Michael Steed

Michael Steed (25 January 1940 – 30 August 2023) was a British psephologist, political scientist, broadcaster, activist and Liberal Democrat politician.

[4] In 1966, Steed became Lecturer in Government at Manchester University,[5] a post he held for many years until taking early retirement through ill health.

As a psephologist, he became a specialist in the detailed analysis of election results from a sociological point of view, for many years providing media such as The Observer and The Economist with texts making such complexities as "percentage swing" accessible to the lay reader.

[6] In the late-1960s and throughout the 1970s, he made regular television appearances on "election night" programmes, often at the side of Bob McKenzie who popularised the "swingometer" based on the concept of swing devised by David Butler.

[13] At the 1971 Liberal Assembly, he successfully moved the major pro-European resolution, noting however that the then-EEC, in which decisions were taken by "a secret cabal", must be made more democratic.

National sovereignty, he argued, would "die away as a European democracy of widely diffused power was created and exercised at all levels" in "a close political union of the people of Europe".

[21] In the 1979 European elections, he was the Liberal candidate for Greater Manchester North, where he was defeated by veteran Labour politician Barbara Castle.

[26][27] This later developed into the Campaign for the North, an all-party group pressing for devolution for the English regions; as well as Scotland and Wales, with Steed as chairman and Temperton as director, using funding from the Rowntree Trust.