Piecemeal reform will still result in contempt.
There are two questions you should always immediately ask when an otherwise completely unexpected political proposal comes along, in this instance Gordon Brown's sudden apparent conversion to an ever so slightly fairer system of voting. Firstly, why now? Second, who benefits?
Well, all right, that's what every cynic will consider. To be fair to Brown, he did ascend to the Labour leadership on the promise of carrying out constitutional reform, which has mostly been either forgotten, watered down to the point of near worthlessness, or handed to Jack Straw to think as shallowly as possible on those much vaunted rights 'n' responsibilities. As everyone knows, Labour has been promising a referendum on proportional representation since 1997, back when Blair was flirting with Paddy Ashdown as he feared not winning an outright majority. We all know what happened next, and despite still setting up the Jenkins commission, which recommended the alternative vote system with an additional top-up element to make it somewhat proportional, there has been no movement until now.
Why then now? Despite there being some voices at the height of the expenses scandal last year calling for a referendum on PR to be held on the same day as the general election, like most of the proposals for reform floated at the time it had come to nothing. While it would be lovely if Brown had suddenly had a epiphany in which he decided that the innate unfairness of the first past the post system means that many votes are all but wasted, and that it's an insult to democracy itself that a party can be elected with a workable majority when it received the support of only 22% of the electorate as a whole, a far more compelling explanation is that it's another last ditch attempt at shoring up the Grauniad-reading core vote whilst also appealing to erstwhile Liberal Democrat supporters. It's also impossible to rule out that it's not a throwback to the thinking of Blair in 97: despite everything, a hung parliament at the moment is a real possibility, and a far more plausible outcome than it was back then. The Liberal Democrats, otherwise regarded by the main two parties as a joke suddenly become incredibly popular, and while it's difficult to imagine them making a deal with the Conservatives, one of their demands in exchange for entering into a coalition would almost certainly be voting reform: by holding out the promise now of a referendum on AV, which they could negotiate into a vote on PR-proper, there's already a basis on which the two parties could work together.
This has the added bonus, and this also falls into the who benefits category, of showing the Conservatives up as opponents of progressive (yes, that word I loathe) reform, a trap which they're more happy to fall straight into, as Eric Pickles' bone-headed performance on Newsnight yesterday showed. According to him, the Alternative Vote system was "unfair"; unfair perhaps if you win the largest share of the vote on the initial count but fail to win an overall majority from all those entitled to, which as the Graun's leader points out not a single one of the current members of parliament has, and then lose after the votes have been re-assigned, but an improvement over FPTP it certainly is, even if only a slight one. There's no doubt whatsoever that self-interest informs both Brown's manoeuvring and the Tories' opposition to any form of PR, but even if Labour's motives are hardly pure, the Conservative position is not down to anything as principled as a belief that PR makes for weak governments, but because of their certainty in getting a large enough majority in which to dominate parliament in a similar way to Labour has for the past 13 years, even if its backbenchers have rebelled against the party whip on an unprecendented number of occasions. The "elective dictatorship" which some have railed against is suddenly no longer a problem when you're inside the tent pissing out rather than the one getting wet.
If that answers why now, then while it's assumed that Labour will benefit under AV or a proportional system, it's not necessarily as clear cut, as while in 2005 most Lab/Lib supporters would have voted tactically to keep the Tories out, the opposite might now be the case, with voters determined to get Labour out of office. There is one thing we haven't considered though: what if this isn't in fact a grand ruse to damage AV and PR with Brown's reverse Midas touch? Key is that any referendum would only be held in the event of a Labour victory, and that's if it manages to rush the legislation through parliament in time, itself difficult with Tory opposition and with less than 2 months before an election will have to be called if the vote is indeed to be on May the 6th. Doing this now only encourages the cynical view Brown will do anything to stay in power, even if it doesn't affect the actual vote this time round. It also distracts attention from that other unresolved constitutional issue increasingly affecting parliament: the West Lothian question, where this time round it could be Scottish Labour MPs which stop the Conservatives from gaining an absolute majority.
More fundamentally, the real reason why a referendum on just AV isn't good enough is that it doesn't allow the electorate to make the decision for themselves on just which electoral system this country should have. Why shouldn't we be allowed to choose a fully proportional system, even if it involves the scrapping of the current constituency system? What's the point of AV when the single transferable vote is very similar but actually proportional? Why not lay all the options out, or aren't we considered intelligent or interested enough to be able to make an educated and informed choice? All Brown is offering is the illusion of change, knowing that he almost certainly won't still be around to implement it. The lesson that should have been learned from the expenses fiasco is that the public both demands the right to know and to be able to act; until parties offer that they are likely to continue to be held in contempt, piecemeal electoral reform or not.
