Are we heading for a constitutional crisis at the next election?

Current Prediction: Labour short 13 of majority

Party	2005 Votes	2005 Seats	Pred Votes	Pred Seats
CON	33.24%	209	40.01%	284
LAB	36.21%	346	36.10%	313
LIB	22.65%	66	13.80%	20

Prediction based on opinion polls from 22 Oct 07 to 10 Nov 07, sampling 6,624 people.

The above table shows Baxter's current prediction of the likely result of the next election. It predicts that Labour will still be the largest party, but lack an overall majority. The most likely outcome would therefore be a Lab-Lib coalition of some sort.

Baxter's system takes a weighted average of recent survey results and converts them into a likely distribution of seats according to new constituency boundaries.

So if this happened Labour would still be forming a government even though the Tories had polled over 40% of the vote.

Would this really be politically acceptable?

While disparities between voting shares and seat shares are always going to be a feature of the first past the post system the fact is that nothing remotely like this has ever happened in the past. There has only been one election since the war when the party with the most seats did not also have the largest proportion of votes. That was in 1951 when the Tories won the election with 48% of the vote, although Labour actually polled higher, with 48.8% of the vote.

That didn't really bother anyone because the margin was so small, and in any case the Tories had nearly 50% of the vote.

But will people really accept a Labour-led government when they polled a full 4% less than the Tories?

This issue will be made all the more acute by the fact that Labour are already struggling to defend their reliance on Scottish and Welsh MPs to pass laws that primarily affect English constituencies (the so-called West Lothian question).

Could this be the trigger for a change in the electoral system and/or the representation of Welsh and Scottish MPs at Westminster?