Spirit of the Jenkins Commission lives on

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

MVC Chair David Lipsey was interviewed on Saturday's 'Today' programme on his experience of sitting on Commissions, including the Jenkins Report into the voting system. You can hear the full interview here. His response to a question on the fate of the Jenkins Commission was:

"It hasn't happened yet. The government still has the matter under review, albeit six years later. Jenkins Commission recommendations [for introducing a form of PR to Westminster elections] would probably have been implemented had it not been for the Labour Government winning such large majorities in its first two terms. On the whole governments don't change the voting system when it is delivering to them such big majorities. It is just the way of the world!"

"I am absolutely certain it will become an issue again. At the last General Election Labour got this large overall majority with only 35% of the vote. I think most people can see that that this is not a real form of democracy. And the arguments that Jenkins put forward live on ... even if the government continues stubbornly to reject the conclusions."

David Lipsey opens debate in the Lords

Posted by ninatemple on May 26, 2005 | Comments (0)

David Lipsey, chair of Make Votes Count gave an impassioned speech opening the House of Lords debate on the workings of the electoral system in the 2005 general election. The full text follows:

Speech by David Lipsey for House of Lords debate on electoral system 26.05.05

My Lords, a Martian visits London. “Take me to your leader� he says, but he is immediately told it is not as simple as that here, and whisked round to this Parliament to have explained to him,

perhaps by the noble Lord Lord Norton of Louth, the distinguished chair of your Lordships’ constitutional committee, the wonders of our democratic election-based governance.

Now being by definition an intelligent being, the Martian is of course much taken by this. In particular he wants to know all about our recent general election. So he googles the Internet built into his brain, and comes across an analysis of the results from the admirable Electoral Reform Society.

This is what he learns.
- Of the total electorate, just three in five chose to vote. Of those, a little under 35.2% voted Labour, by far the lowest share of any winning party in the last century and this. So Labour won the votes of 21.6% of the electorate. It was rewarded with 55.1% of the seats in parliament.

- If the Conservatives had polled the same vote-share as Labour they would nevertheless have 116 fewer seats. Labour would still have had an overall majority of 26. To get as many seats as Labour they would have needed 7.5% more votes.

- Only around two-thirds of MPs got 50% or more of their constituency vote. No MP got the support of half their electorate.

- - Every million voters who voted Labour secured 37 MPs; every million Tories 22, every million Lib Dem 10.

- Almost one voter in five voted not for the party they preferred but tactically.

My Lords, I could go on and on. But my Lords, ask yourselves this question. Would the Martian be likely to conclude that none of this mattered: that the advantages of the system in delivering a one-party government outweighed these affronts to justice? Or would he more likely reel away, wondering that his distinguished and brilliant interlocutors could be so blind as to defend such a travesty?

In particular, my Lords, I should have thought that an electoral system with any claim to be democratic has to pass one minimal test. It need not be proportional – we will come back to that. But it must be unbiased. That is to say, the rules of the game have to be such that parties that do equally well in votes should do equally well in seats.

The British electoral system no longer meets that test. Indeed now it fits more readily into the various corruptions of democracy seen round the world, where gerrymandering is employed to keep those in power in power.

The judge in a recent case involving postal vote manipulation recently said our system would disgrace a banana republic. Well, my Lords, I say to you that that is not just true of postal votes. Our system now stands barely better than the systems your lordships regularly deplore in other nations without the law.

Does this matter? By being present today, your Lordships indicate that for you these matters at least need debate and I am grateful. But I think I can illustrate the concern I have by reporting the reaction of other Labour colleagues. What are you doing raising this issue, some have said to me? You are casting doubt on the government’s mandate.

By God I am my Lords! Elections are the supreme authority in any democratic system. They confer on the government the legitimacy to rule. If therefore they are corrupted, so is that legitimacy and so is that authority.

We have seen this, I believe, in the opening days and weeks of the new government. On some days it seems to recognise that the election result was something less than a triumph: the humble listening prime minister who limped back from Sedgefield illustrated this. On other days, we have seen an arrogance that defies belief, a wilful ignoring of the message delivered by the electorate on the basis that it can be ignored thanks to the government’s majority in the Commons.

So far as the people are concerned, as soon as this government starts doing things they don’t like, they will be able perfectly reasonably to retort: “but most of us didn’t vote for you. “

My Lords the legitimacy genie is out of the bottle. It cannot be stuffed back in by the political elite. Either our electoral system is re-examined or our democracy will rot.

I am sure these words come as music to the ears of the Lb Dems, and I cheerfully embrace their support. However, the two big parties still seem determined to defend the system, warts and all.

