Make My Vote Count

The campaign for voter choice and a more representative parliament

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Reconnecting People and Politics Through the Alternative Vote
Peter Hain MP

Make Votes Count organised a public meeting on Reconnecting People and Politics on Tuesday 16th March 2004 in committee room 14 House of Commons.

Among the speakers was Peter Hain, Leader of the House of Commons, Secretary of State for Wales and MP for Neath. This is what he said.

The shockingly low turnout in 2001 prompted a wave of concern about how we can re-engage the public with the democratic process.

It might have been a blip caused by political factors, such as the certainty of the election outcome or the lack of a credible opposition party.

But long term, systemic trends suggest a more sombre conclusion. Not only has voting in elections declined relentlessly since 1945, but falling membership of political parties and declining trust in public institutions suggest a wider alienation from politics.

The issue of engagement and participation underpins not just parliamentary democracy however, but the provision of government services across the board. That's why, in departments as diverse as Education, Health, Culture and the Home Office, ministers and officials are decentralising and delegating decision-making to the lowest possible level.

But if government is going to be effective it needs active and engaged citizens. Modern public services, just as much as democracy, can not be handed down from above. Government needs to be a constant dialogue between elector and elected.

It is clear that people are still as interested in politics as they always were. The number of people saying they are interested in politics has remained constant over the last thirty years. And although some traditional types of political activity are declining, other forms of participation are increasing. Membership of groups such as the RSPB or the National Trust is often cited to show that people still care deeply about certain issues. And other single issue groups have seen their support base expand in the last couple of decades.

More encouraging still for parliamentary politics, there has been a significant increase since the mid 1980s in the number of people willing to sign a petition, contact their MP or the media, or even go on a demonstration.

All the signs are that where people think they can influence the outcome; where they believe their voice will make a difference, and that their participation matters, they will get involved. You only have to look at the turnouts for elections to the boards of the New Deal Communities in recent years which were almost uniformly double those of local elections in the same local area.

The challenge is to connect. To convince people that their voice matters and that their vote counts.

This is where a change to voting system comes in. I have long been an advocate for the Alternative Vote, which I believe is likely to lead to a better quality of representation.

But I do not claim that simply changing the electoral system will cure these problems of disengagement. It won't.

Decreasing levels of turnout and participation afflict democracies new and old, across the world. The reasons for the decline go far deeper than whether you put a cross in a box or rank your preferences or have two separate votes. The decline is as apparent in countries that have proportional systems, like Ireland, Finland and Switzerland, as those that have majoritarian systems, like the UK and the USA.

But although the voting system may not be the sole cause of the problems, it is contributing to them, and certainly doing nothing to alleviate them.

For many people, first-past-the-post provides very little incentive to actually get out and vote. At any one election it is unusual for more than 70 seats to change hands, in 2001 only 21 MPs were ousted. The vast majority of voters are in seats where a change in MP is unlikely and are increasingly realising that their vote will make very little difference to the outcome of a general election. So they are simply not bothering.

This is illustrated by comparing turnout in the safest seats with the most marginal at the last election. The constituency with the lowest turnout (34.1%), Liverpool Riverside is one Labour's safest seats with a majority of over 20,000 votes. The highest turnout occurred in Winchester (72.3%) where in 1997 the sitting MP had a majority of two.

In the top 100 safest seats the average turnout in was around 54%; in the top 100 marginals, around 64%.

That missing 10% is reason enough to support a change in the system if it means more people will feel their votes matter.

But what also concerns me is that those constituencies with the lowest turnout also appear to be where there is most deprivation. Working class areas like Liverpool, Glasgow, Salford and Leeds have routinely seen low turnouts.

According to MORI, 68% of the top social classes voted in 2001, and only 53% of those at the bottom, so it is not just a question of boosting turnout across the board, but also targeting to ensure that political exclusion is not a symptom of economic and social exclusion.

Two other factors illustrate the distorting effect of first-past-the-post, one the impact on geographical representation, the other forcing people to vote for parties they don't really support.

