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November 02, 2007
No change without electoral reform
In the wake of the Electoral Reform Society's report that an election yesterday would have been decided by just 8,000 key swing votes, Polly Toynbee of the Guardian writes that only a PR system will encourage Labour and Tories to truly distinguish themselves from one another. Toynbee says what Make Votes Count has been saying all along: that a PR system would make all parties accountable to every UK citizen, not just a mere 8,000. Here are some of her key points:
Over the past five weeks the parties would have had to define themselves at least a bit more crisply, splashing into slightly clearer blue/pink/yellow water. Now they all swirl together, intent on bamboozling voters with time-honoured abstract nouns: all are for liberty (who isn't, in principle?), equality (strictly of "aspiration" and "opportunity" only) and fraternity (community values for the middling and poor, but not for the wealthy). All parties are passionate about education, caring about the NHS, greenish, concerned for underachievers and relaxed about the filthy rich. On the mighty matters - tax and spend, nuclear power/weapons, foreign policy - the two main parties pretend to agree. (Wait to see where the Lib Dems go next.)
At heart, of course, Labour and Tories are viscerally separate tribes, deep-dyed by their own histories, born and bred in opposite intellectual and moral universes; government under either would differ much more than they pretend. Yet in public they converge, swimming in a shoal, afraid lest any difference might alienate anyone. So they nibble each other's tails on small policies, but stick together on everything large.
Why do they do that? It's how their pollsters tell them to survive the electoral system - and they may be right. The Electoral Reform Society yesterday produced the reason why. Such is the worsening deformity of our voting system that an election yesterday would have turned on just 8,000 key swing votes. In recent elections the battleground was minuscule - around 200,000 votes in marginal constituencies. But now the number has shrunk to vanishingly small: imagine each party targeting its entire election budget on just this handful of people, anointed by geographical accident to be the nation's kingmakers. Who are they? Parties have the technology to identify most of them personally. Middling, bored, indifferent - not very political people who do vote, but who decide the nation's fate on passing last-minute whim. Political passion is bleached out by this; the country suffers inane electioneering as the parties try to catch the fleeting attention of these few voters.
The Electoral Reform Society calls these 8,000 "category A voters" - the swing denizens of 25 Labour-held marginals and the nine target seats Labour needs to maintain a majority after boundary changes.
This is not an anorak issue: it is why parties dare not diverge. Under a proportional system, every vote in every constituency would count equally. Instead of Labour votes piled up in the tower blocks of urban fiefdoms, or Tory votes stacked up and wasted in shires and leafy suburbs, all votes would carry equal worth. Under PR, to strike out and stand overtly for your own party's values by rallying your own voters would be a better winning strategy than trying to attract the feeble attention of a handful of don't-much-care voters. The politics of difference, not indifference, would become essential, and smaller parties would stand a chance.
Compromise in hung parliaments would be by public bargaining after an election according to relative strength, instead of current pre-election centrist merging by focus group. If apathy and a declining vote are the problem, giving voters differences worth voting for is the answer.
Posted by joshloewenstein on November 02, 2007
