Make My Vote Count

The campaign for voter choice and a more representative parliament

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brief history of the Labour Party and voting reform

Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour Party, was a strong supporter of voting reform. Electoral reform was actually carried by the House of Commons on a free vote in 1918 and on a whipped vote of Labour and Liberal MPs in 1930. On both occasions, it was the unelected House of Lords that stopped progress.

By the time Labour won its landslide victory in 1945, the cry of "We are the masters now" had drowned out those still calling for change. Voting reform has always suffered from the tendency of MPs of the governing party, elected by the existing first-past-the-post system, to be less critical of its faults than candidates excluded by the same system. Labour paid the price for this neglect in 1951, when it won its highest vote in any 20th century election, but the FPTP system returned a Conservative government on a minority of the votes cast. It took a decade in opposition after the Thatcher victory of 1979 for Labour to seriously reconsider its policy.

In 1990 Neil Kinnock invited Raymond Plant to chair a Labour working party on this issue, and Labour began to actively reconsider the voting system for the Commons.

Electoral reform proved to be a divisive issue within the Labour Party, with the 'old' right and 'hard' left both opposed. Strong concerns were expressed about Labour not being able to govern alone under PR and the prospect of ever sharing power with the Liberal Democrats was still seen as an anathema.

By the time the Plant Commission reported in 1993, with proposals for both Houses of Parliament and for the European elections, it was John Smith who had to grapple with these issues as the new Labour leader. He strongly believed that the people should be allowed to decide how their MPs are elected and proposed that a referendum should be held on the voting system for Westminster. A proposal that also united the Labour Party on the issue for the time being.

This commitment to the referendum has remained Labour Party policy ever since. In 1997, the Labour government established the Independent Commission on the Voting System (ICVS), chaired by the Liberal Democrat peer, Lord Jenkins.

Unfortunately for the momentum for change, the AV+ proposal itself led to a necessary delay in holding the referendum. The top-up element would require boundary changes, and these could not have been implemented in time for this coming election.

The first-past-the-post campaign, generously resourced and funded by the AEEU union led by Sir Ken Jackson, tried to flood the LP membership consultation on the AV+ proposal with hostile pre-printed postcards, in an attempt to get the LP national policy forum to drop the referendum pledge and commit the Party to first-past-the-post.

Despite this, the National Policy Forum meeting in Exeter in July 2000 eventually reached the following consensus:

Whilst remaining committed to the holding of a referendum before any change to the House of Commons electoral system is introduced, Labour will allow the changes for elections to the European and Scottish Parliament and for the Welsh and London Assemblies to become familiar and allow all their consequences to be felt before deciding on any further proposals for electoral reform.

Labour has conducted a consultation on the issues raised by the Independent Commission on the Voting System which is contained in a separate document. There were serious concerns about the acceptability of AV Plus. It was strongly felt that the electoral system for the House of Commons needs to maintain the constituency link, encourage stable government and take account of proportionality of power as well as representation.

This consensus carried through the 2000 Labour Party conference, and formed the basis of the Labour Party 2001 manifesto. This read:

The government has introduced major innovations in the electoral system used in the UK - for the devolved administrations, the European Parliament, and the London Assembly. The Independent Commission on the Voting System made proposals for electoral reform at Westminster. We will review the experience of the new systems and the Jenkins Report to assess whether changes might be made to the electoral system for the House of Commons. A referendum remains the right way to agree any change for Westminster.

In 2001 Labour was returned again with a massive majority. This forced the issue of voting reform onto the back burner, the bulk of Labour MPs were not about to reform the system that had elected them, and the government was not going to voluntarily grapple with such a thorny issue. The Constitution unit establish an independent commission on PR voting systems, this undertook qualitative and quantitative research and paved the way for the government's own review. The government review is likely to be set up initially as an internal cabinet review, and should report within a year after 2005 general election. This will allow Labour to enter any 2005 general election with manifesto wording on this issue continued along the same lines as in 2001. If the election were to produce a hung parliament or a much smaller Labour majority, then the review would gain a greater importance, as it would be the means through which the government could deliver a referendum on voting reform and thereby secure some cooperative arrangement with the Liberal Democrats.