There is a mistake on page 227 of my Pocket Oxford Dictionary. The editors of this little tome seem to be under the impression that democracy is "a government by the whole population, usually by elected representatives." They clearly haven't examined the British electoral system recently.

But they aren’t the only ones. Most people - if they ever think about it - believe that a fairly large proportion of the electorate are involved in choosing a government. Perhaps not an absolute majority, what with there being more than two parties, but certainly enough to suggest that the people have spoken.

Sadly, the oddities of the British electoral system mean that you'd be wrong, potentially very wrong. A quick look at the figures reveals the true picture.

There are 659 MPs. A party, therefore, needs to win 330 constituencies in a general election if it is to have the absolute majority required to form a viable government.

The British electorate currently numbers just over 44 million people, and so a constituency contains an average of 67,000 voters. Despite the 3+ party system, winning a seat in the House of Commons generally requires getting around half the vote within a constituency. However, there's also apathy to be considered: most general elections only see around 75 per cent of eligible voters taking part.

So, theoretically, the minimum number of votes required for a party to win an election is:

Minimum number of seats * votes to win average seat * turnout = 330 * (50 per cent * 67,000) * 75 per cent = approximately 8.3 million.

That's roughly 19 per cent of the electorate - around 14 per cent of the entire British population.

The more astute of you may have noticed that I cheated slightly there. I ignored the fact that no political party in its collective right mind would only stand for election in half the constituencies and hope it won them all. It’d be quite an efficient way of doing things though.

But look at the result of the 2001 election - widely described as an unprecedented second landslide victory for Labour.

Size of electorate: 44.4 million.
Number of votes for Labour: 10.7 million.
Number of seats won: 412.
Percentage of electorate voting for Labour: 24 per cent.

In an election that was not just a victory but a landslide, fewer than one in four of the electorate cast their vote for Labour. Suddenly that 19 per cent doesn't look so outlandish after all.

However, the 2001 election was something of a special case. At 59 per cent, it had the lowest voter turnout of any election since the war. The government was returned to power not because of any great enthusiasm for Labour, but because the Tories seemed unelectable.

If you want further proof that our electoral system can disenfranchise voters, you only have to look at the three major post-war watershed elections. These, remember, are not just changes in who was in charge, but moments when the whole of the British political landscape changed.



The bottom figure is interesting; only a third of the voters - something around a quarter of the population - were required to create a swing big enough for British politics to undergo a revolution.

To give you some sense of the scale of those figures, and the level of apathy seen in the 2001 election, let's look at the other example of British democracy at its finest: the reality TV phone in.

In the third series of Big Brother, the producers received approximately 8.5 million votes. Let's ignore for a moment all the fifteen-year-old girls who fancied Alex Sibley voting multiple times. 8.5 million votes are enough to get a majority in the House of Commons with the complete control of Nottingham as a bonus.

However, Pop Idol 2002 remains the reality TV landslide par excellence: 8.7 million votes were cast with 4.6 million for winner Will Young. They say young people cannot connect with politics any more, but they seem to understand the voting bit. Twice as many people between the ages of 18 and 24 voted in Pop Idol then they did in the general election the year before.

Just in case you were not feeling disenfranchised enough, here is another wonderful feature of the British electoral system. Your vote probably does not count. There’d be an uproar if it happened on the voting for Big Brother but, when you are voting on who will form a government, it’s more than likely you live in a safe seat, meaning that the political parties can safely ignore your vote.

Of the 659 seats in the Commons, the great majority have historically been safe seats. Fewer than 100 seats are actually affected by the swing in the average election – these seats are the so-called 'key marginals'.

In recent years, the swing needed for an opposition to oust a government has averaged 8.5 per cent (8.2 per cent to Tories in 1979, 8.8 per cent to Labour in 1997). Getting that swing in those 100 key marginals is usually all that stands between opposition and government. So the percentage of votes that are actually required to change to produce a new government could be as low as:

100per cent * (8.5 per cent swing * 75 per cent turnout * 100/659 seats) = 0.96 per cent of the electorate.

For those of you that have got this far, and have a calculator to hand, will know that this adds up to about 425,000 votes. What is more, this may be an optimistic estimate. For a start, it assumes a fairly big swing. In 1964, the swing to Labour was just 0.3 per cent, but it was enough to win a majority. Spoilyourvote.org, a website dedicated to furthering the cause of apathy - or, as they put it, antipathy - say the figure could be as low as 160,000. By comparison, back in 2002, it would have taken 250,000 votes to have gone the other way for Gareth Gates’ dreams to have come true.

When the swing required to elect a government is not much more than that required to give us a different Pop Idol, you have got to start to wonder about the state of democracy in this country.