« May 2005 | Main | July 2005 »

Tories urged to smell the coffee...

Posted by pauldavies on June 30, 2005 | Comments (0)

...Twice. And on only vaguely related matters.

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." -H.L. Mencken

Big-league Conservative Party donor Lord Ashcroft has hit out, saying that the election campaign didn't focus resources well enough on the most vital areas of the country. In other words, they didn't play the FPTP game well enough - in the 'race to the bottom' in the caring about the people stakes, the Tories just weren't Machiavellian enough.

"To the extent that the voters who rejected us in 2005 associate the Conservative Party with anything at all it is with the past, with policies for the privileged few and with lack of leadership."

"We cannot hope to win a general election while this is how we are seen by people who should be our supporters."

the decision to target more than 164 constituencies many of which barely qualified as marginals, may have been a serious mistake...

This is the game folks, and it's the meanest one in town.

The 2005 campaign blew even the illusion of concern out of the window. Even those violently opposed to democracy would surely think that if the people have to be given the vote, then it should be more than just those in 100 or so select areas of the country that the parties actually give a crap about.

Anyway, this ground's been ridden like Abi Titmuss, there's little need to go over it again, however tempting it might be.

Elsewhere...

Michael Brown, a former Conservative MP and an Independent columnist, said it was now in the Tory party's self interest to support PR because they would not get re-elected without it.

"It will be impossible for them to return to office under the vagaries of the current system," he said.

From the Independent's coverage of last night's ERS meeting.

Like a lot of people, I'm not convinced on this one, and depending on what system you look at, you can see why the Tories react with such abject horror and disdain every time the subject is broached. Still, they, like everyone else, should be made to at least look at the issue. The system stinks, everyone knows that, now can we see if it's possible to do something productive about it?

Which is more or less what Robin Cook said, so I'm told. I'm also told he was drunk. I can sadly vouch for neither claim.

Meetings: Tonight and Monday

Posted by pauldavies on June 29, 2005 | Comments (2)

First-up, a reminder of tonight's ERS/Independent meeting, 'Making your vote count: the way forward'

6.45pm at One BirdCage walk (SW1H 9JJ).

Email independent@reform.demon.co.uk for a ticket, or just turn up, there should be space for all of you.

Moving on...
The End of the Affair? Mending the relationship between citizens and Westminster

Keynote speech by Rt. Hon Geoff Hoon MP, Leader of the House of Commons

Monday 4th July 2005 10:30am - 12:00pm at The Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, 1 Carlton House Terrace SW1Y 5DB

Many hoped that the 2005 election would mark a return to democracy as usual, and that a narrower race, a high-stakes contest, and the promotion of postal voting would increase turnout.

In the event, participation hardly increased from the record low of 2001. Whilst Britain remains in many respects a healthy and active democracy, the public appear to be losing confidence in formal representative political institutions.

This alienation extends beyond elections. As trust in most professionals, local MPs and in many public institutions holds up, trust in the political system appears to have taken a downward leap.

Speaking in his new role as Leader of the House, Geoff Hoon, will lay out ideas for a revival of Parliament and democracy.

Speakers
Rt. Hon Geoff Hoon MP, Leader of the House of Commons
Stephen Coleman, Professor of e- democracy, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University
Ben Rogers, Associate Director, ippr

If you would like to attend please RSVP to Ruth Eldridge on 020 7470 6105 or email: r.eldridge@ippr.org

I taught Joseph Stiglitz everything he knows

Posted by pauldavies on June 29, 2005 | Comments (0)

A slight aside, so I'm slipping it in before the rest of today's business.

Did anyone see Channel 5's (or is it simply five's?) 'Great Ideas That Changed the World: Stiglitz on Capitalism' last night?

Pretty good I thought. My old economic history teacher, a crazy little old man from Aberdeen who is 104 and inhabits a strange little room at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, taking the time now and then to tell Stephen Hawking he's a daft old fool, claims to have taught ol' Joseph everything he knows. And I believe him.

Pointless anecdotes aside, it was fascinating viewing at times, despite it being largely (ok, completely) unrelated to electoral reform. It none the less gave a well-measured account of the world's recent politco-economic history; I knew economists were good for something.

Stupid beard though, looks a bit like Bill Bryson, if his ancestors had been eastern European.

A fresh perspective

Posted by malcolmclark on June 28, 2005 | Comments (0)

It is always refreshing and encouraging to hear from a politician who is willing to constructively engage in the voting reform debate, irrespective of their previous position on the issue. This was the case last night with Jon Cruddas, in his talk to the MVC seminar "Does the present voting system provide unnecessary opportunities to extremists?". The MP for Dagenham and through-and-through Labour man gave a passionate and intelligent insight into the socio-economic and political conditions that allow the BNP to thrive, and the challenge the Labour party faces in maintaining its support within poorer communities. What follows is a summary of his main arguments. Thought-provoking stuff. Oona King’s contribution to the discussion will be written up separately.

For Jon Cruddas – and many fellow MPs, trade unionists and party members – the purpose of a Labour government is to provide the conditions and resources for ensuring the well being of all, especially the more disadvantaged sections of society. But both in policy and political terms, he feels the poorest third are being increasingly ignored under this Labour adminisistration – and there are systemic reasons for this:

First-past-the-post encourages coalitions to be made before the election – i.e within parties. But New Labour is not a coalition of balancing ideas and values, led roughly from its centre. Instead it seems to be led from the outer part of its coalition.

1) New Labour’s policies are created as much out of a deductive process of focus groups of swing voters as from any strong ideological framework.
2) Issues that dominate the local policy agenda (e.g social housing) in areas such as his do not often make it onto the national policy agenda, which is dominated by the concerns of those in mainly middle class marginal constituencies.
3) New Labour seems preoccupied by the prejudices of middle England (e.g. immigration), which can in fact compound those issues in the community rather than solve them. The restraints in being able to put across a different set of principles (e.g. the positive case for immigration) helps the centre of debate be shifted to the right.

“No one is talking about any of it. … There are deep-seated problems not getting looked at� was Jon’s analysis. And despite Labour’s third straight election victory, he does not see the situation improving. In fact, with the rise in the number of super-marginals that the party will be fighting at the next general election, it looks like getting worse.

This prospect alarms him because he fears that the BNP will increasingly be able to gain support and (local) electoral victories. The assumption that the white working class vote would always largely go for Labour is under significant threat – partly because the party is marginalising the concerns and values of these people. The BNP are in a good position to be able to pick up these alienated or discontented voters. Furthermore, the BNP may at the present time be fairly easy targets once in office, labelled as ‘lazy’ or ‘incompetent’ and thus kicked out at the earliest possible opportunity (as happened in the Goresbrook ward by-election last week). But this will change. Already a new generation of better organised, more effective and more professional BNP spokespeople / campaigners are emerging. Thus Labour needs to raise its game to combat this threat. In Dagenham the fight against the BNP has actually revitalised the labour movement locally.

Jon is not a systems-nerd. He has never been greatly interested before in voting systems. It is the getting into power in order to change things for the better that has been his priority. But if electoral reform can tackle better than the current system the problems that lead to increased support for extremists, then he would be open to it.

Tipping… about to topple?

Posted by pauldavies on June 28, 2005 | Comments (0)

Tom Nairn of openDemocracy argues that the 2005 general election was a tipping point for wholesale reform of Westminster. Sometime in the next decade or so, he argues, we are likely to see the shift in people's attitude towards government translate into a shift in the way our democracy operates. It raises a number of interesting points, a couple of which I've had a look at below.

There has been a deep shift of attitude within the British electorate. Commentators recognise it, but most dismiss it as a transient mood or fashion. Now, however, stronger evidence for its seriousness is emerging — and indeed, showing itself inside the victorious party itself. Far from revelling in complacency, a growing number of New Labour representatives and party workers are joining frustrated voters and the less party-biased commentators in a troubled surmise. Just how and why did they win on 5 May? Can such a farce ever be repeated? For sound reasons, people are worried about whether such a system can continue at all without serious reforms.

Not a lot to say on this point, but it introduces it pretty well. As for whether the farce could ever be repeated? By all means. My own acute sense of Schadenfraude would quite like to see FPTP stick around, just to see how silly it can all get. Turnout at 30%? Mandate at 30% of that? Would they care then?

On 1 May 1997, a resentful public unceremoniously cast what had been the dominant governing party for over a century – Britain’s era of global hegemony – into the dustbin of history. 5 May 2005 showed that (even with help from Australian political strategist guru Lynton Crosby) the Conservatives still haven’t climbed out of it. But ... could a similar fate await New Labour in turn? Whether or not Tony Blair follows Thatcher, in the sense of being personally dumped by his party, couldn’t the New Labour tendency itself fall victim to another such tide of popular nausea and rejection?

Again, of course it could. Maggie destroyed the Tories, why can't Tony destroy Labour? At least it would make a change from Labour destroying themselves. But there is a premise here which I'm not so convinced by.

"In every part of this great metropolis whoever shall pass along the streets will find wretchedness stretched upon the pavement, insensible and motionless, and only removed by the charity of passengers from the danger of being crushed by carriages or trampled by horses or strangled with filth in the common sewers... These liquors not only infatuate the mind but poison the body; they not only fill our streets with madness and our prisons with criminals, but our hospitals with cripples... Those women who riot in this poisonous debauchery are quickly disabled from bearing children, or produce children diseased from their birth."
-Lord Lonsdale, speaking in 1743

Every generation believes it has witnessed a tragic loss of self, an increase in boozed-up anarchic louts and politicians that are increasingly remote. It's classic good-old-days syndrome. People must have thought before that enough was enough and things had to change. In certain aspects of sociology, they'd have been right, and they may be right again, but history has shown that it often takes a lot more than things being really rubbish to force a change. Who would have thought a decade ago that we were no further along the road to reforming the CAP?

If the new course proceeds past the 2005 tipping-point, one thing – it’s banal to point out – is certain to lead to another. No British politician can hope to reform just one part of such a creaking palace

In politics, revolution is an overused word for an under-seen phenomenon. Lurch and muddle is much more common than wholesale change. There is no real evidence to suggest that the whole business of British politics will change like that. I don't think Tom is suggesting it either, to be honest. Obviously one thing will lead to another, but the tone hints at something more radical than we are ever likely to see. This is an impossible game, therefore it's very unlikely to be messed about with completely – it won't happen through reason, and in Britain especially, it's unlikely to happen through mass public movement – whatever that movement would be for.

Such a development would reverberate far beyond Britain itself. It would transform relations with the rest of the European Union, and have a profound impact on Australia… How long might this all take? Well, I’d guess two more London elections and three Canberra ones — around ten years. But with globalisation at its present pace, it may come even sooner.

A somewhat disappointing end to an otherwise good article. Somewhere along the way, a fairly big leap of faith has been taken, and it landed on unsure foundations. The problem, as I see it, is that the article attacked something it couldn't defeat in it's limited span, and therefore couldn't do it justice. Therefore, going much further talking about it would be pretty pointless too. Still, stuff to think about.

Slighty less important message

Posted by pauldavies on June 28, 2005 | Comments (0)

Comment spam is starting to get out of control, so any comments you leave might take a bit longer than usual to appear on the site. Rest assured, they will turn up as soon as possible, I shall be checking and approving as necessary regularly.

Important message

Posted by pauldavies on June 28, 2005 | Comments (0)

Our email server has gone done, thus we can't read anything until tomorrow, any emails sent last night have disappeared unread, and stuff sent this morning is bouncing back.

Sorry for any inconvenience. I blame First-Past-the-Post.

Extremism and the voting system

Posted by pauldavies on June 28, 2005 | Comments (0)

I was going to say something about the meeting last night and Marie Woolfe's subsequent piece this morning, but Malcolm was actually there, so he can do it. My gist: The folks in the Commons don't care about the BNP - they're not part of The Power (not going to get a seat), therefore they don't matter - out of sight, out of mind an all that - it doesn't matter, of course, that they're swelling support and stirring up badness outside parliament. [sigh]

Anyways, as well as Malcolm to come, Jarndyce has doubly saved me from having to elaborate... Go look.

Are you listening, Mr Straw?

Posted by pauldavies on June 28, 2005 | Comments (0)

Apologies in advance for the lazy nature of this little dissection of the latest slab of media commentary. Thought-pieces should always act more as stimulation than anything else, but I and plenty of others have talked about the old myths of PR for long enough already, so when it comes to Chris Huhne's piece in the Indy today, I feel the need to do little more than quote the odd bit and urge you to go and read it in full.

Critics of electoral reform should engage honestly with the proposed alternatives

Critics argue that in other systems… it is possible for a small party like the liberal Free Democrats to become a necessary component of any coalition, even while commanding fewer than 10 per cent of the votes… As Mr Straw argued: "PR systems can, and often do, give disproportionate power to small minority parties".