Well, all right, that's what every cynic will consider. To be fair to Brown, he did ascend to the Labour leadership on the promise of carrying out constitutional reform, which has mostly been either forgotten, watered down to the point of near worthlessness, or handed to Jack Straw to think as shallowly as possible on those much vaunted rights 'n' responsibilities. As everyone knows, Labour has been promising a referendum on proportional representation since 1997, back when Blair was flirting with Paddy Ashdown as he feared not winning an outright majority. We all know what happened next, and despite still setting up the Jenkins commission, which recommended the alternative vote system with an additional top-up element to make it somewhat proportional, there has been no movement until now.
Why then now? Despite there being some voices at the height of the expenses scandal last year calling for a referendum on PR to be held on the same day as the general election, like most of the proposals for reform floated at the time it had come to nothing. While it would be lovely if Brown had suddenly had a epiphany in which he decided that the innate unfairness of the first past the post system means that many votes are all but wasted, and that it's an insult to democracy itself that a party can be elected with a workable majority when it received the support of only 22% of the electorate as a whole, a far more compelling explanation is that it's another last ditch attempt at shoring up the Grauniad-reading core vote whilst also appealing to erstwhile Liberal Democrat supporters. It's also impossible to rule out that it's not a throwback to the thinking of Blair in 97: despite everything, a hung parliament at the moment is a real possibility, and a far more plausible outcome than it was back then. The Liberal Democrats, otherwise regarded by the main two parties as a joke suddenly become incredibly popular, and while it's difficult to imagine them making a deal with the Conservatives, one of their demands in exchange for entering into a coalition would almost certainly be voting reform: by holding out the promise now of a referendum on AV, which they could negotiate into a vote on PR-proper, there's already a basis on which the two parties could work together.
This has the added bonus, and this also falls into the who benefits category, of showing the Conservatives up as opponents of progressive (yes, that word I loathe) reform, a trap which they're more happy to fall straight into, as Eric Pickles' bone-headed performance on Newsnight yesterday showed. According to him, the Alternative Vote system was "unfair"; unfair perhaps if you win the largest share of the vote on the initial count but fail to win an overall majority from all those entitled to, which as the Graun's leader points out not a single one of the current members of parliament has, and then lose after the votes have been re-assigned, but an improvement over FPTP it certainly is, even if only a slight one. There's no doubt whatsoever that self-interest informs both Brown's manoeuvring and the Tories' opposition to any form of PR, but even if Labour's motives are hardly pure, the Conservative position is not down to anything as principled as a belief that PR makes for weak governments, but because of their certainty in getting a large enough majority in which to dominate parliament in a similar way to Labour has for the past 13 years, even if its backbenchers have rebelled against the party whip on an unprecendented number of occasions. The "elective dictatorship" which some have railed against is suddenly no longer a problem when you're inside the tent pissing out rather than the one getting wet.
If that answers why now, then while it's assumed that Labour will benefit under AV or a proportional system, it's not necessarily as clear cut, as while in 2005 most Lab/Lib supporters would have voted tactically to keep the Tories out, the opposite might now be the case, with voters determined to get Labour out of office. There is one thing we haven't considered though: what if this isn't in fact a grand ruse to damage AV and PR with Brown's reverse Midas touch? Key is that any referendum would only be held in the event of a Labour victory, and that's if it manages to rush the legislation through parliament in time, itself difficult with Tory opposition and with less than 2 months before an election will have to be called if the vote is indeed to be on May the 6th. Doing this now only encourages the cynical view Brown will do anything to stay in power, even if it doesn't affect the actual vote this time round. It also distracts attention from that other unresolved constitutional issue increasingly affecting parliament: the West Lothian question, where this time round it could be Scottish Labour MPs which stop the Conservatives from gaining an absolute majority.
More fundamentally, the real reason why a referendum on just AV isn't good enough is that it doesn't allow the electorate to make the decision for themselves on just which electoral system this country should have. Why shouldn't we be allowed to choose a fully proportional system, even if it involves the scrapping of the current constituency system? What's the point of AV when the single transferable vote is very similar but actually proportional? Why not lay all the options out, or aren't we considered intelligent or interested enough to be able to make an educated and informed choice? All Brown is offering is the illusion of change, knowing that he almost certainly won't still be around to implement it. The lesson that should have been learned from the expenses fiasco is that the public both demands the right to know and to be able to act; until parties offer that they are likely to continue to be held in contempt, piecemeal electoral reform or not.
Labels: constitutional reform, Gordon Brown, MPs expenses, politics, proportional representation, west lothian question
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