On Proportional Representation

Yes, it is unfair that the vote which spread over Scotland gave the SNP all but three of the 59 MPs for Scotland was barely a third of the vote which, spread over the entire UK, gave UKIP one seat, significantly less than the vote which gave the Lib/Dems eight seats, and only slightly more than the vote which gave the Greens one seat.

Unfortunately there is no perfect and completely fair election system.

I personally believe that one of the most important criteria for an election system is how easy it makes it for the electorate to "throw the rascals out."

E.g. if a party has seriously offended the electorate it important that the electorate can remove them, as they removed the Conservatives in 1997, Labour in 2010 and the Lib/Dems this year.

I am not saying I am necessarily agree with how the voters used that power, but it is critical to democracy that voters have it and all the parties know they can use it.

"First Past the Post" is a "crunchy" system in the Nico Colchester sense in that significant changes in the votes cast for a political party can have a devastating effect. That in turn means it gives voters far more power over politicians.

It is not impossible to wipe out a major party under a PR system - as the Lib/Dems found out at the 2014 euro elections - but it is much harder. And any system which features closed party lists - particularly the dire D'Hondt system used in Euro elections, but this also applies to most additional member systems like that used in Germany, give the party machines far, far too much power to appoint parliamentarians.

So although what happened to the Lib/Dems, Greens, and UKIP last week was cruel, and looks very unfair compared with what happened to the SNP, I could only consider changing it if the replacement system (and don'[t forget that there are many different forms of PR) passes the following three tests

1) It is a "crunchy" system in which significant loss of support means significant loss of seats so that politicians have to fear the electorate

2) It is a system that gives as much power as possible to voters as compared to party machines

3) It should not be impossible for a party with a strong lead to get a majority.

As proportional representation systems go, I am personally fond of the STV (Single Transferable Vote) system used in Ireland and in student elections in most British elections. When I mentioned this in a facebook discussion this week, two Bristol University friends (one of whom, like me had acted as Returning Officer in STV elections there because we understood it) both said that the problem with the system is that it is too complicated to explain to people.

My first reaction was that this was an insult to the intelligence of voters. I asked jokingly whether my friends were saying that STV would be a good system except that we can't trust the voters to understand it!

But casting my mind back to discussions with members of the electorate, there is one problem with laughing at that argument: voters who are not political anoraks do indeed tend to have a negative reaction to STV. Three thousand votes were spoiled in the Mayoral election last week because voters appeared not to understand a very simple form of first and second preference voting. STV is indeed far more complicated.

I remember about twenty years ago when what was then called the Liberal/SDP Alliance was committed to STV I discovered that there was a 100% effective tactic to discourage an Alliance vote from floating voters who were interested enough to talk about the issue and wavering the Alliance because first past the post wasn't fair.

I would ask them if they knew what system the Lib/SDP alliance was proposing instead and how it worked. They invariably didn't. So I gave them an honest and accurate description of how STV works, with no negative spin whatever, just going through the facts about it.

In every single case, the voter's reaction was something along the lines of

"What, is THAT what they want? I really don't like that."

One final thought, echoing a tweet from Dan Hodges today. We have been watching UKIP tear themselves apart. If we had PR, he said, these people would be running the country.

He's right, of course. If we had proportional representation, UKIP would have around 12.6% of the seats in the House of Commons, which would probably put them in government. The nearest thing to a stable government which could be formed would be a Tory/UKIP/DUP coalition.

Ouch!

Comments

Jim said…
Great,

and now for a very fair question.

If you honestly believe that the benefit of FPTP is the ability of the electorate to "Throw the rascals out" then why do your party keep voting against "Recall" which would allow the electorate (not mp's) to do exactly that?
Chris Whiteside said…
I would have voted for the Zac Goldsmith amendment which toughened the proposals and made it easier for the electorate to do so.
Jim said…
perhaps you would have personally, but that is not what the question asked.
Chris Whiteside said…
I cannot speak for those who voted against Zac's amendment.

However, I suspect they were afraid that if you make it too easy to launch a recall petition, the sort of idiots who have been protesting in the past week against the election of a Conservative government could abuse it. Specifically, they could use recall as a means of trying to reverse the result of the general election by recalling Conservative MPs in the most marginal constituencies irrespective of whether the MPs concerned had actually done anything wrong.

I thought the Goldsmith amendment got round this problem by requiring a substantial share of the local electorate sign the petition.

Apparently that did not satisfy all my colleagues.
Jim said…
I would agree that a high number of the electorate must support the motion, to eliminate the over use of it.

But I do think it important that the electorate has a method of recall between elections. The way I see it is the taxpayer is a politicans boss, their employer, and any employer has it in his/her gift to fire an employee (for the right reasons of course, otherwise we get into unfair dismissal cases) It does not come down to a committee of other employees, its down to the boss to do the hiring and the firing.

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