"the voters on the West side of the borough would vote for any candidate put up by the Labour Party"
This is not factually correct as both the results of the General Election and the last Mayoral Election proved. In the not too distant past there were Conservative, Liberal and Independent councillors in the West of the Borough and there will be again.
Looking at the Borough as a whole the first past the post system produced a bizarre outcome in 2014 in that that it took two and a half times as many votes to get a Conservative Councillor elected as its does to get a Labour Councillor elected. Please do not tell me that I should therefore favour a PR system - that is kind of obvious - but please do focus on the fact that over 55,000 people voted Conservative in May 2014 and only eleven Conservative Councillors were elected (100,000 people voted Labour and forty nine Labour Councillors were elected.) |