This line of attack confuses the characteristics of some election systems - such as Israel's or Germany's - with the properties of all alternatives to first-past-the-post. It wilfully misrepresents the most commonly advocated alternatives for Britain.

In either the Irish or the Jenkins case, we would probably have had many majority governments in Britain since the war. There would, though, be differences. First, majority governments would not have such crushing majorities and the balance of the opposition would not be seriously distorted. This would increase competition within the British system, and provide voters with greater choice.

At present, Labour rules with a large majority on just 35 per cent of the UK vote, the lowest share for any government since 1832. In theory, it would be possible under the present system for Labour to win a majority with barely 30 per cent of the vote. Would that be fair?

A third advantage of reform is that everyone's vote would count, wherever they lived. There would be no citizens disenfranchised because they live in the half of all UK constituencies where the result can be confidently predicted before polling day.

Few people in Britain argue for the Israeli, Belgian or even Greek system. Critics of electoral reform should stop tilting at windmills, and engage honestly with the proposed alternatives.

Is this really what we wanted?

Posted by pauldavies on June 28, 2005 | Comments (0)

Many many things to talk about today, but while I'm messing about with them, an interesting poll from Angus Reid Consultants - 'How satisfied are you with the results of the United Kingdom general election?'

Full results and story here. The short version: despite Tony et al claiming "It seems clear that the British people wanted the return of a Labour government but with a reduced majority", only 31% of respondents were satisfied with the outcome, and 43% were dissatisfied.

Reply from Number 10

Posted by pauldavies on June 27, 2005 | Comments (0)

From the political office
17 June 2005

Dear Ms Temple,

The Prime Minister has asked me to thank you for your letter of 9 May.

Please be assured that your comments on voting reform have been carefully noted.

Thank you for taking the time and trouble to write.

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Rebecca Goff

Well I must say, that was worth the almost 6 week wait. We had another one last week, also dated 17 June and addressed to Lord Lipsey, regarding his letter of 17 May. "This is receiving attention and a reply will be with you as soon as possible."

It's not like we're getting our hopes up of course, we know that talking about electoral reform is a bit "odd" when there are big soya/baby stories breaking.

A little round-up of randomness

Posted by pauldavies on June 27, 2005 | Comments (0)

Starting with, a round-up of distinctly vaster proportions. That of Tim Worstall, and this humble blog's first entry into his britblog bonanza. It's resulted in many hits, so if I or anyone else happens to write anything not completely rubbish before Sunday, tell Tim. That just leaves me with a week to think of something worthwhile to say...

Would it really be possible to start Nazi Germany if you'd just been listening to Bob Marley's Exodus back-to-back for the past three weeks and getting stoned? Would the idea of the Holocaust seem so appealing?

So asks Coldplay's Chris Martin (quote nabbed from the Private Eye). I don't know Chris, but I fear Bob would've been lost on Adolf and friends. Some people can always do with chilling out.

And finally, this is wrong. (via Tim Ireland)

MVC event tonight

Posted by malcolmclark on June 27, 2005 | Comments (0)

A reminder of tonight's MVC parliamentary seminar - free and open to all:

"Does the present voting system provide unnecessary opportunities to extremists?"

Monday 27 June at 6.30pm, Committee Room 6, HoC

Speakers: Jon Cruddas MP and Oona King.

The topic for discussion is whether our first-past-the-post voting
system disenfranchises people - by for example marginalising the people most in need of a Labour government - and thus allows space for the far right (and other extremists) to flourish. The event will be chaired by John Grogan MP and is free and open to all.

No ticket needed. Enter via St Stephen's entrance to Parliament - a very short walk from Westminster tube station.

For further details contact Malcolm Clark 020 7928 2076 / 07733322148

Culture Shock

Posted by pauldavies on June 27, 2005 | Comments (0)

The British Press seems to have taken some time off this morning. Perhaps it's because Richard Whiteley died and they're all in shock. The solemnifying effect of the demise of the arch-pun-maker looks to have overrun everyone save Simon Hoggart.

However, 'twice-nightly' wasn't very big in Trinidad and Tobago, and their journos seem to have more talent than ours anyway, so pack your bags, get out the suncream and jet off to the pretty shores of the T&T Express for today's dose of electoral-reform-related goodness. Well I say goodness, I actually mean stimulation, for it's not exactly a pro-reform piece. But it's not anti-reform either. It's a bit more philosophical than all that. Perhaps the last paragraph will explain things better:

Both classic systems [PR and FPTP] have grave weaknesses, and it seems clear that whether one is to be preferred or not, depends ultimately on the breed of politicians who man the systems, and what incentives are put in place for them to behave in ways that are not typical of politicians. As one New Zealand MP observed when asked whether proportional representation has made the New Zealand Parliament a nicer place as voters hoped, "I guess the answer is it is still full of politicians." In sum, it is the political culture, i.e. the "software", and not the institutional structures, i.e. the "hardware", that helps more to determine whether good governance has an opportunity to prevail or not.

It's all very true, and also touches on an issue far too involved (and ultimately insoluble) for an op-ed piece to do justice to. It doesn't offer anything on the idea that voting reform could change the political culture in itself. One could argue that we have nasty politicians so we need a nasty system; but are they only nasty because of the system?

Maybe I'll have a think about it later; maybe not, I don't know the folks involved well enough, and speculating for the hell of it is an evil to match anything hidden away in Portsmouth. For now, I'm sticking with Simon.

New Labour jargon, which compared with real language is like Lego compared with real bricks

Hey everybody! Jack's back!

Posted by pauldavies on June 24, 2005 | Comments (1)

One slice of specious turd-pie is evidently not enough for some people. Following his almost entirely erroneous and patronising piece in the Guardian a while back, our *beloved* foreign-secretary has popped up in the Independent today to tell the 40,000 people who've so far signed the Campaign for Democracy petition why, they are, in fact, retarded.

The article can be found here, but for those of you who happen to be reading this while eating something, and don't wish to splatter the recently-consumed over the recently-washed, I shall give you the mini-version.

PR systems can, and often do, give disproportionate power to small minority parties.

He is clearly talking about the Lib Dems, but leaves it just open-ended enough to suggest that he's talking about those nasty BNP types too, which, need I remind you, is nonsense.

This is inherently less fair than first-past-the-post, which tends to favour the party with the largest share of the vote, even if it is in a minority (a problem which can be overcome by the alternative vote).

Note 'tends to favour'. It seems Mr Straw is aware that Labour could have come third and still held a majority. And the use of the sometimes-even-more-disproportionate alternative vote; the alternative vote is like steps in the right direction made by a man with one leg significantly longer than the other. It's amusing, I grant you, but it's not like it gets anywhere.

Those who favour PR must face this truth: you can have proportional voting, but you cannot have proportional decision-taking.

This is the crux of the critique – "We must have A GOVERNMENT. Don't really care who it is, we spent years in opposition, remember, and did we complain about the voting system? NO!" Which, of course, misses the point entirely. Firstly, he's turning PR into a party-political issue, which is just mean and myopic. Secondly, the only reason people ever really shout for the need for a government is so that only one set of people are effectively thinking of how to make the country better, and then the rest of the house gets to vote against things they don't like, thus keeping the system in check and making sure everything works perfectly. But it doesn't work like this. The role of government now is to push through policies whatever. Sod the opposition, sod the Lords and sod the people.

Parties may have set out their positions in their manifestos, but the document which matters is the coalition programme agreed behind closed doors after the election. So what voters see is not necessarily what they are going to get. This may also mean that parties' programmes are not subject to the relentless examination by opponents and media which ours are.

But what's the point of relentless examination, if the government chooses to ignore it anyway? And mainfestos don't matter in either system. They are, I would argue, more important in a fairer system, because they wouldn't be geared towards being so goddamn inoffensive, which means they might actually set out what the people are likely to get from a government. Manifestos are meaningless under FPTP, so we never know what we're going to get.

I like adversarial politics, I think it's good that parties are defined by their mocking of the opposition rather than their own merits. (paraphrased)

Well, if you say so Jack.

Moreover, no PR system has the inherent democratic strength of single-member territorial constituencies. In the last fortnight, I may have been in Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Luxembourg and Brussels, but this week I am back in Blackburn. I cannot shuffle off my responsibility to someone else with whom I share the constituency, or - worse - with others on a regional or national list. I'm answerable and accountable: it's direct, in-your-face democracy, it's simple and it works.

People of Blackburn – do you feel Jack is an effective spokesman for you? That despite being so uber-busy jet-setting all over the world shaking hands with dictators, that he's there for you and that, if he weren't you could kick him out in a flash. This constituency-link stuff is, quite frankly, vastly overrated. For a start, PR can improve the link, and furthermore, the link only exists when the elected MP gives a shit, which unless it is a wafer-thin marginal, is usually voluntarily, and therefore, usually not true. MPs are all too often too busy clamouring to get further away from their constituencies, chasing after the elixir of Real Power to care whether the plumbing's shot in the local sheltered housing complex.

Simon Hoggart on Chaz and Tony

Posted by pauldavies on June 24, 2005 | Comments (0)

Mr Kennedy wanted a referendum on voting systems. Mr Blair said that with all that was going on in the world, he seemed to have a pretty odd set of questions. This was the equivalent of asking him if he would like some fizzy pop and a bag of sweeties.

Same old, same old...

Posted by pauldavies on June 23, 2005 | Comments (0)

I mentioned yesterday that there was to be talk of electoral reform in the Commons.

Heald (Con), Harman (Lab) and Heath (LD) (convenient, no?) provided the bulk of the chat. Edited highlights (all the PR stuff) courtesy of ERS (well, me, actually - so read it, or my eyes will have bled in vain) here. Transcript in full here (more on fraud).

Fear and Loathing in the Lords

Posted by pauldavies on June 23, 2005 | Comments (13)

Charlie Falconer, he of 'no groundswell' fame, is at the centre of Labour's latest move to enshrine themselves into parliament legend and rule unopposed until God himself is forced to get off his decadent arse and kick them out.

Unhappy that they don't actually have that much support and therefore keep having to cheat to force through ever-more ludicrous pieces of legislation like the paradoxical 'no more mocking religious types' bill and banning free speech within the vicinity of, erm, the home of free speech, Tony & Co. are doing something about it.

During Labour's last term, the House of Lords rejected 245 government initiatives, on account of them being a bit rubbish. As the multi-chinned Lord Chancellor said, "if the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives unite against a particular proposal, they can defeat it". Which is a most unwelcome state of affairs for the Red Army.

Despite there now being as many Labour peers as Conservative ones, the ministers in the Commons aren't embracing the sunshine and sacrificing public school children in celebration. Far from it; indeed in the words of one aide, the men in de jure (if not de facto) charge of the Lower House regard the Lords with “a mixture of anger and fear�. It would be foolish to read too much into this; being career politicians, they have a stratospheric propensity to regard everything and everyone with anger and fear.

Lord Rooker, the Deputy Leader of the Lords: "People should not make too big a thing of achieving parity because it creates an illusion we’re now ruling the roost," he said. "But everyone forgets the 180 crossbenchers who, if they bother to vote, do so against us by a margin of four to one." Yet more unfairness. There is very obviously a conspiracy amongst the non-ideologues to disagree with stupidity. This simply won't do.

And things are going to get worse before they get better. The Lords used to be a rare surviving bastion of gentlemenly conduct, a chivalrous chamber of etiquette and tradition. Not any more. The so-called 'Salisbury convention' that meant opposition parties did not block Bills that figured in the Government's manifesto has been shamelessly and publicly flogged and chucked into the gutter like an opposition fan after Millwall have lost at home.

Not to fear, Labour fans, for Charlie is on the case. Lord Falconer has spotted the problem and acted accordingly: he's purging the dissenters. Legislation due to be introduced in the next session, he said, will lessen the Lords' power to tell the government to stop peddling nonsense, sorry, stop being so awkward, as well as abolishing the remaining 92 hereditary members, of whom, luckily enough, only four sleep on red velveteen pillows.

Given this, and the other recent evidence, one could thus be forgiven for thinking that a modicum of fairness in the way votes translate into power isn't too high on the government agenda. Dammit.

(Various bits and pieces of information/text stolen from The Times)

Conservatives condemn PR

Posted by pauldavies on June 22, 2005 | Comments (3)

It's opposition day in the Commons today and the Tories have the big hitters out in force to talk about:

ELECTORAL INTEGRITY AND DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY

Mr Michael Howard
Mr Francis Maude
Mr Oliver Heald
Mr Dominic Grieve
Mr Jonathan Djanogly
David Maclean

That this House believes that the Government should rule out future use of all-postal voting and that any pilot schemes should be subject to explicit parliamentary ratification; regrets the unwillingness of the Government to adopt in mainland Britain the tried and tested Northern Ireland system of individual voter registration; condemns the Government's constitutional changes which have undermined democratic accountability, such as the introduction of proportional representation; and further believes that urgent steps are needed to restore public confidence and integrity in the electoral system and to increase the accountability of government.

