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April 27, 2006
Welcome to the world of Peter Hain (caution advised)
Peter Hain embodies almost all that we've come to know and love about New Labour. Indeed, given that he has already scaled the very summits of childish anger, blind stubbornness and insouciant imbecility, and given that he is as determined as ever to keep right on going along his pathetic path, he's now just one outrageous scandal away from joining the top table of red-tied apparatchiks.
Being one of the special ones in the Labour hierarchy is a bit like being a contestant on Mastermind. Everyone has the same skill base, topped up with a specialist knowledge that sets them apart from the rest. Mr Hain's specialist subject is evidence, or rather, why evidence doesn't matter in the slightest, because it's just not as important as the gunk that spills out of his own cerebral cells. Nowhere has this talent been utilised quite so superbly as over the question of dual candidacy in Wales.
So despite the fact that "the Assembly Government confirmed it held no evidence that regional list AMs were abusing their positions", and that "changes to the voting system have been rejected at Westminster, condemned by opposition parties, and heavily criticised by organisations such as the Electoral Commission and the Electoral Reform Society", Mr Hain has promised that the Commons will overturn a recent Lords vote that would allow individuals to carry on standing in both constituency seats and on regional lists." You see how this works?
Mr Hain isn't done yet, either.
Last night Mr Hain said, "The ban on dual candidacy is essential to clean up the Assembly's electoral system and to put the voters back in charge… Fifteen of the 20 regional list members have offices in constituencies where they were previously defeated… It cannot be right for list members to target taxpayers' money on just one constituency in their region with the sole aim of unseating the constituency member who beat them. It is an abuse of the system and we have a manifesto commitment to put an end to it."
Putting the voters in charge presumably means giving them the widest choice possible. Within the current framework (obviously STV gives the biggest choice) that shouldn't include removing certain candidates from the ballot papers.
Regional list members also have to have offices somewhere. It's most likely that they'll have them where they are based. If they stood for a constituency, it's likely that they're based there. Damn their evil 'living in a certain place' and not moving out when a Labour candidate gets elected. How dare they!
A regional member having an office in one place is not evidence that all their allowance ends up there. It is also not evidence that their sole aim is to unseat the constituency member, although regional members should be working hard, and given that they're all non-Labour, this inherently means providing competition to the constituency AMs. It's their job.
The problem is not that regional list AMs are doing their jobs, however. It is that no one is quite sure what their jobs are. With two different types of AM, especially when the two are also split into executive and opposition, there is going to be animosity. There is a bit of the Hain in all party politicos. Those inner children are angry, and they like to come out to play and squabble.
Luckily, the answer is apparently obvious (to everyone that has looked at it in any detail at least). Sadly that's not the way things work in the mad, bad world of Peter Hain. Remind me again why he's in charge?
Posted by pauldavies on April 27, 2006
Comments
Hain is one contemporary reason why it would be a good idea if decisions on the way our representatives are elected was taken out of the hands of MPs. They will always favour the system that gave them their seats. In this regard I am gratified to see that representations that I made to the Standards Committee regarding the functions of the Electoral Commission (the subject of their eleventh review) are published on their web-site. I copy it below - it is self-explanatory:
"Dear Secretary,
I note, from a recent interview with Sir Alistair Graham on the Today programme, that the Standards Committee will be looking at the functions of the Electoral Commission. In the course of the interview Sir Alistair concentrated on turnout at elections and the falling number of people who actually register to vote.
I was disappointed that the remedies mentioned were all concerned exclusively with the mechanics of voting - there was not a single mention of the electoral system.
It is of course highly important that there should not be fraud, and that everybody should register and should cast a vote. However, the purpose of elections is to represent fairly in Parliament the wishes of the electorate. If they do not achieve this purpose, as most certainly they do not under the present electoral system, it is not
surprising that many people will regard voting as just a futile gesture which might well do nothing more than demonstrate the strength of support for a particular party or candidate without making the slightest difference to the election result. Any amount
of fiddling with the mechanics of casting a vote (polling booth, postal, Internet) is not going to alter appreciably this fact.
To illustrate what so typically happens under our single-member constituency, first-past-the-post(FPTP) system here is an example picked at random from the 1997 election results:-
Rother Valley: Lab 31,184; Con 7,699; LD 5342; Other 1,932. So 7699 plus 1 = 7700 voters were represented by the Labour winner. Every one of the remaining votes was represented by no-one: i.e. one Labour MP went to Westminster representing 7,700 voters or 17% of those who voted (or 11% of the total electorate). (Electorate 68584; voters 47157 = 67.3%)
It is estimated that overall 70% of all votes under FPTP are wasted. In this case, if we exclude the Tory "yardstick" vote of 7699, the proportion of wasted votes is 67%.
Moreover, if 23,484 of the Labour voters had stayed at home, or if all the people who abstained from voting had turned out and voted for the Tories the result would have been the same: one Labour MP would have been elected.
So it would be progress indeed if one outcomes of the Committee’s review were to be the lifting of what appears to be a ban on the Commission’s power to "interfere" in "politics" The most serious effect of this seems to be a strict taboo on any recommendations to Parliament by the Commission which might bear on the obvious need to get rid of a system that, amongst many other evils, recently excelled itself in giving us a government for which 78% of the electorate had not voted. (Such a taboo is not surprising of course against a background where the government - under pressure from its tribalist MP's - so cynically reneged on its unequivocal 1997 commitments regarding electoral reform). So, in order to try to meet the government's anxieties about turnout, all the Commission seems able to do is to deal with fringe "problems" that would largely disappear anyway if we had a rational electoral system.
If we are to have true democracy we need a robust untrammelled Electoral Commission. Indeed a highly desirable outcome would be that the Electoral Commission became the centre of a constitutional system where decisions as to how our representatives are elected was taken completely out of the hands of MPs who will always have a vested interest in retaining the system - however undemocratic - under which they were elected
Best wishes
J Patterson"
Posted by: Joe Patterson at April 27, 2006 06:11 PM
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