Comment: The Conservative case for AV
Not all Conservatives oppose AV. A fairer voting system would help us take on the EU and the green lobby.
By John E. Strafford
Speaking about our electoral system in 1909 Winston Churchill said: “The present system has clearly broken down. The results produced are not fair to any party, nor to any section of the community. In many cases they do not secure majority representation, nor do they secure an intelligent representation of minorities. All they secure is fluke representation, freak representation, capricious representation.”
The same could be said today. In the 2010 general election the largest party was the Conservatives which, with 36.1% of the vote, got 47.1% of the seats and no overall majority.
Contrast this with the result of the 2005 general election when Labour, with 35.2% of the vote, got 55.1% of the seats and a majority of 66 seats in parliament. Labour’s share of the vote in 2005 can be compared to the support enjoyed in past elections by losing parties.
Attlee’s share of the vote in 1955, when Eden’s Conservatives won a majority of 58 (comparable to Blair’s majority in 2005), was an amazing 46.4% and Attlee lost the election. Of course, in 1955 there were effectively only two parties fighting the election.
A study of the results of general elections over the last hundred years shows that there is no correlation between the percentage of votes a party receives and the percentage of seats it gets in the Commons. You might as well toss a coin for determining who should form the government. The present system can be seen to be rotten.
Because of our electoral system the political parties are only interested in the ten per cent of constituencies which are marginal and of those only the ten per cent who are floating voters. In other words, they are only interested in one per cent of the electorate because they are the ones that determine the results of the election. (The IPPR think tank assesses these swing voters at 1.6% of the electorate. Lewis Baston describes them as the ‘ruling minority’). It is because the two main parties concentrate on this narrow focus that their policies converge.
Our three main political parties in the last election concentrated on what the focus groups were telling them the one per cent wanted. The other 99% were ignored, so even though a majority of the people wanted a referendum on the Lisbon treaty, none of the main parties gave them one. Even though a majority of the people wanted the troops brought home from Afghanistan, none of the main parties offered them that. Even though a majority of the people do not believe in man-made climate change and the subsidies that go with it, none of the main parties offered to scrap the subsidies. This cannot be right. When political parties spend their time and energy on just 1% of the electorate voters feel that democracy has died.
As a method of election First Past The Post (FPTP) is broken. It is not fair. It is time to change. What are the arguments in favour of FPTP?
It gives strong government. Yet we have had minority or coalition governments in 33 out of the last 100 years including at those times when we needed strong government most of all – the two World Wars and the great economic depression of the 1930s. You can add to these critical times the world economic crisis we face today.
It enables an electorate to kick a government out. Yet only once in the last 100 years has a government with a working majority been replaced by an opposition with a working majority. The only time this happened was in 1970 when Harold Wilson lost the election to Edward Heath. In most cases change takes place over three parliaments.
It is our tradition. History shows that this is not correct. We had proportional representation in the university seats up until 1950. Up until 1884 we had multi-member seats and we had those for over 600 years. It is FPTP which is the newcomer, and it was only brought in because the political parties found it easier to control candidates and to manipulate the results. The political parties started seriously organising in the 1870s.
In the referendum we will have a choice between FPTP or the Alternative Vote (AV). One great advantage of AV is that every vote will count so this should increase turnout. Another advantage is that two thirds of the seats will become marginal. This will force the political parties to address the concerns of the majority of the people rather than those of the one per cent. This will stop the practice of one man, Lord Ashcroft, financing 100 Conservative marginal seats and the trade unions doing the same for Labour. That has to be good for democracy.
AV is used to elect party leaders. It is used to elect the Speaker of the House of Commons. So MPs do not oppose AV on principle. Preferential voting was used to elect the leader of the Conservative party. Why? Because when you get over 50% of the vote it gives you legitimacy. We want the same legitimacy for members of parliament.
In 2010, in terms of votes per MP, Labour had 33,370, Conservatives 34,940 and the Liberal Democrats a massive 119,944. Even worse than the Liberal Democrats were Ukip, which got no seats in spite of receiving 920,334 votes. By contrast the Democratic Unionists only needed 21,027 votes for each of their seats.
Our parliament is supposed to be a representative democracy, but it is not representative of women. It is not representative of ethnic minorities. And it is not even representative of our political parties.
Our electoral system is morally bankrupt, so let the people decide.
John Strafford is the author of ‘Our Fight for Democracy‘ – a history of democracy in the United Kingdom. He is the vice-chairman of Conservative Action for Electoral Reform and supporter of the Yes to Fairer Votes campaign.
The opinions in politics.co.uk’s Speakers Corner are those of the author and are not a reflection of the views of the website or its owners.