But hey, at least they've recognised it. [Sigh].

Today's order of business.

Electoral Reform apparently not worthy of PMQs

Posted by pauldavies on June 22, 2005 | Comments (0)

There is an unwritten rule in the House of Commons that if you are a Lib Dem and you mention voting reform, you get laughed at. Tony Blair is no stranger to this rule, as he showed again today, delivering another "why don't you just shut up and stop questioning my legitimacy as your all-powerful God" retort to Charlie K during PMQs.

(From the Guardian's minute-by-minute coverage)

12.05pm
Charles Kennedy raises groans for bringing up electoral reform, saying the government is in power on 35% of the vote - close to "a tyranny of the minority" - pushing through ID cards and restricting protests around Westminster. Does he think Westminster reflects the way people voted?

"Is not that a trifle exaggerated?" laughs Mr Blair. "All electoral systems have their flaws. If we had a system where the Lib Dems were holding the balance of power, would not that be a tyranny of the minority?" Touche.

12.10pm
Unabashed, Mr Kennedy comes back asking for a referendum to replace the scrapped EU constitution one - why not have the one promised in the Labour manifesto on PR in this parliament, he ventures.

There will be a review of electoral systems, says Mr Blair, but dismisses Mr Kennedy's thrust as a "pretty odd set of questions considering what's going on in the world today".

ERS press release - Disappointment over lack of vote reform clarity

UPDATE: Just so you know, those things "going on in the world today" that are more important than British democracy (the top 10 stories on the BBC News website)

1. Tax credits backfire on families
2. Solar sail probe fate unknown
3. Man U shares leave stock market
4. Iraq leaders seek rebuilding aid
5. 'Avoid soya if you want a baby'
6. Immigration abuse fines unveiled
7. Parents 'ignore game age ratings'
8. Royals cost Britain 36m a year
9. Sven lover 'bragged in emails'
10. Giant desk inspires lonely writers

Res ipsa loquitur

follow the Compass

Posted by malcolmclark on June 22, 2005 | Comments (0)

It is always enjoyable to report good news. A debate and ballot on electoral reform was held at Saturday's impressively attended 'The Challenge Left' conference organised by Compass - the democratic left pressure group.

Not only did over 70% vote for the motion, giving further evidence of a groundswell of support in favour of electoral reform in Labour's third term. But also Oona King's impassioned speech in favour helped sway some of the doubters, including apparently a number of trade unionists and others who up until then had been hostile to our arguments. On such small steps ....

The example has been set. As Neal Lawson, Chair of Compass, the pressure group of the democratic left says ‘the government won’t give people a say on the electoral system so we thought we would at least give Compass members a vote’. Other organisations / conferences should now follow Compass' lead and hold their own debates and ballots on electoral reform.

A quick detour into religious hatred

Posted by pauldavies on June 22, 2005 | Comments (0)

Hunter S. Thompson regularly quoted the Book of Revelation in his columns, a) because hotel rooms tend to have bibles in them and b) because it contains some of the most incendiary language ever written down, or spoken for that matter. Not even the man himself attacked Nixon like the Good Book attacks unbelievers.

Our own impossibly cool columnist, Boris Johnson, used some holy words on his blog yesterday in order to make a very salient point: "this bill is bad, ill-thought out, and likely to do far more harm than good."

There's plenty of good stuff in the speech he would have made if the Speaker had chosen him, but the most important bit goes thusly:

Here is the Koran on those with a lack of correct religious belief

22.9 As for the unbelievers, for them garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water whereby whatever is in their bowels and skins shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods.

...But I would like the minister to explain to us all, here and now, why and how he thinks the repetition of those words, in a public or a private place, does not amount to an incitement to religious hatred of exactly the kind that this bill is supposed to ban.

My point is that if this bill makes any sense at all, it must mean banning the reading - in public or private - of a great many passages of the Koran itself

Which is absurd and paradoxical, given that the measure is intended to be a protection against Islamophobia

Random quotes don't really do the argument justice, so go and read the lot.

On a simpler note, religious zealots are the only people with more hatred inside them than tied-to-the-mast political ideologues. Mixing the two is quite obviously a very silly idea.

Would Brown bring PR?

Posted by pauldavies on June 21, 2005 | Comments (0)

(From ePolitix)

A senior Labour backbencher has said that a Gordon Brown administration would continue the UK's "constitutional revolution".

"I don't know what he thinks about the electoral system, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if he decides we need to rigorously review it."

There are a thousand and one questions about just what the country would look like under Brown. There is big debate over both what he wants, and what he feels he would be able to get away with. No one can honestly claim an answer to either question.

On one side, we have people (like my mum) who believe that Gordon is a proper-lefty-raving-socialist who has just been playing polite while that nasty right-winger has been in charge, biding his time until he spearheads the revolution. With any such belief, however, there is always an element at least of fanciful nonsense.

Most of the nation sees Brown to the left of Blair, not a lot, but enough. And because he hasn't had to take any major decisions outside of economics, no one thinks he's a liar who has the heads of Iraqi children stuck on spikes around his bed.

Economics also has the added attraction of scaring a lot of people, and bamboozlnig a lot more. This has helped disguise some of Brown's thoughts and let a lot of people believe Gordon believes what they believe. Palliative, but probably misguided.

On the other side, we have people (such as business columnists) who think that Brown is either as Blairite as Blair, if not more so, or even if he wasn't, he has no choice, because he wants to get elected in 2009/10. Brownites remember - this will be a lot easier the longer Blair hangs around. Prime-ministerial popularity ALWAYS wanes.

Personally, Brown strikes me as someone who is as wily as he is uncharismatic. He won't be able to charm his way through like Tony, but he'll probably take a strong lead on almost every issue, and make sure that things are carried through thoroughly. Trying to bracket him in terms of the antiquated right-left axis is as foolish as those that still cling to such notions as the defining characteristic of Good and Evil.

He will no doubt want to do something rather grand, he must have bottled up a fair few ideas over the last eight years or so. I think the article is probably as fair a prediction as we are likely to get - generally more of the same, but with a change of personality at the helm. But a lot of things can still change. If the forecasts are correct and the economic trouble that Brown has been saving up comes back and bites him in the ass, he might lerch off in some hitherto unforseen direction.

As for electoral reform, I'm fairly sure Brown as PM wouldn't be a bad thing for it, but it's far too early to say with any conviction. He may feel he needs PR to win in five years' time, but he may be confident of winning and just selfishly want a bigger majority to work with, and therefore stick with FPTP. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Voting systems and political extremists - seminar

Posted by malcolmclark on June 20, 2005 | Comments (0)

"Does the present voting system provide unnecessary opportunities to extremists?"

Monday 27 June at 6.30pm, Committee Room 6, HoC

Speakers: Jon Cruddas MP and Oona King.

The topic for discussion is whether our first-past-the-post voting
system disenfranchises people - by for example marginalising the people most in need of a Labour government - and thus allows space for the far right (and other extremists) to flourish. The event will be chaired by John Grogan MP and is free and open to all.

For further details contact Malcolm Clark 020 7928 2076

Smarten yourself up...

Posted by pauldavies on June 20, 2005 | Comments (0)

The latest spasm of incompetence from the ongoing epileptic fit that is South West Trains meant I was a little rushed in digesting the great and the good of the papers today. I have now rushed through them at a pace that flirted with inducing politico-indigestion and have emerged... well, thoroughly un-satiated.

This did, however, give me time to mess about with the Amazon links that now brighten up the left-hand side of the page, featuring all sorts of smart and strangely exciting stuff that people have written about politics. Every one a winner. And, as I understand the small-print of the affiliate program, if about 10,000 of you buy a book, MVC earns enough to buy a sandwich for lunch.

Until then, I'm left to chomp away on the scrags of the papers, so as unfulfilling and generally emetic as a McDonalds' meal as they are today, here we go:

If you're not yet bored of the Tory leadership, Bruce Anderson in the Indy (subscription only) and Tim Hames in the Times are worth a gander.

The Telegraph is chatting about Gordon. Twice. And despite the odd tired analogy, it's a not altogether undesirable way to spend 10 minutes.

But the big news today: Apparently they're looking to reduce the size of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. The Times' subs obviously missed the three superfluous words in there.

The need for political scepticism

Posted by pauldavies on June 19, 2005 | Comments (0)

Something smart for a Sunday... Extracts from a speech made in 1923 by the 20th century's most perceptive man, Bertrand Russell. Its continued relevance over 80 years on is at once remarkable and indicting.

One of the peculiarities of the English-speaking world is its immense interest and belief in political parties. A very large percentage of English-speaking people really believe that the ills from which they suffer would be cured if a certain political party were in power. That is a reason for the swing of the pendulum. A man votes for one party and remains miserable; he concludes that it was the other party that was to bring the millennium. By the time he is disenchanted with all parties, he is an old man on the verge of death; his sons retain the belief of his youth, and the see-saw goes on.

I want to suggest that, if we are to do any good in politics, we must view political parties in quite a different way. A party which is to obtain power must, in a democracy, make an appeal to which the majority of the nation responds. For reasons which will appear in the course of the argument, an appeal which is widely successful, with the existing democracy, can hardly fail to be harmful. Therefore no important political party is likely to have a useful programme, and if useful measures are to be passed, it must be by means of some other machinery than party government. How to combine any such machinery with democracy is one of the most urgent problems of our time...

...The skill of the politician consists in guessing what people can be brought to think advantageous to themselves; the skill of the expert consists in calculating what really is advantageous...

...The power of the politician, in a democracy, depends upon his adopting the opinions which seem right to the average man. It is useless to urge that politicians ought to be high-minded enough to advocate what enlightened opinion considers good, because if they do they are swept aside for others...

...Since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation, unless they have the good fortune to unite it in war against some other nation. They live by ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’. They cannot pay attention to anything difficult to explain, or to anything not involving division (either between nations or within the nation), or to anything that would diminish the power of politicians as a class...

...The instinctive appeal of every successful political movement is to envy, rivalry or hate, never to the need for co-operation...

...We do not want to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to have when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools; yet, taking mankind in the mass, that is the truth. For this reason, no political party can acquire any driving force except through hatred; it must hold up someone to obloquy. If so-and-so’s wickedness is the sole cause of our misery, let us punish so-and-so and we shall be happy...

...A well-intentioned person who believes in any strong political movement is merely helping to prolong that organised strife which is destroying our civilisation...

...An honest politician will not be tolerated by a democracy unless he is very stupid… because only a very stupid man can honestly share the prejudices of more than half the nation...

...Knowledge exists, and good will exists; but both remain impotent until they possess the proper organs for making themselves heard.

Not an argument for voting reform, per se, but PR could, if managed correctly, help to reduce the negativity of politics.

Funny. Pure and simple.

Posted by pauldavies on June 17, 2005 | Comments (0)

Hello children. Are we sitting comfortably? I’m going to tell you a story. It’s the story of Princess Tony and the Ugly Face Man...

Read the whole lot

The Ginger Revolution

Posted by pauldavies on June 17, 2005 | Comments (18)

Everyone's favourite ginger-bearded mumbler, the very honourable Robin Cook is going to give a speech tomorrow intended to stir up that most precious of things: the long-sought after feeling of association among somewhat radical peoples. (Can someone be 'somewhat' radical?) Anyway, being the shrewdie that he so obviously it, he's cashing in a bit of it in the shape of a Grauniad article, which is all rather jolly.

As ever, I'm being a tad lazy, so I shall utilise Robin's words in absence of the arduous task of thinking of my own.

Labour would be making a big mistake if the fortuitous arithmetic of our parliamentary majority became an excuse for complacency.

Even if I wasn't being a bit slack, I couldn't better that turn of phrase; "fortuitous arithmetic of our parliamentary majority". Genius. Well done that man. I feel obliged to rip it off at every opportunity. Sadly, talk of voting reform doesn't go any further, but it's such a lovely bon mot, we'll let him off. Perhaps he'll elaborate tomorrow.

He goes on to ask:

How has Labour mislaid 4m votes since it was first elected?

You've chopped them off the top of safe-Labour strongholds, Robin. Don't worry – you don't need them that much. Better to have a majority than treat your old friends with respect, no?

He continues…

We ended up convincing a dangerously large number of our supporters that we are to the right of them, and a million of them jumped ship to vote Liberal Democrat on polling day. They will not come back unless they see us embark now on a serious process of renewal of Labour as the natural home of progressive voters

If only it were that simple Robin. If you go to woo those voters, you will un-woo the ones who joined you because they perceived you to be to the right of the ship-jumpers. Tough business, this politics.

