Make My Vote Count

The campaign for voter choice and a more representative parliament

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the case for voting reform

The battle for the universal franchise in Britain took a century to win. With a few minor exceptions, there is one person one vote for adult citizens, and nobody seriously suggests changing this situation. But millions of people are denied an effective vote because of where they live, or what they believe. Supporters of the Greens, or people who are locally in a minority such as Labour supporters in Surrey or Tories in Liverpool, might as well not vote at all for all the effect their vote has on the outcome of a general election. They have no MPs, and no chance of winning any MPs. While we have one person one vote, we do not have one vote one value. Some, as Orwell might have observed, are more equal than others under our equal franchise.

Electoral reform is the next step in the democratisation of Britain. Its primary aim is to free the voter from the constraints of the current First Past the Post (FPTP) system - the lack of choice, the unequal representation, the local one-party states, the cruel dilemmas of tactical voting. But it should also transform the political system. A parliament that was a more faithful reflection of how people voted would operate in a very different way. A government formed from that parliament would behave differently. And the whole way in which politics is conducted would be different.

The constraint of each party matching a single candidate to a seat reduces the choice available to voters and therefore the pluralism of politics. Parties themselves are broad churches with a variety of views. Take Luton, for instance, a town with two Labour MPs. Margaret Moran, who tends to support New Labour positions, represents the South constituency and Kelvin Hopkins, a left wing rebel, represents North. People in South who agree with Hopkins, and people in North who agree with Moran, are unable to make their voices heard properly. Similarly, pro and anti European Conservatives would be able to choose between candidates.

FPTP encourages parties to play it safe in candidate selection. If more than one candidate were to be chosen at a time, the parties would offer the electorate a more diverse range, including more representation from women, ethnic minorities and people with unorthodox views on one subject or another.

A reformed electoral system would allow smaller parties which have a significant degree of support spread over a wide area to gain a voice in Parliament, as in Scotland. FPTP rewards minority parties with concentrated support, like the SNP, while punishing those with perhaps more support but widely spread, such as the Greens. Voters would have more choice between different political positions than they can exercise under FPTP.

If the electoral system is reformed, voters will be freed from the dilemmas of tactical voting and able to vote for the party they really support rather than voting to stop the party they most detest. Labour supporters could vote Labour in constituencies where the Lib Dems and Conservatives are currently the only serious contenders for victory, rather than thinking about tactical considerations. The Green Party would find it easier to translate support into votes. FPTP distorts the wishes of the electorate even at the casting of the vote, as well as by failing to reflect voting patterns in parliamentary representation.

FPTP aggravates regional and social divisions. There are no Labour MPs in Surrey, but this does not mean there are no Labour voters in Surrey - in fact there were over 100,000 of them in 2001. Conversely, there are no Conservative MPs in Merseyside, and over 100,000 Tory voters who have no local representatives of their party. This is bad for voters, but also bad for the parties. The big cities, Scotland, Wales and the north of England are under-represented in the counsels of the Tory party, and were correspondingly under-valued under Conservative government. There are few Labour MPs representing rural areas, despite large numbers of rural Labour voters, and that set of interests has also felt itself under-valued under Labour government.

The important constituencies under FPTP are the ones that might change hands (the 'marginals') which make a difference between being in government or opposition. These seats represent a minority of the country. Within these, the parties target the voters who might consider switching, themselves a small subset, and tailor their appeal to these people using sophisticated polling and marketing techniques. FPTP has created the tyranny of the median voter, call him or her pebbledash person, or Worcester woman, or whatever. This fosters a limited and cynical appeal to the electorate rather than broad democratic engagement.

Very few single-member constituencies have much sense of a common identity. It is impossible to carve the country into equal-sized chunks of 69,000 electors while respecting natural community boundaries. Cities are divided into arbitrary and constantly-shifting sections; the Handsworth area of Birmingham for instance has been in constituencies called Handsworth (before 1983), Ladywood (1983-97) and Perry Barr (1997-). When new constituencies are created, they are often rag-bags of different sorts of territory such as 'Mid Dorset and North Poole'.

Parliament is often justly accused of being remote and unaccountable. It is not surprising that an assembly whose composition bears so little resemblance to the country at large, or how it voted, should seem remote. Another part of the reason for this is the proliferation of safe seats, whose members are only minimally accountable to the local electorate. Yet another factor is that large government majorities mean that government measures often go through with a minimum of serious attempts to challenge and improve the Bill rather than simply express support or opposition for the principles. Without electoral reform, the ability of parliament to challenge and scrutinise the executive without stopping the government from governing will always be limited.

A common defence of FPTP is that it produces 'strong government'. This is not necessarily so - the Labour government of 1974-79 and the last Tory term of 1992-97 were weak governments with small majorities, buffeted by circumstances and internal dissent. Governments with strong majorities, like the Conservatives in the 1980s or Labour now, use those majorities to impose their policies regardless of public protest, reasoned objection or the interests of the people those policies affect. Strong government has given Britain the poll tax and war in Iraq. The best sort of strong government implements policies the public want and which have been tested in parliament rather than being nodded through. FPTP has produced rule by the largest minority, with no government since 1974 having had more than 44% support at the outset.

It is stretching the case too far to claim that FPTP is the only cause of declining turnout and political engagement. Electoral reform alone will not cure all the problems of politics, but it is a necessary condition for the deeper changes necessary. FPTP encourages the adversarial nonsense that turns so many people off politics. It also encourages the selective, cynical targeting of voters with hot-button issues that are usually about fear and resentment rather than the finer human impulses. A more civil, rational, problem-solving political discourse could evolve once a representative electoral system is in place. That is the ultimate prize of the electoral reform movement.