Vernon Bogdanor: 'Our electoral system failed to register all significant minorities'
5th Sep 2005, 11:34 GMT
The most obvious feature of the recent general election is that the Labour Party was returned to office with a comfortable working majority of 66 seats on just 35.2 per cent of the vote. This means that nearly 65 per cent of those who voted - nearly two thirds of the voters - were against it. We thus have, under our constitution, a government with very considerable, if not untrammelled power, yet opposed by nearly two-thirds of the voters.