And the crux of all this: I want to see weakened parties; shove some dynamite into the inherent fractures of the main two parties and blow them open. Why not split Labour into 'Old' and 'New'? The Tories can become clan-like too: split along European ideas, or levels of elocution, perhaps. It'd be fun. Less whip power too in all likelihood. If nothing else, we can rest assured it would make the current sickening, soporific mess more exciting and it could even lead to all sorts of fabulous stuff like making MPs more constituency heads than pawns in an ugly parliamentary parade, that should be subordinated to an Upper House stacked with clever types with clever, free, ideas.

Sorry, getting carried away again. And wasting wonderful notions of revolution on completely raw morning rambles, when they should be kept to my increasingly tome-like reform tour de force. But then, I guess I'm just a bit too lazy to finish it off.

Read the Cookie Monster's piece in full.

Another authoritative word on the boundary issue

Posted by pauldavies on June 16, 2005 | Comments (0)

From The Times' letters page

Constituency boundaries
From Professor R. J. Johnston, FBA

Sir, The seats that Labour won in the recent general election on average had fewer electors than those won by the Tories not because the Boundary Commission defines smaller seats in urban areas (report, June 13) but because of the long delays between redistributions.

The constituencies this year were defined using 1991 data, since when city seats have tended to lose population, thus helping Labour. More frequent and quicker redistributions could significantly reduce that (but Parliament has resisted that in the past). The constituencies now being defined in England use electoral data from 2000: when first used they will probably be nine years old, and they are likely to last until at least 2016.

Although this “creeping malapportionment� benefits Labour and was one of the reasons why its 3 percentage points lead in the votes translated into a 25-point lead over the Conservatives in seats, it was not the main reason. Differences in turnout were more important. Labour tends to win in seats with lower turnouts than those won by the Tories and the Boundary Commissions cannot be blamed for that.

RON JOHNSTON
(Co-author, The Boundary Commissions, Manchester University Press, 1979)

The Winning Essay

Posted by pauldavies on June 15, 2005 | Comments (1)

How can voting reform rejuvenate British democracy?
by Andrew Turner, Winchester

“It would be a great reform in politics if wisdom could be made to spread as easily and rapidly as folly� – Winston Churchill

British democracy is not well. It lies, forlorn and dispirited, on a dirty hospital bed, waiting for an overdue operation.

Its heart, a voting system which once beat with the ferocity of the Iron Lady, has been in decline for many years and is now in dire need of a transplant. The life-support provided by a few self-interested politicians and an as-yet-uninformed electorate pumps blood only as far as the 800,000 or so voting cells closest to the system’s heart.

The recent election campaign thrust the symptoms of this diseased organ firmly into the public sphere, igniting shock and anguish among the populace, although effective diagnoses were as forthcoming as the release of intelligence about the war in Iraq.

These symptoms – apathy, disillusionment, tactical voting, negative campaigning, policy homogenisation and an unaccountable and unrepresentative government – garnered unprecedented press coverage as voters battled with the hardest electoral decision many of them have ever had to make. Talk of ‘giving Blair a bloody nose’ was rife as the anti-war protestors sought to achieve via the ballot box what a million-strong march through the capital had failed to do – gain governmental recognition.

However, once again they were fighting a losing battle. Labour could have finished third on the popular vote and still have been returned with a commons majority, so bizarre is our voting system. This is a shocking statistic of a system that fails to properly represent the country’s electorate to the extent that for the majority of people voting is merely academic.

The politicians know this. We, the people, know this. The politicians know that we know. And they simply don’t care.

Unless you have the fortune of both living in a marginal constituency and being labelled a ‘school gate mum’ by the marketing men, the most you can hope for from the parties vying for your vote is a cursory leaflet or two complete with electioneering slogans that rival each other more in vacuity than in ideology. And why should you vote for a specific party? Simple, the other one is worse. But democracy based on cynicism is hardly a democracy at all. It all has the makings of an Orwellian nightmare: the illusion of equality punctured by the political will of the ruling castes; some votes are much more equal than others.

Under first-past-the-post only votes for the winning candidate count. You consequently have a choice of just two parties, if you have a choice at all. Successfully smearing the other side is, therefore, an effective way to win. With the vast majority of seats deemed ‘safe’ and able to be called well in advance, the point in voting for a lot of people disappears, as does their motivation to go to the polls.

The declivity of electoral turnout is especially marked among the young, who are less inclined to vote for the sake of it, preferring to go to the pub or sit in front of the TV instead.

This particular aspect of the disease did meet with a partially successful remedy. The introduction of postal voting looked like it could be, if not a silver bullet than a least a very shiny one. Last year’s postal voting trials successfully mobilised the slacker vote, resulting in a satisfying leap in turnout. Sadly, success proved to be no more than the high of a short-term drug: a cover as opposed to a cure. And this one came with potentially disastrous side-effects. The scheme was found to be “wide open to fraud� and was more indicative, said Judge Mawrey, when presiding over the trial of misconduct in the Birmingham council elections, of a “banana republic� than a civilised democracy.

There is another way.

The two great pillars of low turnouts – apathy and disillusionment – could both be addressed by changing the voting system. Increased representation and with it the advancement of a subtler kind of politics, taken away from the marginals and given back to the masses, would increase engagement with the electorate – note to politicians: care about the people and they’ll care about you.

The problem of an unrepresentative voting system doesn’t just mean policies that don’t accurately reflect public opinion, it also means power is so skewed that the power of government often strays beyond ‘strong’ and ends up at ‘unaccountable’. Using this exaggerated authority to push through controversial policies increases the perception of remoteness that the populace feels towards the government, in turn fuelling the problem of disillusionment and further harming the democratic process.

Luckily there is a positive spin attached to all this that even Alastair Campbell would be proud of. Key voters are now as narrowly defined and promises are now as innocuous as one would believe possible. The problem of turnout has more prominence and the legitimacy of government has been called into question more than ever before. The surreptitious duo of tactical voting and negative campaigning have also reached a nefarious nirvana.

As all the symptoms of the system reach their zenith together, the need for a change is highlighted from many angles simultaneously. This may prove enough to drag talk of proportional representation out of the realm of political anoraks and place it into the mainstream agenda. A public well apprised of the situation, a democracy observably in tatters and a willing and supportive media can create enough noise around the issue that 2005 will be remembered as the last unfair general election in this country.

Changing the way that votes are translated into seats in the commons would make government more representative of the will of the nation, viz. more democratic. It would dramatically lessen disillusionment and mean an end to disreputable electioneering and de facto dictatorships.

Scrapping first-past-the-post and replacing it with a more proportional system would revive the failing heart of British democracy, pumping life back into veins which spread to every corner of the country.

The wisdom is there to rejuvenate the body politic and defeat the folly of first-past-the-post: change the voting system and cure our democracy.

More on yesterday's debate

Posted by pauldavies on June 15, 2005 | Comments (5)

Malcolm has already covered yesterday's Westminster Hall debate in some depth, so I'll try to be brief.

I am told by everyone that was present that Harriet came across atrociously. I thus got very excited by the prospect of writing something scathing (and insightful, of course). Sadly, the Hansard transcript doesn't make this very clear, so I'll have to work with what's there.

If you're not too bothered about what Ms Harman said, it went along the lines of "This government is always open to ideas of how to fulfil our various vacuous statements like 'your country better', 'your government cares about you, honest' ", etc. etc. In short: arguments were put to Harriet that PR was a Good Thing, Harriet responded by saying, "we'll see about that once we've looked at everything thoroughly."

If you're a little bit more bothered about what was said, some choice passages follow. If you're totally bothered, or have unfortunately had your legs hacked off, been strapped to a computer and have got bored of the porn on offer, you can read the full transcript here.

We hold our views strongly because, apart from the independent Members, we are all members of political parties; we have all been elected and we all have a big focus on the system.

Just out of interest, holding views strongly because you are a member of a political party is nothing to be proud of. In truth, it should be the cause of embarrassment. If you want to take it further, holding a passionate view on a topic that is open to emotion is tantamount to throwing reason out the window, and therefore, lessening the credibility of everything you say. To read a much more eloquent and authoritative version of that sentence, read the first chapter of Bertrand Russell's Sceptical Essays.

As party creatures, it is sometimes difficult for us to disentangle the issues; it is often easy to think that we have argued something from principle because we feel it hugely strongly and because it happens to help our party.

Well at least she recognises her shortcomings. As yet, no evidence to suggest she is bothered about doing anything about them.

Back to the fatuous nonsense then...

we want to have the best system that we can

I believe that a good 70% of the time spent talking in the House (or the Hall) is wasted. It's a bit like a test match, where you spend the vast majority of time watching things build up for those split second delights of a middle stump doing cartwheels or the unparalleled beauty of the crack of leather on willow. Except cricket is cool, and the 'build up' is an integral part of the joy. The wishy-washy nonsense that flops out of the mouths of parliamentarians like dribble on a baby's chin is just useless platitudinal tat.

Ms Harman even bothered saying that New Labour would not rig the system in their favour. Take a second and consider the reasons one would ever have to make such a statement...

Perhaps it's not too surprising that Harriet didn't give us much to condemn her to party-political hell with; she was never going to make particularly strong statements, and was wise in the stats she chose to refer to. As Malcolm said, she failed to respond to the direct questions put to her, but it is impossible to tell via Hansard how much she squirmed while sticking to her script. I can but assume her little face scrunched up somewhat when asked:

Will the Minister also tell me whether she thinks that 35 per cent. of the vote is sufficient to give a Government legitimacy with an overall majority? What percentage figure does she think would be too low to give a Government the legitimate authority to govern even if they had an overall majority in the House of Commons?

Judging by the transcript, she simply didn't hear it. If anyone has the happy occasion of meeting Ms Harman on their travels, perhaps they'd like to repeat the question.

Haven't we covered this already?

Posted by pauldavies on June 15, 2005

The Independent, inspired by yesterday’s debate in Westminster Hall, has thrown itself back into the welcoming arms of electoral reform. The front-page ‘The proof: Vote reform will boost turnout’, takes a look at various PR systems around the world and notices, funnily enough, that PR systems tend to produce turnouts that are 10% higher than non-PR elections. The more important statistic, in my opinion, is that PR elections within the G8 average 20% higher than non-PR ones.

With the constant harping on about the need to up turnout from all sides of the House, one would think that MPs would look at this more seriously. It’s not an especially tricky piece of logic to get one’s head round either: under PR, more votes count, people are more inclined to vote when they think their vote will count, hence higher turnout in marginals and under PR. Repeat it often enough and even a whipped career politician might just grasp the concept. Their children probably already have.

For new/nostalgic readers, Lord Lipsey's two pieces on turnout and the voting system: One. Two.

I’ll write a bit more about the debate later, but for now, a cheap (and ultimately pointless) joke:

[Ms Harman] said she thought the "trend in turnout in proportional systems seems no better than those used in first-past-the-post."

This is clearly wrong on two accounts. Firstly, the trend, as the Indy has shown with their pretty front-page pictures, is clearly there, and secondly, Harriet, as I’ve explained before, doesn’t ‘do’ thinking. Mwahaha. This quip was made possible through the clever use of journalistic licence: Ms Harman, to her credit, was talking about the trend in the UK, not the world. Nevermind, I'm in a rush this morning.

A half-hour debate that didn’t say an awful lot probably isn’t worth dwelling on any longer than necessary, so I’ll move on...

...to Pippa Norris: How to make 'wasted votes' count
It's a rather in-depth (for an article at least) look at turnout; well she is an academic. It’s basically saying what I said in the first paragraph, only in a more academic (*cough* boring *cough*) way.

Harriet in the House

Posted by malcolmclark on June 15, 2005 | Comments (0)

In the Hall to be precise. Yesterday afternoon Harriet Harman, Constitutional Affairs Minister, responded to a Westminster Hall debate on electoral reform called by Lib Dem MP John Barrett. Such debates are a fairly new invention and one of the few positive steps taken since 1997 to increase the all-important accountability of government ministers to MPs.

Westminster Hall here refers to the glorified committee room in which backbench MPs get a chance to raise important issues and hear an immediate response from the relevant government department. The conventions and the time-limits on speeches (the whole thing is usually only scheduled for half-an-hour) means that the term debate is used only fairly loosely. But still there is a bit of cut-n-thrust.

And on this occasion most of the cutting was done by John and his Lib Dem colleagues who had come along to support him / electoral reform; most of the ducking and parrying by Harriet. Martin Linton MP – Chair of Make Votes Count in Labour and PPS to Peter Hain in the last parliament – was sitting behind Harriet and must have been gritting his teeth and wanting to escape quickly. We weren’t expecting miracles from her – not after her showing on Question Time – but this was disappointedly a below-par performance. Especially compared to the coherent and principled arguments for reform laid out by John.