May I first say a word to the Conservative Party? I am told that those held hostage by terrorist groups have a way of falling in love with their captors. Something rather similar is happening to the Conservative Party.

My Lords, the bias in the present system makes it extremely hard for the Conservatives to win an overall majority. To do so they would need to poll at a bare minimum of 42-43% of the vote.

My Lords, from 1997 to 2005 the Conservative share of the vote rose at a rate of rather under 0.3% a year. On this basis, my Lords, I calculate that they might hope to achieve an overall majority at the election of 2061. In other words, never mind the next Conservative, leader, the next Conservative prime minister of a majority government has yet to be born.

But my main argument today is aimed at my own party, the Labour party. I understand of course that my noble friend the Lord Chancellor is not able to be with us today, though we are delighted to welcome in his stead the noble Baroness Baroness Ashton. However, the noble Lord did take to the airwaves this week to explain to the Today programme his views on this subject. He put forward three arguments with which I want briefly to take issue. First, he said that change would mean coalition government. Secondly, he said, it would encourage extremist parties. And thirdly, he said, there was no groundswell of opinion for change.

My Lords, at the heart of the first two charges lies a crude error. My noble friend was making the schoolboy howler of confusing electoral reform with proportional representation.

There are of course some electoral reformers who support PR, and good luck to them. But I am emphatically not one. I support the broad thrust of the Jenkins committee, of which I was a member. And it took a quite different approach.

It recognised that electoral systems have to balance a number of considerations, sometimes even contradictory considerations, for example the claims of proportionality and of strong government. What Jenkins concluded – and developments since strongly reinforce that conclusion – was that our system was out of kilter, and the balance needed to be restored.

As Jenkins clearly showed, coalition government is not necessarily weak government; the post-war history of Germany shows that. Nor is majority government strong government; think of John Major, and think, perhaps, how things are likely to pan out for this Labour government despite its majority.

Be that as it may, Jenkins would not mean permanent coalition. The AV+ system it recommends is more proportional than the present system, but by no means totally proportional. A government – Labour or Tory – which got somewhere around 42-44% of the vote would have every chance of an overall majority. Ironically this is no more than the Tories require to get an overall majority under the present system.

Nor would it encourage extremists. Pure PR systems do that: Israel’s for example. But under the Jenkins system of county top-ups, extremist parties would not win seats with less than 10% of the vote. The BNP for example would nowhere come near to securing a seat.

The final point the Lord Falconer made, my Lords, was that there was no groundswell of support for change.

My Lords, while my putative Martian was en route for London, it seems that the noble Lord the Lord Chancellor was en route for Mars. On every possible indicator of public opinion, my Lords, concern about the election system has dominated debate since the general election.

NOP’s opinion poll for the Independent showed 62% support for reform. 16,000 people ch have signed up to the Independent’s campaign. Phone-in programmes for example Any Questions and Any Answers have been dominated by the debate. 350 angry reformers – the largest public meeting I have ever seen in this house – filled committee room 14 for a meeting of Make Votes Count, the voting-reform organisation which I chair. And so on and so on. The only place this clamour fails to penetrate is the closed mind of the Lord Chancellor, and I fear that of the prime minister under whom he serves.

May I conclude with some question for my noble friends who is replying to this debate? Can she say a little more about the review of voting systems, promised by the government in its election manifesto and now under way? What are its terms of reference? Is it intended to receive representations and take evidence from outside parties, or is it a wholly private government review? What steps are being taken to test the Lord Chancellor’s proposition that there is no public demand for change? Will the government conduct its own polling? Will it use cicitzen’s juries as was done so successfully recently on this subject in British Columbia? When does she expect the review to be complete? What consultations does the government plan to undertake on its findings?

If I might conclude with one final question; or perhaps more honestly a challenge. Will the government now agree that, after the review, it will fulfil its 1997 election pledge to hold a referendum on the electoral system? – a referendum that would show once and for all whether the Lord Chancellor’s claim that the public is not eager for change is true or false.

Why the Tories should support electoral reform

Posted by davidlipsey on May 13, 2005 | Comments (4)

Originally published in The Independent, 13/05/05

Our electoral system is banana-republic biased against the Conservatives

Beware Greeks bearing gifts; so why should the Tories heed the advice of a Labour peer about electoral reform? I offer it, however, because the Tory party is in denial about the lessons of the 2005 poll for the party's stance on the electoral system. Without their support for change, the travesty of democracy that our system represents is more likely to survive, The Independent's splendid campaign notwithstanding; and democracy matters even to a tribal Labour man like me.

