REGARDING the large number of non-voters in the recent General Election, I would like to agree with the points made by Celia Midgley (Craven Herald letters, July 25). However, the situation is, in some ways, more extreme than she suggests.

It’s true that the “turnout” at the recent General Election was just 60 per cent, (actually 59.8 per cent) but this is a percentage of registered voters. There appear to be no official data on levels of voter registration but according to reliable estimates, only 80 to 90 per cent of people eligible to vote actually registered. This would suggest that the turnout of people potentially eligible to vote was somewhere between 48 per cent to 54 per cent (that is 60 per cent of 80 to 90 per cent). The Institute of Public Policy Research found that in fact just 52 per cent of UK adults actually voted.

So, the 33.8 per cent share of the vote attributed to Labour, actually represents only about 17.6 per cent of all potential voters, (33.8 per cent of 52 per cent), hardly an overwhelming majority. The other 82.4 per cent either didn’t register, didn’t vote or voted for somebody other than Labour!!

At the 2019 election, Labour got 32.2 per cent of the vote and were deemed to have suffered a disastrous and humiliating defeat, getting only 202 MPs. But five years later, with 33.8 per cent of the vote, (just 1.6 percentage points more), they have apparently achieved an overwhelming landslide victory, with 411 MPs (over twice as many) and a supposedly wholehearted mandate from the British people. Welcome to the anomalies of the British electoral system.

I want make it clear that I’m writing this not in an attempt to undermine the credibility of the new Labour government - I, myself, voted Labour - but as someone who is worried about our current voting system. I realise that the full picture is far more complex than the simplistic analysis above, but the figures do suggest that we should at least be careful about how we describe and interpret the outcomes of an election involving a ‘first-past-the-post’ system.

Like Celia Midgley, I wish more people took an interest in politics and fully understood the impact political decisions have on virtually every aspect of our lives. Clearly, in the UK, people are at liberty to vote how they want, or to not vote at all, but there are at least 30 countries, including for example Belgium, Australia and Greece, where voting is compulsory. Some people would like this to apply in the UK, and it is worth remembering that, until relatively recently, it was legally obligatory in the UK to provide information about all adults at a dwelling, to enable the compilation of the Electoral Roll (in other words, compulsory voter registration).

Dick Newson

Embsay