The Big AV debate

In this member post, Young Fabian member James Roberts summarises the arguments at the Big AV debate we held in Liverpool jointly with the Liverpool Guild of Students on April 1, and which James organised.

Both the ‘Yes to fairer votes’ and ‘No2AV’ campaigns have made claims which have since been rebuffed: ‘Yes’ claims that AV would require the support of 50% of the electorate of each constituency; ‘No’ claims that switching to AV would cost £250million. Both of these claims are disingenuous at best, or outright fabrications at worst.

The ‘Yes’ campaign is accused of condescension and a superiority complex over its ‘fair’ credentials. The ‘No’ campaign has been lambasted for its reprehensible billboard advertising effectively claiming that AV would cause an underfunding of children’s hospital wards or soldiers’ equipment.

The whole debate has become increasingly negative.

And yet our Big AV debate in Liverpool on April 1 managed to attract a range of well respected speakers. In favour of AV were John Pugh, the Liberal Democrat MP for Southport (although on the day he didn’t attend, so I had to step in) and Labour’s Steve Munby, Liverpool City Councillor for Riverside Ward and City Cabinet member for Neighborhoods. Against were Jane Kennedy, former MP for Liverpool Wavertree and Labour Cabinet Minister for Farming and the Environment, and the 2010 Conservative PPC for Bolton West, Susan Williams, also the director of the North West regional No2AV campaign. The debate was chaired superbly by the University of Liverpool Politics Department’s Professor John Tonge, current President of the Political Studies Association UK.

Highlights of the debate included a comment by Jane Kennedy that First Past the Post is a system which is very like ‘the old adverts for creosote’, presumably that it ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’, but an analogy which passed over the heads of many in a room with an average age in its 20s.

There were some awkward looks in the audience when Susan Williams chose to disagree with Steve Munby about ‘the poor needing politics’ – I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt and assume she meant that politics is for all, not just the poor, but coming from a Conservative speaker, it clearly did not sit comfortably with the Liverpool crowd. Having said that, her calm, measured approach to the debate gave her an air of being a ‘common sense’ speaker. Meanwhile Jane Kennedy quoted at length from Ipsos Mori polls to back up her points, which lent weight to her arguments.

At one point, a position was put to the Yes team questioning whether AV would disadvantage areas with high levels of functional illiteracy. Steve Munby responded to this with an anecdote about his time as an election observer in El Salvador, where illiteracy is considerably higher than in Britain, but has a comparable turnout, with a much more complicated set of electoral systems.

The No team contended that introducing AV would not be a stepping stone to further reform, but in fact an electoral dead end which would lower turnout and exacerbate the problems of public engagement with politics. This was in response to a question from the floor about a No vote effectively ending the possibility of electoral reforms in areas other than the voting system for a generation.

A straw poll should really have been taken at the beginning, but by the end of the debate a show of hands had the No to Yes ratio at about 3 to 1. This might be explained by the few, if any, Lib Dem supporters in attendance, the high Conservative showing in support of their speaker and the split on the issue in Labour circles.

Some people have suggested that electoral reform is boring, and they may well be right.

But it is important, as this debate showed.

• This post is an edited version of one that was first published on the Merseyside Fabians blog.

Countdown to AV

In this guest post, Martin Edobor, a member of the Young Fabian Science and Society Network, argues in favour of AV.

Next week Jeremy Corbyn MP will introduce the first UCL & King’s College Young Fabians AV Debate. This will give the Young Fabians a chance to reflect on the referendum, and think deeply about the implications voting reform may have on our political system. With the referendum a few months away, it is important that we have an open and frank debate, where individuals from both sides can put forward their argument.

For me a move towards an Alternative vote is a move towards a more progressive electoral system, in which the voice of the voter would be empowered. Under AV a prospective parliamentary candidate will need to gain at least 50% share of preference votes before they are elected. This gives parliamentarians a stronger mandate as public officials. It also avoids the situation in which MPs can be elected with less than half the overall share of the vote, which currently happens under the first past the post system.

