won 42 per cent of the votes nationally, but 52 per cent of the seats in the Commons. In addition, third parties who lack a regional base are under-represented in the amount of seats they gain win in relation to the percentage of the vote they win nationally. In 1989 the Green Party won 15 per cent of the vote nationally, but due to their vote being thinly spread over the country no seats in the House of Commons were won. When FFP system is being used, it can be argued that the all votes are not equal. Norton identifies some votes as "wasted votes (votes cast for losing candidates have no effect)" . The Commons is not just unrepresentative in the nature of party representation; the MPs that are elected into the Commons are not a reflection of the electorate in terms of ethnicity and sex. The Commons are predominantly white, male and middle class. At present nine per cent of MPs are female and seven per cent of them are non-whiteiii. Professional politicians have little experience of other forms of work and middle class MPs may have little experience of the issues that effect people living in run-down areas. This leads to the question: are people able to represent others who have little or nothing in common with? The parties have a major role in the selection of future MPs, through the candidates they selected, due to the relatively low number of seats that actually change hands in any given election. The example that Adonis refers to is, in 1987 only 55 seats (eight per cent of the total) changed hands between parties. The electorate in the UK play no role in the selection of candidates running
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