And another thing…

NOT SURE why, but I seem to be on the mailing list for “Vote For Change”, the campaign to hand permanent Cabinet seats to the LibDems change the electoral system.

Last night I received this email from Willie Sullivan, who helps run the campaign:

Tom

I’ve just heard some great news for the campaign – and I wanted to tell you straight away. It’s what we’ve been asking for all along.

The Government’s Democratic Reform Council met yesterday: they have decided to call a vote in the Commons on a legally binding clause that will provide for a referendum on the voting system.

This is the first time the Commons will be able to vote on holding such a referendum in decades.

It’s huge – and it’s down to your hard work for our campaign.

But we haven’t won yet – opponents of reform, especially in the unelected House of Lords, will do their best to kill the bill and stop voters from having their say.

Tomorrow, the press will report this story. It’s going to be big news. But we haven’t won until a referendum is actually called.

We need to put pressure on the politicians – opponents of reform need to know we won’t let them stand in our way. With your help, I know we can do it.

Thanks for everything you have done,

Willie

And here’s how I replied:

Thanks for the alert, Willie – I’ll make sure I’m there to vote against.

Tom

CAN LABOUR win under the current electoral system? Well, given that we have won three times in the past 12 years, I would hazard a guess at “yes”.

If some of Labour’s parliamentary candidates reckon we can’t win unless we promise a referendum on the alternative vote on the same day as the general election, maybe they should be examining their own so-called “democratic credentials”.

The ambition of the 34 candidates is truly soaring: “hundreds” of LibDems throughout the country would switch to Labour if we were to hold a referendum on the same day. Phew! That many, eh? Nearly enough to affect the result in … well, a seat, probably.

They propose a “government Bill” to facilitate such a referendum. The only problem there is that such a Bill is very unlikely to succeed. Apart from those Labour MPs who would oppose it (including Yours Truly), the Libdems would be likely to campaign against it on the basis that it’s not precisely the exact system that would most benefit them be most democratic.

And can we please stop all this nonsense about the 1997 manifesto commitment? That was a promise of a referendum, not on AV but on AV+, a version of AV which would be even more calamitous than straightforward AV, with “assisted places scheme” MPs (like those in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly) being “elected”. We have never made a manifesto commitment to a referendum on AV.

You have to wonder why Labour candidates are so keen to get into Parliament if all they want to do is bargain away power to the LibDems. “Ah,” they will argue, “but the Tories were in government for most of the 20th century and we must make the 21st century the century of progressive politics.”

Yeah, okay, I’ll sign up to that. But you know the best way of electing a Labour government? Not through messy, sordid little deals with the minor parties, but by winning more votes than the Tories. That’s how they stayed in power for most of the last century – by beating us in elections; by offering the electorate policies that were more popular than ours.

By carping on about voting systems, we simply reinforce the notion – and I hope and believe it’s a wrong notion – that we have nothing to offer the voters but electoral calculations.

IMAGINE, if you will, a fourth term under a Labour government led by a triumphantly re-elected Prime Minister Brown.

Then imagine the ensuing referendum campaign on the subject of electoral reform. That’s the first crucial point: GB has proposed a referendum, not on proportional representation, but on the Alternative Vote (AV), which many regard as barely more proportional than the current system and, in certain circumstances, less so. When Peter Hain, whose long-standing support for AV is well known, approached me to ask if I would support him in the party’s deputy leadership election in 2007, I warned him that his stance on this issue was likely to alienate not only those who supported the status quo but also those who supported full proportional representation.

The second point, which few seem to have noticed so far, is that AV isn’t even Labour policy, and is unlikely to become so before any referendum. I’m not sure what precedents exist for governments holding referenda on policies which they don’t explicitly support. When we held referenda in 1997 on Scottish and Welsh devolution, the government was asking for popular endorsement of their own policy. The reason I don’t see the need for the government to hold a referendum on Scottish independence is because we don’t supprt that policy.

But still we’re supporting a referendum on a policy which some individuals support, others oppose, but which won’t be government policy at the time of the vote, and certainly not Labour policy.

Which brings me to my main point: will the Prime Minister allow members of the government to campaign against AV in the referendum, as Harold Wilson allowed his ministers to campaign for a “No” vote in the 1975 EEC referendum?

And if, after all of this, there’s a vote in favour of change, does the matter rest there? Obviously not, since those, like Chatter 88, would simply pocket that gain and use it as a stepping stone towards their next aim: full proportional representation (probably the single transferable vote, or STV). And what would constitute a “yes” result anyway? Would turnout in the referendum have to be over 50 per cent for the result to be legitimate?

Needless to say, this is not a policy I shall be campaigning on here in Glasgow South in the months leading up to the general election. I could be wrong, but I reckon local voters might be a bit more concerned about unemployment, the economy and the health service than whether those who make decisions in government were elected in their own constituencies with more than 50 per cent of the vote after an exhaustive ballot.