AV would produce a result which is representative of the amount of votes cast. Therefore it a system that is fairer than first past the post.

If AV had been the electoral system used in the 2005 general election, Labour would have gained 8 more seats, the Liberal Democrats 9 more seats and the Conservatives would have dropped 15 seats (BBC). This needs to be clearly put forward to the public: an AV system is both more democratic and fairer than FPTP. In order for Britain to move towards a more modern democracy, we must begin by adopting a more progressive electoral system.

Let’s ‘AVe more important debates

Am I alone in hoping that the early months of Labour’s new leadership is not dominated by the upcoming referendum on electoral reform?

I don’t agree with much of Anthony Painter’s blog yesterday on this campaign, but I do agree with the comment he supplemented it with which suggested that it’s not going to split the Coalition. I think there’ll be much bigger fracture points both before and after, but more significantly believe that the electoral reform debate threatens to distract from the damage ideological cuts will be making to people’s lives. The new leader, whilst building a fresh and credible policy platform, must focus on what matters. And to the people suffering most from the change in government, the electoral system isn’t going to be top of their lists.

It’s interesting that the centrepiece of Anthony’s post is the case for making the ‘yes’ campaign a ‘no’ campaign on first past the post. It strikes me that this is because there is actually very little to be said in favour of the alternative vote. It isn’t PR, just simply FPTP with the an added platitude. The belief that having the ‘support’ (often by default and through reluctantly reassigned votes) of 50% of those who vote (not 50% of the potential electorate) in a constituency will somehow instantly change politics or MPs’ behaviour is without substance. First it unfairly burdens the majority of parliamentarians with the characteristics of the worst. And second, it assumes that needing a few more votes provides enough of a tipping point to shift the complacency he describes. Why would it?

The big strengths in FPTP are actually best contrasted with PR systems (genuine, effective single member constituencies for the whole of the house; and consequently – particularly with a recall mechanism – real lines of accountability between public and politician) so to say, as Anthony does, that there are only two arguments for FPTP is slightly disingenuous. Of course the contrast for the coming months though is with AV not PR.

The first of Anthony’s two straw men, that FPTP delivers clear outcomes, is, as above, relevant to a comparison with PR more than AV, which would achieve likewise. The second, the propensity of maverick politicians is not necessarily one I’d make.

I would argue, however, that the case for change has to justify the inevitable expense and disruption; the similarities between FPTP and AV are such that this is questionable. There’s not a long list of things ‘wrong’ with AV, 50% is no bad thing – but it’s not the magic bullet its proponents suggest. Rather it is anodyne. But that doesn’t present a strong argument for amending our electoral system.

Anthony omits the simplicity defence of FPTP. I personally think it’s an important one. I don’t for one minute buy the counter-argument that to say other electoral systems are complex is somehow patronising to the public at large and that such views deserve to stay in the Westminster village. Complexity is a genuine concern. As Vice Chair of the Young Fabians I may be said to be part of a Westminster village accused of looking down on the wider population, but my own recent experience is worth highlighting. I am afforded the rare luxury of being an undecided voter in the leadership election. I understand how AV works and am certain to vote. Yet the iterations of how I will vote have been rattling through my head for months now. Do I place 5 ranked votes? Do I just vote for the three I’d be comfortable with as leader? Do I vote my likely second or third preferred leader number one so as to ensure they help take out early another candidate I don’t want to be in the final two or three? Possibilities are endless …

If turnout drops as a result of a change to the electoral system then we’re left with the perversity of MPs being elected with a greater share of the vote (50+%) but, potentially, less actual votes from their constituents. Is that desirable?

Given all the talk of PR in the months leading to the general election, I was interested to see very early on that all five of Labour’s leadership candidates were openly (small c) conservative on electoral reform when not long before it had seemed an unstoppable bandwagon in party circles. I’m not going to be a passionate defender of FPTP, and I would not be unhappy with AV, but I won’t be jumping on the bandwagon of change for change’s sake or as a solution to a problem of which the electoral system was not a cause. I just don’t think it’s where the radical centre-left should be expending its energy.

