Make My Vote Count

The campaign for voter choice and a more representative parliament

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the Labour case for reform
Robin Cook MP

Electoral reform addresses four of the big current political questions.

First, where does Labour stand on the political spectrum? I was positively stunned last autumn by a Times opinion poll which discovered that the majority of Labour voters think the Labour party is to the right.

But I understand why we have ended up here. Our message and campaigning, the language, rhetoric, and images we use are all angled to the centre, never to the left.

The reason that we are preoccupied with the centre is because under first- past-the-post it is the only battleground in town. There is no other place in which you compete for votes with the Conservative party than in the centre ground.

One of the reasons why social democrats coming from Europe stay more firmly anchored ideologically than ourselves is because they have parties to the left of them. If we want to have a pluralist politics then we need to have an electoral system in which every view needs to be argued and clarified.

The second issue for Labour that electoral reform helps is the perceived neglect of our core voters. There is a standing rule in Number Ten that every photograph of Tony Blair must demonstrate economic success. I have several times pointed out that this does not leave that much room for some of our core voters to get into the photo.

Yet we have done a tremendous amount for our core voters. What perplexes me is that we do not put that more into our public message. It is a standard story from many Labour MPs that when we talk to the people who are much better off as a result of the tax credits they imagine that it is the result of the obscure workings of the Inland Revenue, rather than a deliberate political decision by government. The real risk is that some of the people who have benefited most from Labour may find out first how much they have benefited when a Tory government takes it away from them.

Why do we ignore the core voters? It is because the first-past-the-post system makes it rational to ignore your own stronghold voters. The reason why we focus on that 1% of swaying voters in the target seats is because they are the only people with real power in our electoral system.

The 60% of the electors of Liverpool Riverside who did not vote last time were entirely rational. They knew they would get one Labour MP. They knew that however often they voted they would still get only the one Labour MP. We could change that and we could change our own campaigning style if we had an electoral system in which every vote counted equally and every vote was worth chasing.

The third problem where electoral reform would help us is the status of parliament. As a parliamentarian I worry about the big fall in public respect and esteem for parliament. At the root of that change is an electoral system that produces such a massive majority in parliament. And here I want to be very careful about what I'm saying. It is very tricky for any Labour MP to suggest that there is such a thing as even the possibility of too many Labour MPs. But I do not think we should blind ourselves to the problems that come with such a large majority.

First of all there is a danger that parliament gets taken for granted and indeed we have seen that a number of times. It is interesting that Labour MPs actually in this parliament have shown a capacity to rebel. There is a myth around that Labour MPs are docile, but that is a malign slander. There have been more rebellions and more rebels since 1997 than in any previous parliament. But the majority is so large you do not notice them.

The vote against the war in Iraq was the largest single government rebellion since the rebellion of Gladstone and home rule. It stopped home rule for Ireland, but it did not stop the war on Iraq because the majority were in agreement.

There is a further danger that this exaggerated majority starts to blunt the transmission mechanism between the electoral process and the parliamentary debate. Any parliament elected on electoral reform would not even begin to consider the possibility of top-up fees that are opposed by 80 per cent of the public that elected that parliament. The only reason it is even on the agenda is because we do not have a parliament that represents the way in which the public outside think and vote.

The fourth and last question is that of trust. That is a hot topic at present, yet too often the debate focuses on the specific question of trust in Labour and trust in parliament. I think we have a much wider problem of trust in the political process. We are facing a situation in which more and more of the public feel they do not have ownership of the democratic system or of the political process.

And if we want to remedy that, the one thing we need to do is to create an electoral system in which the way people vote is the way that shapes the parliament that then belongs to them. You know if every vote counts, every vote counts equally.

Back in the 1960s one third of all MPs were elected by the vote of a majority of the electorate of their constituency. Yet today the first-past- the-post system cannot handle the increasing pluralism of British opinion. In 2001 not a single MP was elected with a majority of the electorate in their constituency.

Most people, by far the majority of the people in Britain were represented by MPs for whom they did not vote and our MPs represent constituencies in which most of whose electors did not vote for them. This is not a healthy democratic situation.

Let me conclude by saying that I have a confession to make. I became persuaded for the case for electoral reform in the course of eighteen years of Thatcherism and sub-Thatcherism, when I was thoroughly depressed by sitting on the opposition benches watching every other political view ignored by a massive Tory majority elected on a minority vote.

When I first came out in favour of electoral reform I was accused of doing it for reasons of low cunning. You should not blame someone for that. My advice is that if even if you can find a politician who does not have a streak of low cunning, you should not trust them.

In those days we used to get very large meetings to campaign for electoral reform at party conferences. I do not ever want to find myself in opposition with another majority of Conservative MPs, again elected on a minority view, campaigning for electoral reform. We have the power to change these things. We do not have to do anything wrong. We just have to do what is right. Let's make sure we take that chance.

This text is taken from a speech that Robin Cook gave to the Make Votes Count/Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference in 2003.

In 1997 Labour's manifesto stated: "we are committed to a referendum on the voting system for the House of Commons." This pledge was knocked into the long grass by the sheer size of Labour's majority and by the trade union backed first-past-the-past campaign led by Sir Ken Jackson.

The 2001 Labour Party manifesto kept the possibility of voting reform alive with the following wording: "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."

If you believe in a new pluralistic politics you can advance the cause of voting reform by lobbying the government to set up this long-promised review and then letting it know your views. If, as is expected, this review is established before the next general election, a voting reform referendum could be held early in any third term. To build momentum towards this it is also important to win over the trades unions and Labour Party. Your support can make a difference.