservative 162,224
Labour 122,650
Liberal Democrat 103,805
Others (inc UKIP)15,018

Total votes cast 403,697

So I'm fairly right in assuming that my homeland is still a 'good ole boy' type of conservative place even though there are far more non Torys who actually live, work and vote there.
Thank you for listening.

1 comment:

Wisdom Weasel said...

What about the non-voting chavs of Diss? Might they swing things towards UKIP, or the English Party? Or do they just dream of an unreachable Ibiza?