Don’t let politics hijack the debate: reform is important

(c) Arne Hendriks

Yesterday, Gordon Brown announced that he will introduce a law guaranteeing that a Labour government will hold a referendum on electoral reform within two years if it wins a fourth term at the next general election.

The voting system offered as a replacement is likely to be the Alternative Vote system; where rather than selecting one candidate on the ballot paper, voters will rank them according to preference. If any candidate receives 50% of the first choice votes, they are elected. If not, the candidate with the least votes is removed and their second choice votes are redistributed among the remaining candidates, and so on until one candidate reaches 50%.

This is a victory for Willie Sullivan and the commendable Vote For A Change movement, who have been campaigning over the past few months for such an opportunity. And it is true that the current first-past-the-post system (FPTP) is becoming less representative of voting intentions as we move away from a two-party politics. In 1970 over 89% of voters backed Labour or the Conservatives on a 72% turnout, whereas in 2005 only 57% did so, on a 61% turnout. The Liberal Democrats of course are the main victims of this electoral system, which awarded them 9.6% of seats for their 23% of the popular vote; although the Tories also have cause for complaint as winning 3% less of the vote than Labour translated to 158 less MPs.

The Liberal Democrats can be expected to support this move, although their ultimate goal is the implementation of PR. But are either of these voting systems an improvement on the current model? To take PR first, this is a system based on candidate lists put forward by the parties – clearly encouraging the parties to nominate those most likely to toe the party line. For AV, this does not necessarily lead to more proportionality, and research by Democratic Audit showed that AV can in fact produce more distorting results than FPTP. No electoral system is perfect, after all.

Whilst the proposed changes have their faults, the fact that the worthy (if slightly nerdy) topic electoral reform is now reaching public consciousness  may just signal that our faltering political system still has the energy to cast off the mire of expenses, spin and centralization and renew itself as something worthy of being “the mother of democracy”.

We can only hope.