Our electoral system is banana-republic biased against the Tories. In this election, a further 2 per cent swing would have meant they got more votes than Labour; yet Labour would still have had 100-plus more seats and an overall majority. Some Tories have recognised this, but are under the illusion that it could be fixed if the Boundary Commission did more to equalise seat size. This is rubbish. The main cause is that turnover is lower in Labour seats than in Tory seats; so Labour needs fewer votes per seat. Hence Labour got 55.1 per cent of seats on 35.2 per cent of the vote and the Tories 30.5 per cent on 32.3 per cent. Yet we hear no cry of "foul" from the Tories.

This is historically strange, for once the Tories were stronger for electoral reform than Labour. In the 1980s, some seven Tories of cabinet rank and some 60 Tory MPs supported the Conservative Campaign for Electoral Reform. They thought it would lead to lower majorities for Margaret Thatcher, who herself was elected in 1979 with "only" 43.9 per cent of the vote, and thus more inclusive government. Yet today, when Tony Blair enjoys a big majority with barely one third of the vote, they remain silent. First-past-the-post has become an article of faith for the Tories.

For the Tory right, this seems to reflect two beliefs. First, in order to push through radical right reforms, the Tories must have an overall majority. Second, they hope to achieve such a majority by continuing the core-vote policy of this election; one more heave could get them there. Here there is an analogy with the Benn wing of the Labour Party in the 1980s, which hoped that, with the Social Democrats taking Tory votes, Labour could sneak in as a socialist government with no more than a third of the vote.

That is a frankly immoral strategy, which shows contempt for democracy. But lest that prove not to be the kind of argument the modern Tory party finds compelling, there is another conclusive one: for the Tories today it would not work. For they (unlike Mr Benn) cannot hope to get an overall majority with 33, 35 or 37 per cent of the vote. The electoral bias against them sees to that. Indeed, it is hard to construct a scenario for an overall Tory majority which does not require them to get 42-43 per cent of the vote - that is to say, one extra vote for every three they polled on 5 May.

More curious, however, is the resistance to reform of the Notting Hillers, the One-Nationers, Tory liberals as they would once have been happy to be called. Stephen Dorrell, the former Health Secretary, argued their case on the Today programme on 7 May, and bizarre it was too.

Mr Dorrell clearly does not understand the electoral system. Otherwise he would not have claimed that the party with most votes wins. It does not; and quite likely at an election soon it will not. But besides that, he seemed to think that electoral reform would stop the Tories reaching out for the middle ground. They would prefer to remain in their comfort zone, existing vote share, existing number of seats; and look to gain power through a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

This is crooked thinking. The one certain gainer from any electoral reform would be the Liberal Democrats. Where a reformed electoral system did not give any party an overall majority, they would have to decide with whom to form a coalition.

If the Tories were to have any chance of joining up with the Lib Dems, they would have to change. The Liberal Democrats could never form a government with a party which flirted with racism, as the Tories did in this election; or which was fundamentally anti-European; or which was socially exclusive; or was out to privatise the welfare state. Electoral reform would not enable the Tories to just cultivate their core vote. It would force them, if they wanted a chance of government, to move out to the middle ground.

For the Tories, this election presents an opportunity. Labour is havering about electoral reform. It may opt for preferential voting in constituencies, which does nothing for proportionality or fairness. The Tories therefore have a great chance to take their ground, by going for full electoral reform.

Should they? Certainly. Will they? Probably not. This would be a mistake from the point of view of their own self interest; and a tragedy for all those who want to make Britain an exemplar of democracy once again.

Magical Cure for Apathy

Posted by davidlipsey on May 04, 2005 | Comments (2)

originally published in the Times, 040505

A VERITABLE Niagara of crocodile tears flows from our politicians as they bemoan the likely low turnout in tomorrow’s general election. For we know from Tom Baldwin’s reporting in The Times that they do not give a stuff whether most people vote. Their efforts are targeted solely on some 800,000 marginal voters in the marginal seats where the election battle will be lost or won.

It gets worse. Individual parties do not even want all 800,000 to vote. They want the votes of those who can be persuaded to back their party, while stirring up apathy among those who would support another party.

It gets even worse. Low turnout has manifold causes, but one is the voting system. It would be hard to design an electoral system better served to minimise turnout than Britain’s first-past-the-post, since the system means that only a few votes affect the result. The international evidence is that more proportional systems, which mean that more votes count more, clearly raise turnout.