Liberals would be mad to coalition with the Consevatives

As the Liberal Democrats maintain their rating in the polls, with Nick Clegg flying high having lived up to heightened expectations in the second leaders’ debate on Thursday night, attention has inevitably, even more so than last weekend, turned to the question of who the Lib Dems would join forces with in the event of a hung parliament.

So what is new, what have we learnt in the past seven days that we didn’t know before, and where does this leave Nick Clegg and his party, whose approval he must gain were he to enter into government – 75 per cent of Lib Dem MPs AND 75 per cent of the federal executive OR two thirds of delegates to a special conference OR 50 per cent of the entire membership – the so-called “triple lock” which could take months to pick.

But I digress; assuming the general election results in a hung parliament, who should the Liberal Democrats join forces with? Well, of course you’d expect me to say Labour, and so I will – Labour makes sense not just for us (obviously), but for the Liberals themselves. On some of the key dividing lines, they are much closer to Labour than they ever will be to the Conservatives: on Europe, climate change, equality, the Tory flagship marriage and inheritance tax plans and on the biggest issue of all – the economy.

Ken Clarke, in an interview with the Telegraph, has today revealed for the first time that the Conservative Party was drawing up plans for a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The shadow business secretary said:

“Our starting point would be to say to the other two parties ‘you know you have got to control the deficit and debt’, and have a plan our creditors believe for getting rid of the structural deficit over the next parliament. If they just sit there and say ‘that’s just your party platform’, my own view is that the economic consequences of abandoning that would be catastrophic.

“The core problem is the debt and the deficit, and the Conservatives have been the most consistently sensible on that. I don’t think it would be in the national interest to resile from that… You’ve got to ask yourself, would either of the other parties be prepared to do that?”

Well, there you have it, leaving aside the Tory leadership’s – and even more so the Tory membership’s – regressive hostility toward Europe, tackling climate change and gay, gender and race equality, on the economy, their plans to withdraw £6 billion from the economy and start slashing public sector jobs (see last night’s Jeremy Paxman interview with David Cameron for more), there will be no compromise.

On the Liberals’ other key platform, their raison d’être in many people’s eyes, constitutional reform and a change to the voting system, it would be utterly incomprehensible for them to do a deal with the Conservatives. The Tories, though, have been panicked into announcing some reform measures – but there are no plans to change the way MPs are elected. The BBC website has more:

“The Tories would not allow an unelected prime minister to hold office for longer than six months, David Cameron is to announce in a speech [today]. Their policy would force a new prime minister without a mandate to hold a general election.

“Mr Cameron will say that three of the last five prime ministers, including Mr Brown, have been unelected, but that Tory John Major won his own mandate after taking up the position. He will also outline plans to select parliamentary candidates through postal primaries.”

The plan for primaries is indeed progressive, the presidentialisation of the office of prime minister less so – we elect parties not prime ministers in Britain, and it is for the party most able to form an administration to decide who the prime minister should be. The party’s mandate is already there; Gordon Brown’s mandate came from the 2005 general election, which Labour won, by 66 seats.

As the graphs below show, since the war, the Liberals have suffered the most from the current first past the post system, Labour and the Conservatives benefitting greatly:

This is more starkly illustrated in looking at the difference between the percentage of the popular vote each party has received and the proportion of seats in the House of Commons they win:

As Jeremy Vine explained on last night’s Ten O’Clock News on BBC One, under the current system, it is possible for a party to finish second in every seat across the land, win more votes than all the other parties combined, get over 50 per cent of the vote, and still end up with no MPs. Fair? I think not.

Under the Tories, with a majority or in coalition, there will be no referendum on electoral reform, no chance for the Liberals to secure a fairer voting system and exert the power their polling figures warrant. Only with Labour can they achieve that fairer future, and realign the left after a centruy in which the right has dominated; better together than apart, for the many, not the few.