Harriet kicked off her reply by drawing attention to the complexities of the vote reform issue and the ‘anorak tendencies’ that tend to get involved in it. Maybe fair enough some years ago; but no reflection of the ‘groundswell’ now. Responses to The Indy’s campaign show in fact it is an issue that a large and broad range of people care about and what action on. The next section of her speech was on ensuring that the case for electoral reform had to be made on principles – “we must do it to help democracy, not ourselves�. We are “not going to rig the system in our favour�. True and good. But Peter Hain took the same position yet he was happy to come out in favour of the Alternative Vote and push for it, even as a Cabinet Minister. Harriet shows no signs of making any similar moves. Also, John himself had given the example of how Lib Dems might lose out under some circumstances or types of reform, yet he was still in favour of PR no matter.

Where Harriet really began to become unstuck was on, as John phrased it, “the fundamental problem of [voters] not getting what they wanted�. She referred to opinion polls to illustrate that a Lab government with a reduced majority was the option that people in such polls preferred. Hmm. Opinion polls or a nationwide election at which only just over 1 in 5 of those eligible voted for Labour – which one can you discern most from? Harriet’s argument is also bogus as if there were just a few hundred votes more for the Conservatives in a handful of constituencies, suddenly the result looks a lot different and a Lab majority wafer-thin at best. Another counter, as one of the MPs in an intervention pointed out, is that you don’t vote for a government anyway, you vote to decide which person (or party candidate) you want representing your area at the national level.

And then came the unanswerable question: “if 35% share of the vote is counted as fine for forming a legitimate government, what percentage would be deemed unsatisfactory for that purpose�. In other words, ‘how low can we go’? Ouch! No real way of getting out of that trap – except to say well that is how the current system works, and for elections under it we just have to accept that. So there. Ha! Except she didn’t make that point; not really surprising since it was a room full of electoral reformers and also she seemed incapable of voicing her opinion anyway.

Anyway, after this rather uncomfortable patch, Harriet managed to steer the debate away from the pit she had dug for herself. Oh, and then she jumped right back in it. This time it was about turnout and the argument expressed by some reformers that pr boosts turnout. The very learned John Hemming MP gave us a summary of his report into turnout in G8 countries and the positive effect of PR. Now we all know that turnout is based on a number of factors and that electoral reform would not be a panacea. And the speakers all conceded this. Yet Harriet seemed not to consider that a fairer voting system for Westminster was part of the solution at all; or at least not sufficiently to consider it. It could not have escaped her attention –I believe it was even pointed out in the debate – that there was a very noticeable difference in turnout between the most competitive seats (marginals) and the safe seats in this – and other previous – elections.

To finish with Harriet made cursory references to the manifesto commitment on holding a review of new electoral systems – she repeated the manifesto text word for word – and that was that. What was missing from this debate was anyone making the case for the review to be conducted in an open and constructive review manner. MPs of any party, we are waiting ……

Essay comp runner-up #3

Posted by pauldavies on June 14, 2005 | Comments (0)

How can voting reform rejuvenate British democracy?
by Katy Long, Cambridge

The British Parliament was once held up as the cradle of modern democracy. It was belief in its principles of representation that justified the make-up and oversaw the break-up of Empire. Recognising its powers of political incorporation, the early leaders of the British Labour movement chose to become MPs and not violent revolutionaries. Above all, the vote became the totemic symbol and the practical expression of the people’s will. Suffragists fought for the vote because it allowed representation and participation in government. To have the vote was to have a share of power.

Fast forward one hundred years, and it is impossible not to conclude that this democracy is in decline. The vote has lost its power to engage, to connect the electorate with the elected elite. In 2001 only 59 percent of the electorate voted; even fewer will do so today. Yet these depressing figures are symptomatic not of apathy, but of disillusion. Britain’s electoral system is failing its people; they are disempowered because the majority are in effect disenfranchised. For in this democracy not all things are equal, and particularly not the value of your vote. A Labour government will be elected to a third term on only a little over a third of the votes cast: their claim to represent the British people rings hollow. A handful of voters in a handful of marginal constituencies will call the election; the rest of the British electorate’s votes count for much less. The cynical will make tactical decisions, forced to make strategy take precedence over substance. The link between the people and political power has been broken: the vote no longer offers a share of government; for many it no longer offers even a choice of government. This has dangerous consequences; removed from an alienated electorate, governments can afford arrogance: who, after all, are they really representing?

If this democratic decline is to be reversed, the principles of choice and representation must be restored. Above all, there must be electoral reform. Only a change in the electoral system to one of proportional representation can return value to the vote and restore the electorate’s trust in the Parliamentary system by underlining that government service the people and not vice versa. Under a system of PR, there would be no more wasted votes, no more “safe� seats, no need to vote tactically. Every vote would carry equal weight. The principles of representation would also be strengthened; with votes redistributed until one candidate gained 50 percent of votes, no candidate could be elected without at least the passive support of a majority of the electorate.

In Parliament, PR would break the two-party system by helping to translate votes into seats. The elections of the last 25 years have repeatedly demonstrated that the full spectrum of British political opinion is not encompassed within a Conservative-Labour division; yet these are the limits of the choice the present electoral system offers. Real choice would be provided by PR; if 20 percent of the electorate chose to vote Green as in 1987, this would result in Parliamentary representation and an opportunity for participation in government. Political campaigns could no longer succeed by cultivating the culture of fear that has dominated this election. Instead of dispirited Labour voters turning out at the polls to vote Labour only because a Conservative victory is worse, politics could return to the positive, to ideals and ideas, because the choice offered by PR would empower the voters to set the political agenda, rather than the politicians.

Through loosening the grip of the two main parties on power and ushering in a multi-party system, PR would have a profoundly democratising effect on Parliament’s political culture. Change in the make-up of Parliament would force a move away from the adversarial system of today which emphasises criticism and rewards attack. Democracy would be strengthened because of the renewed importance of dialogue in a PR Parliament: politics would no longer be concerned so much with competition as with consent. Reduced majorities in government (under AV+, the 1997 election would have seen a Labour majority of 77, rather than a landslide majority of 179) would help limit the worst excesses of powerful governments – as seen so clearly in the controversies of Labour’s second term.

Above all, electoral reform would re-open a dialogue between the British people and the British political elite. It is this sense of the distance between government and people that has most damaged British democracy in the last 25 years: once in power, governments have a habit of appealing to those they represent only at opportune moments, with MPs representing party rather than constituents. Under PR, the government’s hold on power would be far more fragile: core voters alone could not return a party to government, so the wider electorate would regain its significance and through this its power to influence politics and effect change.

Of course, it is easy to dismiss discussion of electoral reform as a pointless fixation upon an unobtainable ideal. PR has its own flaws, from the possible party domination of “list� systems to the potential loss of the constituency link. Electoral reform at Westminster is also highly unlikely, for a party that had won a majority under FPTP would then have to vote to dismantle that electoral system and embrace an alternative that offers far less security in terms of future power to the major political parties: witness Labour’s dropping of their PR pledge following the 1997 election. Why waste political energy on a pipe-dream?

Yet it is precisely this act of legislating for electoral reform that would most rejuvenate British democracy. If a governing party were to acknowledge the fundamental flaws inherent in the current electoral system, and introduce PR in its place, the principles of democratic governance would have been placed ahead of party interests and the perpetuation of political power. It is difficult to conceive of any other political act that could so easily indicate a commitment to governing in the interests of the people, rather than the politicians. Trust in the motivations of government would be restored. And it is this loss of trust, this loss of belief in the meaning of British democracy, that most threatens our democratic future. If all power corrupts, introducing PR would be one indication that power is not the sole object of the British political game.

Assuming a Labour victory of some description tonight, the majority of the country will awake on 6 May disillusioned, even despairing, victims of an electoral system that acts in the interests of a two-party political elite and disenfranchises millions across Britain. The so-called triumph of our liberal democracy will remain a false claim as long as our own electoral system separates power from the people. Electoral reform could provide the foundations from which to change this. If Blair’s Labour Party truly wishes to regain the trust of the electorate following their alienation during his second term, and build a legacy worthy of a “People’s� Government, they can do no better than to act upon their own rhetoric and initiate the process of electoral reform: even if it comes at the price of their majority.

Essay comp runner-up #2

Posted by pauldavies on June 14, 2005 | Comments (0)

How can voting reform rejuvenate British democracy?
by Jessica Harvey-Smith, London

If FIFA announced they were turning the World Cup into an eight-a-side tournament with giant goals and no offside rule, it would provoke a huge and very angry public debate. Altering the rules would completely change the nature and character of the game. Football just wouldn’t be the same.

But propose a change to the rules of general elections – the precious chance we have to influence who governs us – and you reveal yourself as a tedious nerd or political anorak.

The system we use to count the votes at general elections in this country does not only influence who wins and who loses. It perverts the meaning of our votes. It forces parties to concentrate on a small number of voters in marginal seats. It discourages millions of people from voting altogether. Changing the rules of the voting game is not an academic exercise: it would shake up the whole political system for the better.

If you live in a marginal seat and support one of the parties in contention, our current first-past-the-post system offers simplicity and accountability. You can cast a positive vote for your favoured party and make a difference to the result. If the winning MP or their party does not live up to expectations, you can get rid of them next time around.

For everyone else, the UK voting system offers second-best choices. If you live in an area where your chosen party is not in the running, the temptation is to vote tactically and prevent the party you like least from winning. The alternative is to back your first-choice party despite knowing you will have no impact on the final result. For millions of people, the only option is a negative vote or a wasted vote.

It is well known that first-past-the-post affects the way that votes are counted. The rewards are disproportionate with larger parties gaining seats at the expense of smaller parties. Labour received 42% of the vote in 2001 but almost two thirds of the seats. There is also a significant geographical bias against the Conservatives. Because their vote is concentrated in rural areas with higher turnout, it takes around 52000 votes to elect a Tory MP but only 26000 to elect a Labour MP. The Conservatives would now need to beat Labour by as much as 10% of the national vote to gain an overall majority in parliament.

So the traditional debate over electoral reform is between proportionality and accountability. Many people know that our system is statistically unfair but feel that it is a price worth paying for retaining an accountable local MP rather than some irremovable careerist at the top of a party list. One party, with one manifesto, can offer strong government and be held accountable for its performance. Pure proportionality would lead to permanent coalition and perpetual back-room deals.

This analysis underestimates the scale of the problem. Our electoral system affects not just how votes are counted, but how they are cast. An ICM poll in April 2005 illustrated the scale of the distortion. If people thought the Liberal Democrats could win in their constituency, 39% said they would back the Lib Dems, 31% Labour and 26% the Conservatives. Yet only 22% intended to vote Liberal Democrat in the general election. In other words, the way in which the system frames the electoral choice actually changes many people’s voting intentions. This must frustrate the Liberal Democrats but it should concern all of us. Millions of genuine preferences are never recorded because we have an incentive to vote negatively rather than waste our vote on a losing candidate.

Understanding this, Labour has rallied its potential supporters in 2005 with the battle cry that a vote for anyone but Blair represents a vote for Michael Howard. Yet the possibility of a Conservative victory on a minority of the vote is partly down to their own neglect. In 1997, the Labour manifesto promised a referendum on electoral reform. A more proportional system, such as that designed by the late Lord Jenkins but never put to the people, would encourage people to vote for the party they genuinely wish to support. We still have our rational choice shaped by an accident of whether enough likeminded people share our political preferences within arbitrary constituency boundaries.

What kind of mandate can the prime minister claim, having won by persuading people to vote tactically against the Conservatives rather than actively supporting Labour? If the basis for strong government and the local representation of constituents by MPs is gained through tactical voting, one of the major arguments for retaining first-past-the-post falls.

Electoral reform is not just about fairer general elections. It would have a profound influence on policy. The two major influences on any party’s platform are philosophy and strategy. What the Conservatives would ideally like to do in government is tempered by the necessity of appealing to a minority of voters in the hundred most marginal Labour seats. Under a more proportional system, there is an equal incentive to gain every single vote, wherever that voter lives. It magnifies the range of options open to strategists and removes the necessity to head for the perceived centre ground.

It is no accident that general election turnout is an average 10% higher in countries with proportional representation. In Britain, the areas with the lowest turnout are among the safest Labour seats. Over a hundred thousand Conservative voters in Merseyside and a hundred thousand Labour supporters in Surrey have not a single representative to show between them. Their admirable display of civic pride is entirely ineffectual. Under PR, everybody has a meaningful vote which contributes something towards the final result. Furthermore, supporters of small parties with nationwide support like the Greens and UKIP would have a greater incentive to mobilise their minority electorate and face a more realistic prospect of seeing their chosen representatives in parliament.

The mitigating factor here is coalition. In Britain, the most likely result of a proportional system would be Lib/Lab coalition, following the example of the Scottish parliament. If this continued indefinitely, it would represent a denial of choice. This is a major criticism of PR.