And yet where do we hear that argument from politicians in this election? Labour, to be fair, commits itself in its manifesto to a review of electoral systems, but it dares not trumpet this pledge for fear of exacerbating party divisions on the matter. The Tories — against whom, incidentally, the present system is so biased that they could plausibly win more votes than Labour while still leaving Mr Blair with a big overall majority — choose to ignore the fact that they are climbing the north face of the Eiger in bare feet. And even the Lib Dems choose not to campaign on electoral reform. Charles Kennedy apparently thinks whingeing about it would put voters off, although this reasoning does not stop the Lib Dems whingeing about everything else.

If we are to get change, it is no use waiting for the politicians. The Jenkins Committee — of which I was a member — proposed a system which put voters in charge. In constituencies they would be able to record a second preference candidate as well as a first. That would multiply the number of marginals. They would also have a second vote for candidates at a regional level, divided proportionally among the parties. Every vote would count and every vote would be campaigned for. Ask your candidates if they back that — and if the answer is “no�, ask them why then you should bother to vote for them.

More than just the marginals?

Posted by davidlipsey on April 28, 2005 | Comments (6)

Some of you have been asking why we have been focussing on the fact that the electoral system means that the only votes that matter are those of marginal voters in marginal seats. You point out, perfectly fairly, that there are other arguments for electoral reform too.

However I do not apologise for using the marginals argument. It fits in well with the themes the parties are themselves developing with their focus on turnout (at least of their own supporters) and on middle England. If the argument was not important we should not have the name we do: Make Votes Count.

Of course other arguments matter too. Of course, it is both true and unacceptable as you point out that Labour can have a large overall majority with no more than a quarter of the electorate voting for it. Of course, we need to be concerned about the bias of the present system which makes this match played on a steeply sloping playing field, Labour top, Opposition bottom. And of course we want to do something for voter choice, as both the AV element in Jenkins and STV would do. We shall be pushing these points before and after May 5th.

The issue awakes

Posted by davidlipsey on April 26, 2005 | Comments (3)

Just over a week to polling, and voting reform is becoming the "sleeper" issue of this campaign. The politicians don't want to talk about it, of course. Tony Blair is scared it will divide his own party between Prescott old Labour and the more modern tendencies. Michael Howard knows that any constitutional change is neuralgic for the Tories, even though it is they who suffer most from the bias of the current system. And most strangely Charles Kennedy seems to have adopted a policy of silence, on the grounds that whinging puts voters off the Lib Dems; since they whinge against every other injustice on the planet, the logic is hard to follow.

However since early in the campaign the Times identified the focus of all the parties on marginals, the sleeper begins to wake. Mr Blair has now blurted out that the election result depends on a few hundred (or thousand) voters. The iniquity of this situation is precisely our point.

Electoral reform is now a solid theme of the commentariat: Polly Toynbee our staunchest supporter, bless her; then Nick Cohen in the Observer, Martin Samuel in today's Times - each day there is another voice pointing out the failings of the present system.

And so are voters, when they get a chance to air their views in press and radio; furious, for example, that they cannot give Mr Blair a bloody nose over the war without giving Mr Howard a boost in his race for Downing Street. This weekend will see local demonstrations for voting reform organised by Make Votes Count all over the country. Make your voice count at them.

Voting dilemma

Posted by davidlipsey on April 12, 2005 | Comments (5)

In my circuits of the Chardonnay classes, one topic dominates the election: should I vote heart or head?

Heart among the liberal lefties says vote against Tony Blair to punish him for the war. Head says that is silly since it can only benefit Michael Howard who is, shall we say? an unlikely peacemonger.

A man who can sack Howard Flight can also sack Tehran or Baghdad. Voting Lib Dem is not a good answer to this dilemma. For in most Labour-held marginals it is not the Lib Dems who are the challengers. It is the Tories. A straight vote for them would represent a two-vote swing their way but each Lib Dem vote is a one-vote swing.

Much of this gnashing of teeth could have been avoided if the government had adopted the Jenkins Commission's proposals for electoral reform. The problem is directly addressed by the AV element of the Jenkins package, which was designed to increase voter choice. Our unhappy voter would simply vote Lib Dem with Labour as second choice. If by any chance the Lib Dems were in contention, that could cost Labour the seat. If however the Tories were the true rivals again, then the second preference vote would keep Labour in - while depressing its share of the first-preference vote, a clear warning signal to Tony Blair.

Meanwhile, the disaffected voter would have a second vote, for the plus, the list component of the package. There he or she could vote for the Lib Dems or any other party he chose, without benefiting the Tories. Other anti-war parties, perhaps the Greens for example, might even pick up seats in the list section adding to the plurality of anti-war voices in Parliament.

