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The reason why the proportion of seats won by a party differ so much from the share of votes obtained, is because of the electoral system in place, first-past-the-post (FPTP), which we use to elect Members of Parliament (MPs). The FPTP system is such that the deviation from proportionality is very high. In the last general election Labour received only 43.2% of votes cast, but won 63.2 % of the seats. FPTP also performs badly when distributing seats according to the parties' share of the votes nationwide. This is because a party with its votes concentrated in some geographic areas (such as Labour in Scotland in 1997, who prevented the Conservative winning a seat in this region) may win a higher share of the seats than is warranted by its share of the votes UK wide. In contrast, a party whose votes are more spread out geographically (such as the Liberal Democrats in years prior to 1997) may win a lot of votes nationwide without winning many seats. For example in the 1983 general election when the Liberal-Social Democrat Party Alliance won 25% of the votes but only 3% of the seats. In the same election Labour received slightly more votes, 27%, but gained just under 30% of the seats. Under FPTP (and other systems where each party