However, it assumes a static political scene. Parties could adapt to the new system by realigning. Whereas the current system provides overwhelming incentives to stay unified, a proportional system allows former parties to separate when important philosophical differences emerge. When the Labour party split in the early eighties, it and the new SDP/Liberal Alliance together received over 50% of the vote but were savaged by Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives due to first-past-the-post. The Tories, bitterly divided over Europe through the 1990s, held the party together but only by suppressing its traditional pro-European wing. The logic of the current system is that splits are fatal and dissent is dangerous. A more proportional system would allow a plurality of voices to co-exist within parliament. Complaints about centralisation, presidential politics, command and control miss the point. Our winner-takes-all system forces parties down that road. By changing the rules of the game, we can encourage parties to embrace their differences and appeal to different people in pursuit of the maximum possible vote.

The health of our democracy is partly shaped by our electoral rules. Behind many of the most common complaints about British politics lie the rational actions of political parties in pursuit of electoral victory. Reform would reach out to non-voters and people outside the key marginals. It would end the perverse choice millions face between a negative vote and a wasted vote. It would restore meaning to our political voices and make our votes count.

Essay comp runner-up #1

Posted by pauldavies on June 14, 2005 | Comments (1)

How can voting reform rejuvenate British democracy?
by Tom Cutterham, Tunbridge Wells

If I were a year older, and had a vote, why would I use it? I live in one of the safest Tory constituencies in the country. My vote for anyone other than the Conservatives won’t help my chosen party get more seats in Parliament. It won’t help anyone with anything. And if I did vote for the Conservatives, that vote wouldn’t help them much either: no matter how big their majority here, it doesn’t help them win seats anywhere else. It’s the same for an estimated 98% of us. The election is a matter of geography, and it leaves most of us with no choice and no say.

There are a few solutions. One of them is an epic campaign to subvert electoral geography, and something like it is already being undertaken in the USA, called the Free State Project. The idea is to get 20,000 American “pro-liberty activists� to move to the state of New Hampshire, where they will decisively sway the vote at every level of state government in favour of, as the campaign organisation puts it, “the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of life, liberty, and property.� Campaign literature claims they’re only another 13,530 people from their goal.

If Tunbridge Wells’ 9,729 superfluous Tory voters from 2001 strategically moved to Labour’s slimmest marginals, they’d swing 11 seats, from Dorset South to Bexleyheath & Crayford, while keeping Tunbridge Wells. If voters moved house in order to squeeze the most effectiveness from their vote, the House of Commons would be a lot closer to genuinely representing people’s political values.

Probably not going to happen, right? Instead of moving house, how about moving just your vote, by swapping it with someone in a different constituency? Voters can pair up to get the best possible effectiveness from each of their votes, using websites like tacticalvoter.net. So take two Tory seats: in one, the Lib Dems are a close second, in the other Labour. A Labour supporter in the first seat can promise to vote Liberal Democrat, in exchange for a Lib Dem in the second voting Labour.

In 2001, the Conservative seat of Cheadle fell to the Liberal Democrats by just 33 votes. According to the New Scientist, “online vote trading had seen 47 Labour supporters in Cheadle agree to vote Lib Dem. There was a similar result in South Dorset, where a Labour majority of 153 followed 185 internet vote-trade pledges.�

Vote trading is like tactical voting, but more efficient, because you know (or at least, you hope) that someone elsewhere in the country is doing the same thing in favour of your party. In expanding it beyond the realm of glorified tactical voting, vote trading encounters problems. Tories are disadvantaged by it, because whereas Labour and the Lib Dems are broadly left-wing, the Conservatives are alone, among major parties, on the right. Their voters are less likely to find willing trading partners.

Moreover, vote trading doesn’t deal sufficiently with the problem of superfluous votes: trading only usually makes sense if it can grant your party victory, if not in your own constituency then somewhere. There is an exception, namely in the case of small parties and protest votes. In the USA’s Presidential election of 2000, supporters of left-wing third-party candidate Ralph Nader found that in states where Gore and Bush were close, their vote for Nader might hand victory to Bush. By trading their votes with Democrats in states where Gore was likely to have plenty of superfluous votes, they could register their support for Nader without contributing to a Bush victory. UKIP and Green supporters, for example, might consider something similar when their favoured major party is under threat by the “back door�.

But there’s still a more effective solution to the geography problem: proportional representation. By combining constituencies into larger, multi-member super-constituencies, and choosing MPs for them based on their proportion of the vote, rather than winner-takes-all, every major group of voters is represented and every vote is effective. Small parties can actually win seats, not just percentage points, and nobody need move house.

By striking a balance on the size of super-constituencies, we can ensure representation on local issues, as well as political representation on a national scale. At the moment, there is no balance, and the result is that the composition of Parliament bears only a warped resemblance to the political landscape of the country. Last election, the Liberal Democrats got 18% of the votes, and only 8% of the seats. Labour got 41% of the votes, 63% of the seats. Attacking that disparity, putting more effectiveness into every vote and making each one worthwhile, has to be a priority.

And that’s not the whole story. First-past-the-post is a system developed for strong government. That is, the kind of strong government that can push through top-up fees and detention without trial, despite significant numbers of its own MPs siding against it. Strong government means legislative unaccountability, and massive power for the executive. Proportional representation means the opposite: a balance of power often based on coalition or minority government. Governments in that situation would have to fight for their policies, winning over MPs with genuine Parliamentary and national debate.

Make every vote count in Parliament, and the parties will be forced to engage decisively with ideology and policy. Make every vote count on a national level, and smaller parties will be able to bring their own ideas to Parliament, and put them forward at the same level as the major parties.

Parliamentary debate will put the arguments of minority parties like the Greens and UKIP under more pressure than they would otherwise ever face. Leave these groups on the sidelines, and their core supporters will always be on the fringes of democracy, their ideas unchallenged and ignored by the majority. Let them in on a reformed, competitive Parliamentary process and those policies will be exposed to national debate, and understood by all for their merits and disadvantages.

It’s not just the small parties who’ll benefit from spreading power more evenly across the country. The major parties will no longer have to focus their policies so narrowly on the 2% of voters who will decide an election under first-past-the-post. There’s a lot more room for risk-taking in an electorate of around 45 million, even enough that parties can get their political and economic convictions back out of the closet and stop wearing each other’s clothes.

Proportional representation means greater balance of power, greater range of ideas, greater power to the individual voter. It will take all of these things to rejuvenate British democracy. Voting reform is not the whole solution, but it has the potential to spark greater change in our political establishment. It’ll be an epic campaign of our own to get a party in government to change the system that put it there, but real representation is worth it.

And the winner is...

Posted by pauldavies on June 14, 2005 | Comments (0)

Friends, voters, countrymen... lend me your ears.

It's taken a little longer than expected, but we have a winner in our mighty essay competition. And his name is Andrew Turner. Congratulations Andrew. £1000 will be with you in ten days or so.

The four shortlisted essays were all very impressive, and as such, I'm going to share them with you: the three runners-up today, and the winning entry tomorrow. Enjoy.

Conservatives Call for Electoral Reform (but not PR)

Posted by pauldavies on June 13, 2005 | Comments (0)

Ever felt like you've changed the world? Just a handful of days after I humbly suggested that the Conservatives might want to look at electoral reform, and what do we get?

A piece in The Times, something in the Scotsman, ePolitix ran with it too, there is even coverage from Spain. Not forgetting, of course, the Conservatives' own website.

OK, so the grounds for me claiming credit on this one are pretty slim, but politics is all about delusion, so it's mine. All mine.

Of course, they're not exactly looking at changing the voting system, and they are talking about boundaries again. Which we all know by now is shirking the issue.

According to Google, the story only really broke a couple of hours ago, so I expect there'll be plenty more in the papers tomorrow. So be prepared: write your letters to the papers now, explaining that the boundary changes really won't help the boys in blue an awful lot, because of the Labour vote distribution etc etc... (details via three of the above links, or search for 'boundaries' in the box on the left).

Also, if your local MP happens to be a Conservative, write to them, explain the shortcomings of a boundaries-focussed argument. They've made this an issue, it would be rude not to make sure they were as well-informed as they could be.

Help Brian Eno change the world

Posted by pauldavies on June 13, 2005 | Comments (0)

Tell the world "I’ll do it, but only if you’ll help me do it"

The wonderful chaps at mySociety have launched yet another cool little initiative. This one's called Pledgebank, and it's class.

quoth mySociety director Tom Steinberg:

"We all know what it is like to feel powerless, that our own actions can't really change the things that we want to change. PledgeBank is about beating that feeling..."

Brian Eno has helped launch the site, and he's done so by pledging to join the groundswell and getting his friends to follow suit. Have a look and tell your friends.

Why British Politics Conspires Against The Conservatives

Posted by pauldavies on June 09, 2005 | Comments (5)

For a lot of people, it’s hard to ever feel sorry for the Conservatives; they are, after all, a menacing, mendacious pack of political hyenas, feeding off the carcasses of the working classes, laughing hysterically all the way back to their homes in Knightsbridge. Or so says the Big Book of Easy Political Clichés.

So effective has the post-Thatcher Tory-baiting been, and such was the Iron Lady’s influence in destroying her own party that treating the Conservatives as a disunited group of political punchlines and nincompoops has become somewhat ingrained on the nation’s political psyche. This is sadly as old-fashioned and distorting as the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system that rounds on the boys in blue like a Liverpudlian.

Any way you care to measure it, the electoral system favours Labour. It didn’t always, but now it does, and it’s never been this bad before. If it were just the fundamental power that FPTP places in the hands of the incumbents, no one could really complain – it’s that way for a reason (however spurious) and is equally unfair in favour of whichever party is in charge. However, this is not the case; the oddities of FPTP work in favour of Labour and regional favourites in Northern Ireland and against just about everybody else – not least the Conservatives.

Although it is often said that apathy helps the Conservatives, the massive drop in turnout seen in 2001, and sustained this year, merely made Labour’s vote distribution even more efficient, further highlighting how the odds are unashamedly stacked in their favour.

FPTP discriminates against parties whose support is spread across the country and also those parties that rack up massive majorities in certain core areas. The best scenario is, therefore, to have ‘lumpy’ support – moderately high enough to win a seat in some areas, and low where you don’t stand a chance. This is exactly how Labour’s voters are distributed.

This is in part due to luck, but also due to the fact that Conservative voters are more inclined to go the polls, even when they know their candidate will be returned with a thumping majority, thus piling up towers of useless votes in traditional Tory strongholds.

When turnout fell from 71.5% in 1997 to 59.4% in 2001, a large proportion of the fall came from safe Labour seats, which ultimately made no difference to the result. Conversely, the Labour vote in the marginals it had won from the Conservatives in 1997 held up remarkably well.

The idea of efficient vote distribution can be illustrated by comparing Northamptonshire and Liverpool between 1992 and 2001. Labour lost about 40,000 votes in Liverpool between 1992 and 2001, yet they still safely held all the seats in the region. In Northamptonshire, by contrast, Labour's vote rose by just 13,000, which was enough to rob the Conservatives of five of the six seats up for grabs.

The Conservatives lose out on efficiency of vote distribution, but not nearly as badly as the Lib Dems, who despite receiving 22% of the vote, nabbed only 9.6% of the seats. UKIP can also feel aggrieved: they polled more than twice the number of votes of the DUP, but have no members of parliament, compared to the DUP’s nine.

Perhaps the most publicised feature of the system working against the Tories is the biased state of the constituency boundaries. There is a bias, and the average Labour seat currently has about 5,500 fewer electors in it than the average Conservative one, thus meaning it took fewer votes to elect a Labour MP. However, in 1979, the gap was even worse, but the system as a whole was fairer, suggesting that other factors are more instrumental in skewing the system towards Labour.

If the 2005 general election had been fought under the now updated boundaries, it would only have meant an extra dozen or so seats going to the Conservatives. The next general election will be fought under updated boundaries, but by the time this comes round, the data will already be the best part of a decade out of date.

Either way, it’s simply not that important, but it offers a nice way for Conservative MPs to complain about the iniquity of the system, without having to address the voting system, or admit to their substantial image-related failings.

The image problem that has beset the Tories since goodness-knows-when is well-documented, but its effects, which have grown in stature since 1992, are rarely elucidated upon. With the increase in tactical voting over the last decade, however, the problem is as big an electoral issue for the Conservative vote-share as boundaries and shifting demographics.

The cult of criticism that built up around the Thatcher and Major governments following the poll tax and Black Wednesday has done as much to bury the Tories as a serious political force as Tony Blair’s charm has. Preying on a public scared by the hobgoblins of street rioting and 15% interest rates, the Lib Dems conspired with Labour to keep the Conservatives out of power.

