As the results for Sussex emerged from our votes on Thursday, those of us who are deeply frustrated with such an unequal form of election results clearly want to find a solution so that in the future, the people voting in General Elections can be much better represented. Across Sussex there are 16 constituencies and just under 71% of the 1.26 million electorate voted for one of the four main parties. Whilst I would personally prefer to see the opportunity opening up for Independent candidates, the disproportionate impact for the four parties is a vital place to start. Of the votes that were made for these four parties, less than 51% were for Conservative candidates and yet they got 81.25% of the seats, while 25% of the votes for Labour led to 12.5% of the seats and just under 7% of the votes for the Green Party led to 6.25% of the seats. However the biggest gap was just under 17% or 151,266 of the votes that were directed at the Liberal Democrats who did not get a single seat. This makes things very unequal.

Tomorrow my blog which is a column in the Brighton Argus will call for a proportional representative system, but given that probably none of the Conservatives will agree to this, there will need to be a different approach. The challenge of course is that Labour up until now have refused to engage in any form of collaborative approach, even though they potentially have more to gain than the Liberal Democrats. Based on the last two General Elections of the current 13 Conservative seats there are six that are most closely opposed to the Labour Party and two that are most closely opposed to the Liberal Democrats and then five that are a bit mixed up. If Labour were willing to back down in both Lewes and Eastbourne and the Liberal Democrats in Crawley, Hastings and East Worthing there is a much stronger chance that our area could end up with two Liberal Democratic MPs and three to five Labour MPs. This would also reduce the Conservative constituents to between 50% – 62.5% of the whole which would seem perfectly reasonable given their vote share!