And another thing…

IT’S DISCOURAGING how easily some people descend to name-calling when they’re attempting to make an argument for a particular policy.

I’ve written previously about my irritation at those who describe climate change sceptics as “deniers” in an infantile and transparent attempt to equate them in the public mind with holocaust deniers.

And now we have Neal Lawson, in debate with Sunder Katwala, describing opponents of electoral reform as “dinosaurs”. Give me a break…

It’s always the same with those who are committed to constitutional change: depict any who oppose you as neanderthals and anti-democrats. After all, if they don’t share our views, they must be wrong, mustn’t they?

Well, even those of us who aren’t brainy enough to understand the arguments in favour of ditching first-past-the-post (FPTP) have valid reasons for keeping the system the way it is. And yes, one of those reasons is that it benefits the Labour Party – there, I’ve said it.

(“What?!” I hear you say, spitting your muesli onto your laptop screen. “A Labour MP wants a system that will benefit his party? Outrageous!” Yeah, and the LibDems support STV for entirely altruistic and principled reasons…)

One of the reasons (but not the only one) I support FPTP is that it enforces the two-party system, and that, as far as I’m concerned, is A Good Thing. FPTP forces the parties to make an effort to be as broad a church as possible and to try to include an impressively wide range of political views within them. That means having a degree of collective discipline, which I know is frowned upon these days. But that’s preferable to having a new party formed every time a party member goes in a huff at every policy decision he disagrees with.

FPTP is also the best way of electing governments. Yes, of course general elections are about electing 646 constituency representatives, but it’s also about much more than that. Most people, I think would prefer to know exactly who is going to form the government and which manifesto they should hold them to.

Which brings me to the main point: PR (so not AV, usually) would give the smaller, annoying parties a proportionate number of MPs (which is bad enough) but an entirely disproportionate amount of power in the hung parliaments PR is designed to produce. I’ve seen it happen at Holyrood: the parties stand for election on their own manifestos and then, as soon as the electorate have their say, the leaders go behind closed doors, away from the cameras, and thrash out a deal without any reference whatsoever to the public or to the manifestos they’ve just voted on, bargaining away policy after policy in return for ministerial cars. That is not democracy: it’s the precise opposite.

And while PR might well ensure that you can keep a particular party out of government, wouldn’t it be better to argue positively for a particular platform rather than rely on shifty electoral calculations to stymie a particular viewpoint? Had PR been introduced in the ’80s or ’90s, Tony Blair would not have had to argue that Labour should change; he would simply have phoned Paddy Ashdown and asked him how many Cabinet seats he wanted. Job done. And it was dashed inconvenient, afer all, having to ditch Clause IV and actually make an effort to engage with the views and aspirations of ordinary people…

The Tories won more elections than the Left in the 20th century, not because of the electoral system, but because the public voted for them. They voted for them because they preferred Tory policies and politicians to ours. Democracy sucks, doesn’t t? Maybe if Labour had better policies they might have won more elections, yes?

As to the argument that electoral reform improves engagement and turnout, how much higher is turnout in the European elections now compared with the last time we used FPTP?

This whole debate reminds me of a story Tony Blair tells when explaining the evolution of his own particular brand of politics. He says when he was a local activist in London, he joined other party members distributing a local Labour newspaper to the residents of a godawful sink estate with huge levels of crime, unemployment and ant-social behaviour. What was the central message of the newspaper to its readers? “Join CND”.

AV would, I grudgingly accept, change precious little, but some of its advocates in my party want it simply as a stepping stone to further reform – a halfway house between FPTP and (shudder) STV. They actually see nothing wrong in spending the next ten years arguing about electoral reform, failing to see that such a debate will do precisely nothing to “engage” the electorate. Rather, the public will see it (rightly) as a vanishingly small political elite self-indulgently discussing the number of angels dancing on pinheads.

INTERESTING Tweets tonight on Question Time and Griffin’s appearance. I haven’t watched it yet – I have better things to do, but if I’ve nothing better to do tomorrow I might watch it then.