YouGov’s election analyst Peter Kellner estimated that anti-Tory tactical voting deprived the Tories of 43 seats in 2001. And while the blue vote has remained as barren as the successive leaders’ heads, tactical voting has blossomed.

In recent years, the Conservatives have faced further problems from the more minor parties, but this time the problems have arisen on the right. If UKIP and Veritas had supported the Tories on May 5th, the Tories would’ve won another 27 seats.

Tactical voting is carried out because in many areas, voting for who you really support is either pointless, or dangerous, or both; we all remember Tony’s scare stories about how going to bed with Charlie meant you woke up with Michael. On a crude level, therefore, changing to a preferential system, such as STV, should be amenable to the Conservatives, as it encourages positive voting, rather than these negative anti-Tory shenanigans.

However, if there is one thing that you can count on in the discussion about voting systems, it is that crudity gets you nowhere.

A system that allows you to rank candidates, and thus represents the complicated will of the nation better than FPTP could easily work against the Tories more than the current system, so one can understand their reluctance to embrace change. Better the devil you know and all that.

The trouble comes because just as FPTP distorts the votes cast into seats won, preferential voting distorts people’s actual feelings. Like most decisions which allow emotion too great a sway, anti-Tory sentiment is prone to getting a little out of hand. Despite the arguable point that New Labour is as close, if not closer to the Conservatives than the Lib Dems, a large proportion of Labour voters would rank Labour and the Lib Dems ‘1’ and ‘2’, before placing the Tories at the bottom, below both the Monster Raving Loony candidate and the local farmer campaigning for the right to marry his goat.

This is taken further by people like Jonathan Freedland, who have argued that PR is the best way to keep the Tories out of power indefinitely.

But just as militant members of the Left are prejudiced by emotion, staunch right-wing supporters of FPTP are shackled by inertia and atavism.

There is another way. In a top-up system, such as the one proposed by the 1998 Jenkins Commission, the Tories would likely get most of the ‘extra’ MPs, elected to make sure that parliament more accurately reflects the popular vote shares.

It might not be perfect, and from a Tory perspective it might be no better than FPTP, but it demands to be looked at, at the very least.

Proportional representation has already saved the Tory party in Scotland and in Wales, it could yet save them in Westminster too.

The Tories clearly aren’t the incompetent ignoramuses they’re made out to be, or at least not all of them are, and certainly no more so than any other party. They’re not even (Widdecombe aside) characters from a horror story that parents tell to frighten their children.

They are, however, a little scared of the public. And of change. So a change that gives the public more say makes many Conservatives rather hesitant. Hesitancy, however, is no way to win power, unless you merely wait for the opposition to mess things up. But hoping that Gordon will take the Labour party far enough back to the left to re-inherit the voters that jumped aboard bandwagon Tony back in 1997 is probably wishful thinking. The Chancellor will have waited for a decade for his chance to be PM, when he presumably takes over in a few years’ time; he’s not going to risk blowing it straight away by alienating the middle-classes.

The Tories, it would appear, haven’t yet spent long enough in opposition to bother looking seriously at the ways in which the system they so ardently support is so prejudiced against them. It obviously didn’t matter when they were in power, then the natural choice for the next Tory leader turned up on the other side, while a succession of odd little bald men led the party from one embarrassing defeat to another. They may yet spend another generation in the political wilderness, but looking at all the possible solutions, including electoral reform, would surely be a good idea.

Electoral Reform: Proven Goodness

Posted by pauldavies on June 09, 2005 | Comments (0)

What the Independent has done for the cause of voting reform is marvellous. However, and through no fault of their own, it is perhaps a little too marvellous.

You see, we, or rather the campaign, could do with a little more ammunition from the other papers. Trouble is, voting reform has become the Indy’s ‘thing’, thereby scaring the other papers away somewhat. Even the Guardian, which, propelled by Polly and Robin Cook, led the way pre-election, has been noticeably quiet on the issue of late.

What the other papers need to realise, either one by one, or altogether, is that this debate is fundamentally a Good Thing. Like highlighting Galloway’s goings-on; or mocking fat people.

Luckily we have proof; iron-clad, impenetrable proof that what we are doing is Right: we’ve pissed off the government whips. Anything that sticks in the craw of a snivelling, weasly, yes-man, dogsbody who epitomises all that is sickening about career politicians has to be not just good, but positively angelic.

So I give you ‘Labour clamps down on politicians who speak out for electoral reform’, courtesy of Marie Woolf.

"The whips didn't like me carrying on about the Government's mandate. They was fed up by that. They were not best pleased," he said. "But the voting system belongs to the public not the politicians and it would be wrong to try to relegate an issue like this to a hole-in-the-corner private review."

Now either Marie or Lipsey needs to work on their grammar, unless Lipsey said it deliberately in a faux-simpleton manner, which, unfortunately, doesn’t translate too well over the pages of a newspaper.

Either way, it’s another good article, so read it, and if you haven’t already, sign the Independent’s petition.

And for those of you still wondering whether Tony really doesn’t care about anyone but himself, or whether it was just an ugly rumour (sorry), I direct you to half way down Simon Hoggart’s column today:

There was a wonderfully revealing moment when the Tory leader pro tem said Mr Straw's statement on the matter had been unclear. "He made it clear enough to me," snapped Mr Blair, "and that's all that counts!"

As we suspected - the rest of us don't matter. Mr Straw had been speaking to an audience of one, and that one was perfectly happy.

Even for Simon’s immeasurably high standards, the whole thing is genius this morning, so take five minutes and make yourself laugh...

...at JP:

Did he think that the deputy prime minister thumping people in the street, and swearing at MPs in Commons corridors, helped to foster a culture of respect?

"I thought it was particularly unfortunate that that young thug who attacked my Rt Hon friend, who is of course of pensionable age..."

The notion of Mr Prescott as some frail senior citizen stooping along the pavement only to have his pension ripped from his hands by mullet-sporting hooligans was silly enough to keep the house happy for quite some time. Mr Prescott glowered aggressively. He is someone who can strut angrily while sitting still.

Names and Faces

Posted by pauldavies on June 08, 2005 | Comments (0)

The Friday Night Armistice once offered a truck-load of money to anyone in their audience who could name certain members of the Tory party. Obviously no one succeeded. But has it got any easier?

Play 'name that Tory' courtesy of the BBC website here.

And thanks to Mr Smithson at politicalbetting for prompting the game.

Anyone getting more than about six or seven right should probably look to get out more.

The inescapable and unholy Evil of party poltics

Posted by pauldavies on June 08, 2005 | Comments (1)

If I were a cynical man, I might suggest that Anne Campbell’s comments, as transcribed in the Independent today, were like blood coughed up after an electoral beating, tinged by bitterness and scorn and spoken with artificially heightened emotion.

But despite appearances, I’m only moderately cynical (on a good day) so I’ll say she has a point, albeit a slightly spurious one put across in a rather more austere manner than might be deemed necessary.

The gist of the article, ‘Labour will be defeated without PR, says ex-MP’, is that PR would guarantee that the Tories are kept out of power for the foreseeable future. Sigh. Why does something so good and healthy such as the need to change a biased and really rather repulsive electoral system have to get caught up in the Genuinely Evil web of party politics?

PR might kill the Tories. It might save them. Similarly for the Lib Dems, and Labour. Thanks to the distorting mess created by FPTP, we don’t really know, but it would be jolly interesting to find out.

The former Labour MP, who lost her Cambridge seat at the general election after 13 years in Parliament, said she would have held her constituency if the election had been held under PR.

She blamed the first-past-the-post system for helping those who wanted to "teach Blair a lesson" over Iraq.

Not helpful. One of the much-vaunted (and staggeringly rare) good things of FPTP is that you can kick out an MP if you feel like it, rather than having them hang around pretending they’re still wanted. Also, people wanted to “teach Blair a lesson� and they did. Some people have used the result to say that we got what we wanted because however screwed up this system is, we now know how to play it to get what we want. It’s a strong case and one that could quite easily win over the portion of the population who are too lazy to think, so let the Murdochs and the Dacres of the world do it for them, especially if it keeps getting aired (like I’m doing now).

This misses the point, however. Under FPTP we are severely limited in our choice – so many votes are wasted in so many constituencies because they have no bearing on the overall result. Getting the ‘right result’ but under the wrong circumstances is not a positive; at best it’s an indifference. For a start, we got a bit lucky, votes were often based on second-guessing what others were doing, who in turn were second-guessing things themselves. It hides the fact that Labour could have been returned with a majority of seats on the second or even the third highest number of votes. It also hides the facts that millions of people were effectively disenfranchised, that the campaigning amounted to who could con the biggest amount of people with IQs under 70 by saying absolutely nothing but in the most threatening/and or charming way… etc etc… you know the score.

Ms Campbell did at least mention that FPTP was anti-politics, that the rules of the game had forced Labour to abandon its core vote, while it chased the centre ground in the marginals, safe in the knowledge that most of the core would vote Labour anyway and those that didn’t didn’t matter.

Which type of voting system are you?

Posted by pauldavies on June 07, 2005 | Comments (0)

Those nice folks from Who Should You Vote For have come up with an ingenious little quiz to tell you which of the more popular voting systems you prefer.

Go look.

Sadly, 'Meritocratic Revolution' is not one of the options.

'Transition to PR system is inevitable - and it has begun'

Posted by pauldavies on June 07, 2005 | Comments (0)

The post-election bubble of enthusiasm that surrounded calls for electoral reform hasn’t so much burst, as it has been let down gently and left to form an impenetrable crust of chagrin atop the pile of possible prime ministerial policy. It’s only a matter of time say the signs, or rather, the experts interpreting the signs.

Experts such as ‘Britain’s leading authority on voting systems’, Professor Patrick Dunleavy of the LSE, who provides today’s ammunition for the Independent’s latest assault on Fortress FPTP.

Professor Dunleavy's analysis of voting patterns found that the establishment of a "multi-party" system - which traditionally precedes the move from a first-past-the-post voting system to PR - "has already happened" in Britain.

Evidence from other countries which have switched to PR show that the establishment of a multi-party system is the precursor to electoral reform. Government or "incumbent elites" delay switching to PR until they "are forced to do so by the electorate".

That last sentence is a little hazy: ‘forced to do so by the electorate’. This could be directly, as in marching round the walls of the fortress making lots of noise in a fall-of-Jericho-esque way (only less ficticious), or indirectly, as in the ‘incumbent elites’ getting a bit scared they might get kicked out of power, and seeing a change in the system as the best way to avoid another bout of wilderness years.

Either way, there’s not a lot we can do about the latter, and there’s no harm in pursuing the former. Plans involving grass-roots activities are taking shape; to speed the process, give us your email via the homepage, and get your friends involved too – the more local groups we can establish, the better.

Fair Vote Watch

Posted by pauldavies on June 06, 2005 | Comments (2)

Some extra reformistesque fodder courtesy of Jarndyce of the Sharpener. 'It's not a blog, honest.' A global look at the spread of real democracy.

Link via the BritBlog roundup.

The Make Votes Count Essay Competition

Posted by pauldavies on June 03, 2005 | Comments (0)

A few of you have been in touch wondering what's going on with this...

The shortlist has been created and sent to the esteemed judges (David Lipsey and Polly Toynbee), who will pick a winner shortly. You might have to be slightly patient (David is currently in Wales, where they don't have printers, and Polly probably works very hard) but don't fret, for all will be revealed shortly.

I can however, destroy the hopes of most of you right now, by revealing that unless your name is Tom Cutterham, Katy Long, Jessica Harvey Smith or Andrew Turner, you're out. Thanks for trying though, some of them were hilarious (gramatically speaking :))

Greg Dyke sounds off in style

Posted by pauldavies on June 03, 2005 | Comments (0)

Greg Dyke doesn’t much like the government. He takes particular issue with Tony, and his unaccountableness, especially over Iraq.

With this in mind, you can probably guess what two-thirds of his piece in the Indy today is about. However, it’s a lovely little rant, and there’s nout wrong with them.

Also, he links the de facto dictatorship to the electoral system in a manner so casual you’d think everyone knew it by now.

Edited highlights:

What Mrs Thatcher and later, and to much greater effect, Tony Blair have both demonstrated is that a powerful - some would say ruthless - leader with a big majority in the Commons is largely unaccountable in our political system.

Lord Butler… summed up the failure of cabinet government in a recent interview with The Spectator: "The Cabinet now, and I don't think there is any secret about this, doesn't make decisions ... What happens now is that the Government reaches conclusions in rather small groups of people, and there is insufficient opportunity for other people to debate, dissent and modify."

In the same interview, Lord Butler also pointed up the second major failing of democracy in the time of the Blair government - the failure of the legislature to hold the executive in check. Any interest group or lobbyist trying to change a bad Bill knows only too well that their best chances are in the unelected House of Lords, where the Government whips are less effective and debate is more intelligent, rather than in the Commons where, in the last parliament, some terrible legislation was passed on the nod, pushed through by the whips.

