After all the talk of electoral reform, the Lib Dems have won a promise of a referendum on AV. Dr Ken Ritchie is distinctly underwhelmed
Civil servants have every reason to wonder where last week’s election leaves them. Whitehall is familiar with the pre-election tours by the opposition, talking policy and priorities. Less familiar has been the coming of a hung Parliament, and the post-election negotiations that led us to a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition.
With electoral reform at the heart of the coalition deal, it’s worth considering what dumping First-Past-the-Post might mean. The old politics hinged on the old system’s habit of dispensing unearned majorities to governing parties. Certainly, the last Labour government was blessed by an ample majority, even when two thirds of voters backed opposition parties.
Yet those who praise our antique voting system for delivering strong government have been left scratching their heads. First-Past-the-Post is at heart a capricious system, under which a tiny number of voters can have enormous power. Academics tell us that as few as 18,000 voters in marginal seats could have delivered an outright Tory majority. Small wonder that a handful of voters in target seats always find themselves the focus for campaigns, while tens of millions in safe seats are taken for granted.
First-Past-the-Post sets the bar low. The only objective is to secure one more vote than your nearest competitor, and that means millions who don’t back a winner are shut out of politics. Nearly one in five Scots wanted a Tory MP, yet the whole country returned just one. One in five voters in the East of England wanted Labour; they got two MPs. The system is a blunt instrument, leaving many with few options short of tactical voting.
Can reform change these dynamics? Well, full-on PR would effectively institutionalise hung parliaments (see table for the likely results under different electoral systems, given 2010 voting patterns). Proportional representation, by definition, produces parliaments that are representative – and voters haven’t handed an overall majority of the popular vote to any government since the war.
The Lib Dems went into this election armed with a manifesto commitment to change the voting system in the Commons to the Single Transferable Vote: a form of PR that lets voters elect several MPs within a larger shared constituency. STV would have been a game-changer. Had the votes cast on Thursday been distributed via STV we would probably have a properly balanced Parliament, with the Lib Dems holding three times as many seats. The campaign would have been conducted everywhere, because candidates could no longer hide behind their majorities, so Tory voters in Scotland and Labour supporters in the South of England would have got the representation they asked for.
But while protestors across Britain urged Clegg not to compromise, a referendum on the ‘Alternative Vote’ – a rather modest reform – was the best he could get. AV retains the ‘one member, one constituency’ rule but, instead of voters picking just one candidate, they rank them in preference order. To win, candidates need at least 50 per cent of the vote. If no candidate has an outright majority of first-preference votes, the last-placed candidate is eliminated and their second preferences redistributed. The process continues until a winner emerges.
With AV, tactical voting would have been unnecessary last Thursday; voters could give their first-preference vote to the candidate they like the most. But AV is not PR. It would mean a few positive changes here and there: a few seats would have been a bit more marginal; the Lib Dems would have upped their numbers thanks to transferred second preferences – but this is more a step in the right direction than a final destination.
AV last Thursday would still have meant a hung Parliament – admittedly with the numbers to make a Lab-Lib coalition viable. But its effects could in some cases be more pronounced. In a landslide year like 1997 it would have nearly wiped out the Conservative Party, pushing them down to double digits, while Labour would have hoovered up ‘transfers’ left, right and centre.
AV is a step in the right direction, but it offers no more guarantee of representative government than the current system. Still, civil servants – both as professionals and as voters – have no reason to fear change, large or small. British politicians have to play the hand they’re dealt by voters, and those in local government have lived with coalitions for decades. Those in the Scottish Executive or Welsh Assembly have experience of minority and coalition government elected under PR. It has not meant the end of effective government – and for voters, it can mean a new beginning.
Written by Dr Ken Ritchie, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society