Everyone who opposes the BNP is united about how awful they are, but views among their opponents differ as to how best to deal with them. Personally, I’ve concluded that the demonstrations that took place outside the BBC were a godsend to the fascists. Ask yourself: would the BNP press office prefer the demos to take place or for Griffin’s appearance to go ahead with little or no controversy? I think I know the answer to that.

Apparently the road outside BBC Broadcasting House Television Centre was closed off and traffic held up while the police dealt with the protesters. I wonder if people trying to get home on a dark and cold Thursday evening found themselves sympathising with the people delaying them?

Of course, I would have preferred Griffin not to have been invited on in the first place, but it was probably inevitable. As soon as Jack Straw, as Home Secretary, used the Parliament Act to force the House of Lords to approve the scrapping of first-past-the-post for European elections, the countdown to Griffin’s appearance on Question Time began.

And here’s where I really have a profound disagreement with the protesters: after two BNP MEPs were elected by the British people in June, and after the BBC had issued an invitation to Griffin to appear on tonight’s panel, and after various politicians, including the Prime Minister, had stated their views about this development, and after thousands of viewers had told the Beeb what they thought… after all this, for the BBC’s mind to have been changed because of sit-ins and demos would have been absolutely the wrong thing to do. That would have been anti-democratic and it would have played right into the fascists’ hands, allowing them to portray themselves as martyrs to freedom of speech, denied a right to express their opinions by unelected protesters.

So the fact that it went ahead tonight is probably, finally, to the BBC’s credit. If I can be bothered watching it at some point, I’ll decide whether I think the whole exercise was worth the candle.

HOWEVER much I like and respect Peter Mandelson (and if he is, as some say, a “Marmite” politician, then I come down on the side of those who have a positive view of the man), I do hope he won’t be pushing for a change in the electoral system for the Commons, as Mack Pack reports today.

Apparently, in a question and answer session at the London School of economics today, Lord Mandelson said:

Now, does that mean to say that there is no change that could be made in our voting system in our country so that people really feel that it’s fairer and more representative? No,I don’t think we should reject contemplating any sort of change and I think that’s something that we’re going to have to address in the coming months.

I hope that before he addresses the issue in the coming months, he will use his pocket calculator to work out that it’s not going to happen: there are enough Labour MPs, combined with the vast majority of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, to defeat such nonsense before it gets off the ground. It’s possible that the LibDems might even vote against any system that wasn’t a pure Single Transferable Vote system.

Far better, surely, not to divide the party in the crucial few months before an election?

ANDREW Rawnsley poses an old, old question in his Observer column today: can Labour win on its own again?

In the run-up to the 1992 general election I bought a book entitled “Can Labour Win?”. I still have it somewhere. The book analyses all the reasons why the party lost power in 1979 and why it failed to regain power in the subsequent two general elections: the shrinking of the working class “base’, reductions in trade union membership, increases in home and share ownership, etc. It concluded that yes, Labour could expect to regain power, but only if it embraced electoral reform.

Rawnsley writes today:

When Labour lost four elections in a row, it became a regular topic of academic study and journalistic commentary to ask can Labour ever win again? The question appeared to have been answered when along came Tony Blair to lead them to three consecutive election victories. His winning skills gave the impression that Labour’s historic decline had been arrested, even reversed. Yet it now looks more likely that his three victories merely put a temporary mask on the deeper trend.

In other words, the arguments of the coalitionists haven’t allowed actual facts and events to affect their arguments at all in the past 15 years.

In the 1987 general election, Labour came third in the next door constituency to mine, Eastwood, behind the second-placed SDP/Liberal Alliance and the incumbent Tory MP, Allan Stewart. There were many at the time who felt that Labour voters should switch to the LibDems at the next election in order to topple Stewart. Those who warned of the dangers of a split opposition to the Tories seemed to have been proved right when Labour leapfrogged the LibDems to come second in 1992, albeit at the cost of an increased majority for Stewart.

But then 1997 happened, and Labour’s Jim Murphy triumphed in the Tories’ safest Scottish seat. Having been told for years that their vote was a wasted one, Labour voters in Eastwood kept the faith and won.

