Sunday 4 October 2009

How one community can not elect an MP of its own just yet

Many people complain that a certain community is growing and they might start electing their own MPs to Parliament, they might put party politics away and will just vote for a candidate from their community. After looking into this argument can I assure the BNP that the Pakistani community in the UK can not elect an MP on its own?

According to the 2001 UK census the number of Pakistani's in the UK is at 747,285 which is a very interesting figure and something to not worry about just yet. We have more than 600 parliamentary seats so even if we divided the number of Pakistani's by the number of seat I think that will show you that there isn't enough Pakistani's anywhere in the UK to elect an MP.

Places like Manchester, Birmingham, and Bradford have large communities of Pakistani's but even those communities in my view couldn't just elect a Pakistani MP on their own. So Mr BNP the argument that Pakistani's will start electing their own MPs in still a farce, people like Sadiq Khan and Shahid Malik have been elected by the FPTP system (which isn’t the fairest system) and the whole community voted for them not just the Pakistani voters in their seats.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

While your argument may be correct, your logic is just completely nonsensical. You can not just divide the aggregate number of Pakistani population into the total number of seats to say "see it is not enough" as populations are not uniform across the nation.

In Manchester Central to give an example, based on the number of votes notionally cast at the last election, it would require just 14,436 votes for any candidate to guarantee a majority of one.

Quite clearly 14,436 does go into 747,285. In fact, if spread perfectly across the country it would be sufficient to guarantee 51 seats theoretically, rivalling the Lib-Dems for third place.

While your argument may be correct - I neither know nor care either way since I don't think having a majority Pakistani-ethnic population in a seat would be a problem even if its true - your logic and maths are quite shipshod and shocking.

Administrator said...

Philip your argument is interesting, the way I have argued this is from a route that suggests that it is very unlikely for the Pakistani community in an area to elect their own MP.

Can you name me a parliamentary seat in which they are enough pakistani's to elect an MP.

Unknown said...

I said already Irfan, I neither know nor care just that your logic is awful. To give an example:

Bethnal Green and Bow has 40k Bangladeshi-ethnic population with George Galloway having been elected with a vote of 15k. So more than double the figure.

Yet there are 283k Bangladeshi-Britain's which is approximately a third of the Pakistani-Britain's. So clearly under your logic that should not be possible.

Administrator said...

Philip,

So the Bengali community in Bethnal Bow and Greeen could put a candidate up for election and he could actually win.

David Herdson said...

The Pakistani community in Bradford West is certainly large enough to elect an MP if it acted en bloc.

The experience of the last three elections is that 19000 votes is sufficient to win the seat and there are way over that number of Pakistani-heritage voters there.

Curiously, despite that, Bradford West has never yet had a Pakistani (or muslim) MP - up until Marsha Singh, every MP the constituency had had was white and Singh is Indian by birth.

That's likely (IMO) to change in 2010 when I expect Zahid Iqbal to take the seat for the Conservatives.