Electoral system ‘distorts politics’
The Labour leadership is being forced into abandoning its core values and supporters in order to stay in power, electoral reformers warned today.
But speakers at a TUC fringe meeting, Make Votes Count, admitted that this was less the government’s fault than the inevitable result of Britain’s electoral system.
The Labour government won a third term in May with just 35 per cent of the votes, a result the chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society described as “very bizarre”.
Ken Ritchie said such a seemingly unfair result was the product of an electoral system in which only marginal seats and swing voters had any real impact on the result.
But he warned it made a mockery of the government’s popular mandate by ignoring the wishes of millions of voters – and was exactly why reform of the electoral system was required.
Jon Cruddas, Labour MP for Dagenham, warned of another risk of the system – that it actually distorts politics itself by forcing politicians to play to the middle ground.
With political parties having to focus the vast majority of their energies on winning just 30 or 40 key seats, policy becomes all about what the swing voters in those seats want.
As such, he believes the needs of the community he represents – a Labour heartland – are being ignored in favour of those in middle England whose votes actually count.
“I feel the community I represent is being systematically disenfranchised,” he said, citing the emphasis on ‘choice’ when what his constituents really need is more social housing.
However, Mr Cruddas noted that this was the “genius” of New Labour that had kept them in power for a third term – and here lay the dilemma.
Was the Labour government that many activists have been railing against for abandoning ‘traditional’ values the only possible result of Britain’s electoral system?
The 1997 Labour party manifesto included a commitment to reform of the voting system, but this has now been watered down to a review, which, Mr Ritchie said, was “at the best, half-hearted”.
But time was running out, he said, arguing – as the late Robin Cook did earlier this year – that if Labour does not reform the system now, they might not have the opportunity later.