Change the system: up the turnout

Posted by davidlipsey on April 11, 2005 | Comments (4)

The politicians are spending huge amounts of time in this election trying to whip up interest: a "critical" a "vital" election, one "on which the whole future of our country depends." In fact, by the standards of some elections, this one falls some way short of vital. Compare and contrast with 1945, for example, or 1979 or 1997.

So what is going on? What is going on are desperate attempts to bolster turnout. According to a MORI poll for the Financial Times last week, Labour leads on voting intention, but if only those who say they are certain to vote are counted, the Tories are five points clear. So both sides are trying hard to get their people out.

Never mind the party politics: what does this say about our democracy? In the old days, some political scientists used to argue that low turnout was a good thing: it showed that most people were content with the political system. Constructive apathy ruled.

It is true that elections with very high turnout mostly take place in countries where something is wrong with politics, as in the old Soviet Union where Joseph Stalin frequently achieved turnouts in excess of 100%. But there is a tipping point: perhaps around 70% of the vote in general elections when the level of turnout becomes a worry. Whichever party wins on May 5th, it is highly unlikely that they will have the support of above a quarter of the electorate. That will be a pretty shaky basis on which to claim any kind of mandate.

What relationship does this have to the electoral system? In part the relationship is a direct one. It is a simple fact about our system that the majority of voters in the majority of constituencies could vote if they do in the sure and certain knowledge that they cannot possibly affect the result. Elections are decided by middle voters in middle constituencies and by them only. As I have argued here before, in those circumstances it is perhaps more surprising that so many voters do turn out as that so many do not.

However, the biggest effect of the present voting system on depressing turnout may not be this direct one. It is an indirect one. First-past-the-post creates a certain kind of politics: tribal, high-volume, unsubtle. Other electoral systems create a more plural politics. At their heart may be a multiplicity of parties (Britain for example is quite unusual in having a week green and no rural/farmers' party). But even failing this - and Germany is an example of a proportional electoral system where parties have not multiplied – other systems tend to lead to a more subtle politics. So for example Labour could not continue under a different electoral system to pay such little attention to the environment. If they did, a Green Party would gain representation in parliament, and might even be in a position to join in a green-tinged coalition.

Every survey shows that the old tribal politics is dying. Young people in particular are not as the old canard has it, uninterested in politics. They are uninterested in politics as it is played by the politicians under the rules of first-past-the-post. If they are to be re-engaged, if future elections are not to be turnout elections like this one, that system must change.

Why Bother?

Posted by davidlipsey on April 07, 2005 | Comments (1)

A striking feature of early commentary on Election ’05 is that it has concentrated so much on turnout.

The consensus is that the fewer voters turn out, the better for the Tories. So Labour goes round insisting that the result will be close (memo to its voters: get there or beware); while the Tories focus on motivating their core vote (memo to their voters: get there to get Blair).

Political scientists have long mused on why it is that anyone votes. After all, the chance of any individual’s vote making a difference is vanishingly small. Fortunately, voters are not desiccated calculating machines. A collective sense of citizenship has disposed many to vote even absent any strong self-interest in doing so. And indeed from 1955 to 1997, this sense was sufficient to keep turnout up, with something over seven in ten potential electors doing the business.

That proportion slumped alarmingly in 2001, to fewer than six in ten. The main factor was no doubt that the 2001 election was widely regarded as a shoe-in for Mr Blair.

This election however is not such a shoe-in; yet predictions are that the turnout could be even lower. As voting reformers, we believe that a major factor in that is the growing understanding that in most places, most votes simply do not count. In safe seats, Labour or Tory, there is literally no point in voting. The Tory campaign was thus said by the Times on 6th April to be focussing on just 800,000 swing votes in marginals.

In these circumstances, this is barely a national election at all: just a contest in a smallish number of local areas under a national veneer.

This is one of the strongest arguments for electoral reform. For whatever system you prefer – the Jenkins’ Commission AV plus or the Single Transferable Vote or the 69 varieties of both – they have one feature: every vote has the capacity to change the result. Under Jenkins, votes even in safe constituencies can have a further purpose in deciding the make-up of those elected from top-up lists. Under STV, voters are choosing between the candidates of a given party as well as between parties.

The international evidence is that in general, turnout in countries with proportional electoral systems is higher than in those with systems such as our first-past-the-post.

Most Make Votes Count supporters will vote on May 5th. We know the importance of elections. But most will do so in the hope and conviction that this is the last time we shall do so under the present anti-voter voting system. For the longer the present system endures, the more the roots of our democracy will rot away.