The British constitution has thrown up some interesting, though often pointless, practices. One of them is that, in the aftermath of a Conservative general election victory, there is a debate about whether Labour should adopt electoral reform. It’s a quaint tradition, though Idoubt if it attracts as many tourists as Black Rod’s march between the chambers during the official opening of parliament.

Whether or not the Tories win the next election (and I still don’t believe for a moment that it’s a foregone conclusion), the question, “Can Labour win again on its own?” has already been answered. Three times: in 1997, 2001 and 2005. I hope we can answer it again next year.

IF THERE’S one thing that puts colleagues off the notion of proportional representation, it’s having experienced its effect on their home ground.

Welsh and Scottish MPs have the scars on our backs from the Assisted Places Scheme, the form of PR used for electing the Scottish Parliament. This is where those who don’t win enough support in actual constituencies, are allowed to become MSPs anyway through the regional lists. They then spend the next four years pretending they represent actual constituents which, of course, they don’t. They represent parties, not people. A few years ago there was an attempt to recognise this fact at Holyrood by cutting Assisted Places Scheme (APS) members’ office allowances to reflect their non-existent (or, at best, selective) constituency case workload. Sadly but predictably, this move was defeated.

APS MSPs are usually, though not always, intent on becoming proper MSPs at the subsequent election, so spend most of their time targeting the constituency where they plan to stand next time, or where they were defeated last time. Robert Brown, for example, describes himself as the LibDem MSP for “Glasgow, including Rutherglen and Cambuslang”. He was “elected” on the Glasgow regional list, but any guesses where he stood last time, and where he plans to stand again? Anyone? No? That’s right: Rutherglen and Cambuslang. Funny, that…

That’s how Assisted Places Scheme systems work, and that’s how AV+ would work if it were implemented in Westminster. Those candidates who failed to become MPs in a constituency would simply get into the Commons via the back door, and would spend the next four years poaching constituency cases off of the candidate who beat them in the first place. Despicable. And if colleagues have any sense, they’ll reject AV+, or at the very least, the “+” part of the equation.

The alternative vote itself I have less problem with, although I oppose its adoption for the simple reason that for the negligible improvement in proportionality that it delivers, it’s hardly worth the upheaval and the added complication to what is currently an exceptionally simply system.

And to those who will now complain that I’m being patronising for suggesting that writing numbers on a ballot paper is “too complicated” to understand, that’s now what I’m suggesting. Nevertheless, whenever we’ve changed the voting system away from first-past-the-post, the turn out has dropped.

AS I’VE WRITTEN here before, I’m a great fan of Alan Johnson. Top man. Shame about his views on electoral reform.

And as I’ve also written here before, the middle of a crisis about MPs’ expenses is not the appropriate time to come up with solutions that have bugger all to do with the problem: like using a laser printer to crack  a nut, as it were.

Yet for some reason, despite my entreaties, the political classes — absolutely no-one from the normal “I’ve got a life” classes, mind you — are talking about nothing but electoral reform, an elected Lords, fixed-term parliaments and… er, what else… now, let’s see… ah, yes — MPs’ expenses.

Alan’s proposal (which for some reason other members of the Cabinet seem to be supporting. Well, why not talk endlessly about obscure constitutional niceties? Not as if they have a country to run or anything…) is for a referendum on AV-plus on the same day as the general election.

If we must go down this road (and please, let’s not), then by all means let’s commit to such a referendum in the next Labour Party manifesto. And to stop all the inevitable whinging along the lines of “But we can’t believe you because you promised this in 1997 and it never happened, boo hoo, etc…” we could commit to holding it in on a specific date — say, the same day as the next local authority elections. 

I suggest this because it is technically possible that Labour might not win the general election, and it would be ridiculous for there to be an affirmative result in a referendum — a referendum which Cameron’s party would be likely to oppose in the first place — and expect the incoming government to honour the result. 

That’s what I’ll be arguing within the party in the next few months. But only if I lose the argument that there should be no change, and no referendum, at all.