And of course we will need proportional representation, if for no other reason than to assure every voter that their vote does matter.

Jack Straw would have a fit. It’s not unaccountable, it’s strong, quoth Jack. Whatever. Dyke makes a good point about the Lords being much more fit for government than parliament. They are, quite simply, although even that is being perverted by electing more and more party mouthpieces into the Upper House.

One or the other needs to reflect the public opinion, whatever that may be, given that FPTP distorts not only parliamentary power, but the way people feel obliged to vote.

I thought there’d be a lot more to say about Dyke’s piece, but it’s fairly comprehensive, and he doesn’t need me merely repeating and praising, so go read it in full, and have a nice day…

Parliamentary support swells

Posted by pauldavies on June 03, 2005 | Comments (0)

Anyone who’s ever walked past parliament square will no doubt have questioned the gun laws in this country. "There must be a case," you find yourself saying, "for allowing someone to shoot that noisome professional Angry Man with the loudspeaker who feels the need to do the whole country a disservice by not only causing a scene (in a distinctly un-British manner) but doing it in front of all the tourists." His days, however, are numbered. Democracy, being toothless as it is, has opted not for vigilante shooting, but a simple ban. And it only took four years to get round to it.

It’s probably going to take just as long, if not longer, to get around to changing the electoral system; and there isn’t even an easy sniper option.

Take heed, however, for the nice man from the Independent, Ben Russell, tells us that a growing number of people in the House are defying Lord Falconer and getting all excited about our cause. The opening salvo goes thus:

Tony Blair will face increased pressure from all parties next week for action to reform Britain's voting system. MPs are hoping to capitalise on a fresh wave of interest in electoral reform when they form a new all-party House of Commons campaign group next week.

Organisers of the Parliamentary All-Party Group on electoral reform, which campaigns for greater understanding of alternative voting systems, believe its 150-strong membership will be swelled because of renewed interest in proportional representation after an election which saw Labour returned on less than 36 per cent of the vote.

Campaigners believe many Labour MPs in newly marginal seats will swing behind reform because their narrow majorities have focused minds on the practical benefits of a change in the electoral system.

Read on, true believers.

And finally, for now at least (a Greg Dyke special is on the way), thine humble host, i.e. me, got a response to that crazy Digby fella printed in the Times.

Sadly they cut the bit that said "quite possibly the most specious piece of claptrap ever to make it to the letters page of a national newspaper… Its towering naivety is matched only by the wealth of evidence against his claim…" And I swear I didn’t use ‘nonsense’ twice, but then I was exposed for an inability to use dictionary.com earlier this week, so you never know.

It was, in truth, written as much by the anonymous letters man from the Times who edited the first bit, as it was by me, but I guess you can’t complain. I should’ve used the penalty analogy though, rather than keeping it for the blog and thus reaching a good few hundred thousand less people.

How long can we wait?

Posted by pauldavies on June 02, 2005 | Comments (0)

Tom Bentley, head honcho of Demos, mentioned on here yesterday, reckons that a change to the voting system is more than likely to happen within the next decade.

Speaking to the Independent, Mr Bentley highlights the significant changes that have taken place across the political landscape and argues that in order to embrace and work effectively within this new state of play, some form of proportional representation is required.

"Our politics duck the big and difficult issues like climate change and pensions reform but at the same time seems unable to put right even small things. It is not just new leaders but a new democratic settlement we need - a shift in the way we do democracy," said Mr Bentley.

Tom Bentley said Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, his likely successor, may resist PR now but their opposition will disappear after the next election.

Labour will be fighting for power in a very different political geography in the next five years.

Makes sense – Brown wants a decent majority to work with as a nascent PM – he can play around after that. From Gordon’s point of view, he should really concentrate on making sure the economy doesn’t go tits-up in the next couple of years, thus sacrificing the super marginals, and subsequently the government to the Tories.

And, given time, the salad-dodging simpleton placed in cursory command of the talks at the moment will have moved on, and those within the government capable of free thought will have caught up with the rest of us.

Alternatively, there is scope for a faster solution. Attack Tony with some trust serum, and convince him to sort it out now.

Can anyone say syllogism?

Posted by pauldavies on June 02, 2005 | Comments (1)

Lord Digby (who apparently isn't a real Lord) took time out of his busy schedule to write to the Times today, and his letter is so staggering in its speciousness, I feel obliged to share it in full.

Sir, In 1979 England was the sick man of Europe, with the “English disease�; Germany was its powerhouse. In 2005 England is the strongest economy in Europe, with high employment; Germany has its highest unemployment since the Weimar Republic.

No problems here, we've had 26 years of Thatcherism and modernisation, riding the elongated crest of the English-speaking wave that has engulfed the planet; Germany has had a decade of listening to David Hasselhoff.

Why? Europe has proportional representation, which means government by compromise. England has “first past the post�, which gives governments the power and time to fulfil their manifesto commitments.

I'm sorry? Either the Times chopped out 10,000 words from the middle of Digby's letter, or he's just made the biggest jump in reasoning since Hitler caught syphilis off a Jew and thus decided they should all be exterminated. And manifesto committments: committments like the one to hold a referendum on the voting system? New Labour has such a pitiful record on manifesto committments that they can't make them anymore, instead opting for vacuous bubbles of nonsense borrowed from satirists. New Labour: forever twirling towards freedom.

In 1945, Labour had the power to introduce the welfare state. Then came a period of consensus government ending with the winter of discontent. The “English disease� could only be solved by a government with the power to take unpopular measures. When that job had been completed by Mrs Thatcher, new Labour was voted in with power to carry on all the key parts of the Thatcher revolution, which enabled Tony Blair to concentrate on rebuilding the welfare state, without socialist dogma.

He has a point about needing the power to take unpopular measures: Britain was in a bad place in the 70s, after all. And Thatcher, despite her almost unparalled unpopularity, turned the country around. She also used her 'strong' government to try and give us the poll tax. Minor point. But this isn't the 70s, thank god. We no longer have strict two-party politics, and a country in need of being dragged out of the gutter. We have multi-party politics and a population increasingly disengaged with the whole caboodle.

None of this could have happened under proportional representation.

I forget this bit: proportional representation stops anything happening ever. Except when it doesn't, like in Scotland. Some other things that couldn't have happened under PR: 60% turnouts, postal voting fraud, tactical voting, the most disillusioned electorate ever, elections decided by a handful of special people who vote for whoever bribes/cons them most effectively.

In case any of you feel like writing to the alleged Lord, his address is:
DIGBY,
Minterne,
Dorchester
Dorset
DT2 7AU

Please note: Make Votes Count in no way encourages using this information for malicious purposes, such as signing him up to disreputable mailing lists or sending round some anchovy pizzas.

Over the last 25 years or so, Germany has lost only one penalty shoot-out. England has only won one. Why? They had PR of course. Digby-brand logic people: it's marvellous.

Why we get the politicians we deserve

Posted by pauldavies on June 01, 2005 | Comments (0)

A new pamphlet by Tom Bentley of Demos, mentioned briefly on this blog t'other day.

I'm yet to read it in any sort of detail, but I'll bet it's worth it anyway.

Go forth and discover, children.

Ode to an ex-MP and a vision for the future

Posted by pauldavies on June 01, 2005 | Comments (0)

Trauma, a bereavement, a death in the family - all the defeated MPs talk about the initial shock of defeat in the same terms.

Thus the tone is set for the Guardian’s trip into the world of the unseated MP. It’s all rather maudlin, and I suppose should make you feel at least a little bit sorry for the poor souls, but to me it reads like a cheaply-made faux-documentary about homeless people with ‘The Streets of London’ playing in the background – the type of thing that Chris Morris would parody on Brass Eye – and therefore, I can’t help but chuckle.

The most revealing thing is that for some, and probably for many, the rejection of losing their seat is not all that different to the pariah status that comes with being a Labour MP who never gets invited to dine at Downing Street.

Take Helen Clark, Labour MP for Peterborough 1997-2005, for example:

The prime minister was remote, the chief whip hostile, New Labour increasingly distant from the party of Wilson and Castle with which she had grown up… "the chief whip told me, 'Tony Blair is not for the likes of you!'"

Makes you wonder if this constituency-link thing is all it’s cracked up to be – if the local MPs have such little sway over the national issues, the notion that they remain spokesmen for their constituents in the House is a little romantic. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but within the current structure of our government, it’s not great either.

It is a central tenet of our democracy that MPs should be the point of contact for ‘the people’ to address parliament.

However, most concerns put to MPs are, I expect, pithy, and can be adequately dealt with, as they are, by pro forma responses from volunteers in the constituency offices. This includes the ‘big issues’ on which everyone has an opinion: chances are the MP has heard it all before and taking account of anything more than the general air around an issue would be a big waste of time.

The voting reform bit

If MPs, like the former member for Peterborough, are only there as lobby fodder, malleable and ready to be whipped into line, they become stuck somewhere between real work in their local community and having a say in Westminster – it’s not especially efficient. Far better would be to make them concentrate on local governance, working in coalitions, elected proportionally from the community’s votes. Critics will argue that being able to get of a bad MP will become impossible if they just hang around as part of a coalition. Rubbish – it’s hard enough to get rid of a bad MP anyhow, as people are too often loath to vote against their party, however much of a Prescott their MP is.

It is much better to have one bad MP getting lost amid a coalition than one bad MP ruling by himself. In multi-member constituencies, the link between people and parliament would grow much stronger – votes would not just be cast for a party, they’d be cast for a person.

And the idea that coalition local governance would just lead to people passing the buck and becoming even more unaccountable is also fatuous. The people who want to stand for local councils etc seem to have a genuine desire to make their community better – and if more MPs were more like this, it would lessen that whole careerist disease that plagues the Commons.

As for deciding the national policies – easy – make the Lords more important – they are supposed to be rather intelligent after all, and if the number of party-free peers were increased as well, the whole system would likely become a far more efficient, far less bureaucratic force for good.

This isn’t all as far away as it may sound. Granted, the Lords bit is going in the opposite direction, and multi-member constituencies are unlikely, but the role of local government is being looked at in some detail by David Miliband, apparently.

For a start, those clever bits of software used so sordidly to hunt out the key voters in the election are now being put to good use.

By using a sophisticated mapping system through postcodes to track areas with particular problems, it has also identified 70 distinctive "communities" - from council estates to wealthy suburbs - with individual needs and priorities.

It is a model for other areas and is born, says Miliband, out of the need for efficiency, rather than the case for extending local democracy into a wider sphere. And he certainly accepts that, when it comes to joining up services, local government can teach Whitehall a thing or two.

He says: "I am basically a believer - a strong believer - that one of the lessons of history is that local coalitions are very important. The governing class cannot do it on its own. It needs to engage the business class, needs to engage citizens. You only develop coalitions around strong vision, which inspires, motivates, engages people a hundred times more than a piece of statute that commands a duty to do X, Y or Z."

All good – local people have little or no business with national politics – on the whole they don’t understand it, and when too much attention is paid to them, policies which don’t immediately catch the imagination, but would benefit the country as a whole, are unceremoniously shelved.

So let the clever types and the experts deal with the big issues, leaving the politicians time to care about the small stuff that keeps the people happy and the political machine ticking over; there's thus no need for career politicians to be dealing out lowest-common-denominator rubbish and everyone gets more fairly represented in the areas that matter to them and to which they are best suited.

And while you're wandering about in this brave new world, remember:

If you see your ex-MP in the street, try to smile and say hello. Life outside Westminster can be cold and lonely.

What we will think of next?

Posted by ninatemple on June 01, 2005 | Comments (0)

Ever been to a cross stitching political demonstration?

Craftivists will be needling politicians outside Downing Street on Monday with a mass stitching of a MAKE MY CROSS COUNT slogan to stir up support for the Make My Vote Count campaign.

Electoral reform is a hot topic after this year's worst election ever - we'll be stitching to keep it in the public eye and under the politicians' noses.

Did you know that:
a.. For every person who voted Labour, almost two voted for other parties and two didn't vote at all?
b.. It took 26,877 votes to elect a Labour MP compared to 44,521 to elect a Conservative and 96,378 to elect a Lib Dem MP?
c.. In England, Labour polled 50,000 less votes than the Conservatives yet won 92 more seats?
d.. In Tony Blair's 1997 manifesto he promised a referedum on a change to the voting system, which he hasn't delivered?

Did you also know that cross stitching is fun? Please come and join in with crafters, activists, MPs and personalities.

Date: Monday 6th June (one month on from Labour's win)
Time: 7pm-9pm
Place: Richmond Terrace, on Whitehall, opposite Downing Street
Contact: Sonja Todd www.sewkits.co.uk