A COMMENT from the last thread has inspired me to return to the keyboard and to the same topic as the last post: electoral reform.

“Fed up Labour MPs from the stone age” (and I strongly suspect that’s not his real name) explained why he is in favour of proportional representation:

I am in favour of whatever smashes the Tory party and this certainly would.

Get out of your cave and join the rest of us in the 21st century. An electoral system that put recationaries (sic) in power with 40% of the vote while 60% of the voters back liberal and social democratic parties is the fools’ route to progress.

With due respect, Fed, what a load of bollocks.

This is an idea I’ve heard often in support of electoral reform: that it would inevitably aid the progressive cause. Pah! I say. And again: pah!

The reason Labour was in government for so little of the last century compared to the Conservatives was not because of the electoral system. It was because we kept losing elections. People didn’t vote for us. And what kind of warped logic concludes that if you can’t win elections then you should change the system to suit you? Apart from the LibDems’ logic, I mean…

Yes, the Tories had 18 years in power between 1979 and 1997, but that’s because they were better at winning elections than anyone else.

Tony Blair understood that, and he changed his party so that it actually started talking the same language as the electorate. This was seen as a betrayal by some, but it worked. And if the Tories do win the next election, it will be because they won the argument and, consequently, the vote. What democrat can argue with that?

Instead of trying to manipulate the electoral system so that we can exclude the Tories from power (even when their policies have more support than those of either of the other parties) why not actually try to win people’s support with policies they like?

Or would that be too “stone age” for some?

ALAN Johnson is an impressive politician.

He is articulate and principled, and he commands the respect of a huge number of Labour MPs. I was proud to be among his many supporters when he stood (unsuccessfully) for the deputy leadership of our party in 2007. He’s also proven himself to be not only one of the most effective Cabinet ministers we have, but also sure-footed and charming when dealing with the media. He also happens to be a really nice bloke.

But he’s wrong on electoral reform.

To be fair, he’s been wrong on this consistently for a number of years. His article in today’s Times is worth reading, nonetheless. I’ve written here only recently about the folly of using the expenses scandal as an excuse to lever in unrelated constitutional reforms. And a referendum on electoral reform, held on polling day at the next general election would be precisely the wrong time to ask voters for their judgment on the issue. The decision to implement such a fundamental change to our democracy has to be taken in the cold light of day, after serious and calm debate, not a matter of months after the start of the worst scandal ever to hit Westminster and at a time when voters’ opinion of politicians is at its lowest in recorded history.

As to the substantive issue, this is how I’d explain our current first-past-the-post system:

You vote for one candidate and the one with the highest number of votes wins.

This is how Alan explains his preferred system (AV+) in today’s article:

On polling day, a voter would have two ballot papers. The first would be for choosing the constituency MP: the voter marks his preferences (1, 2, 3 and so on) against the candidates. If one candidate gets more than half of the first preference votes cast, he or she is duly returned. If not, the candidate with the lowest tally is knocked out, and the second (and then third, etc) preferences are redistributed until finally one candidate reaches the magical 50 per cent mark.

On the second ballot paper, the voter simply marks which party she wants to give her vote to. All these votes are tallied up and those parties that exceed the threshold (say 5 per cent) get a proportionate number of seats. The majority of those sitting on the green benches, however, would be constituency MPs.

So, straightforward, eh?

All sorts of claims are made by the  supporters of proportional representation, along the lines of “it would push up voter turnout” and “it would increase representation among ethnic minorities”.

Not the experience of PR when it’s been tried in the UK already. Take the Scottish Parliament, elected on an “additional member” or “assisted places scheme” system. Turnout at both UK general elections held since devolution in 1999 have seen significantly higher turnours than those for the three Holyrood elections, with up to ten per cent higher voter participation in some constituencies. And in all three Holyrood elections, only one non-white candidate has ever been elected.

Similarly in elections to the European Parliament: turnout has been derisory. The more complicated you make it to vote, the fewer people will do so.

I admit that first-past-the-post is a rubbish system — but it’s still better than all the alternatives. 

Sorry, Alan.