Put simply, there are swathes of the country where your vote does not contribute to the result. In Surrey, for example, more than 20% of the population gamely voted for Labour in 2001, resulting in exactly no seats for the party. In Somerset, a similar story: 18% Labour votes, zero per cent Labour seats.

It is not surprising that in the last two elections an increasing number of results have been determined by increasingly sophisticated tactical voting. As enjoyable as it was to see Stephen Twigg elbow out Michael Portillo in 1997, this alone cannot explain what happened in 2001.

In Enfield Stephen's majority went up from around 1,500 to over 5,500. In Winchester Lib Dem Mark Oaten's majority of two in 1997 increased to almost 10,000 in 2001, while in Kingston the Lib Dem MP increased his majority from 56 to over 15,000.

Tactical voting has become almost a separate sub-election within the bigger general election, with its own trends, mathematics and advocates. The ever-inventive Billy Bragg even set up his own tactical voter website which allowed you to swap votes between constituencies.

In many respects its an entirely logical response to the oddities of first past the post. But is this the best way to run a democracy - forcing people to vote for their second choice, because they don't have an option? Or forcing you to vote for a candidate from a Party you don't much like in order to get rid of a Party you really can't stand?

Of course the problem of this `anti-voting' also plays the other way. Most electoral reformers tend to be left of centre, and many card-carrying members of the Labour Party.

But I doubt every one has supported every single one of the government's policies, and for that reason some may be inclined to withhold their vote from Labour. Perhaps to vote Lib Dem or even Green. If so, the consequences are very likely to be exactly the opposite of what anybody on the progressive left wants: re-election of a Labour Government is not inevitable, and protest voting may let the Tories into scores of marginal seats across the land. Depriving Labour of the progressive vote in marginal seats could mean victory for Tory candidates who don't poll much higher than last time, and finding an astonished Michael Howard in Downing Street.

And if I can paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the only thing worse than being tactically voted out, is being untactically voted out.

We should have a system which allows people to vote for who they want, which allows second preferences to be taken into account, so that at least their vote doesn't end up favouring a party they emphatically don't want. No matter how fed up some are with Labour, I cannot imagine that anybody on the progressive left would see a Tory government as preferable.

But this is the reality of our electoral system. This is the reality of the choice you face at the next election.

I believe that the Alternative Vote is the only viable option. Pragmatically it is the only system that stands a chance of replacing first-past-the-post. All the other systems would mean many sitting MPs losing their seats, and I cannot see many parliamentary turkeys voting for this type of Christmas.

In contrast there are many MPs, in both Labour and the Lib Dems, who could live with AV. For those who support first-past-the-post it retains many of the crucial elements such as the constituency link, whilst for supporters of PR it gives greater voter choice and provides a new base from which to campaign for further change.

In addition, retaining the single member seat makes transition to a new system very easy. There is no need for extensive boundary changes because existing seats will stay - unlike, say the Jenkins Commission option, where a third of seats will disappear, or the Liberal Democrat option where all seats will be merged with on average four others.

But I have long favoured AV, not so much for these pragmatic reasons, instead for principled ones.

First, AV allows you to vote positively rather than negatively. Because it allows you to rank the candidates in order of preference, you can still vote for the party you support. So for Labour voters in Surrey there would be no penalty for voting Labour. They could still choose another candidate as their second preference and know that their vote would contribute to an overall result which would help defeat the Tories.

Second, because there are fewer wasted votes it gives more people the motivation to participate. The pointlessness of casting your one vote in a safe seat is removed once the transfer of preferences comes into play. I acknowledge that there will still be seats where one party is likely to have large majorities, but as we've seen in the last two elections, voters are often more sophisticated in their thinking than the media gives them credit for. A new system may well alter the electoral geography with preferential voting giving more influence to voters than they've ever had at elections.

Third, every MP will need more than fifty per cent to get into the House of Commons. At the last election half the MPs elected under first-past-the-post failed to get a majority in their constituency. Three MPs got elected on less than 33% of the vote. Allowing voters to rank their choices would change the nature of these elections for the better.

And fourth, and in my view most importantly, AV retains the single-member constituency, the link between the MP and a community or communities of reasonable size. This has been a vital and historic feature of British parliamentary democracy in a way that is not always the case in other advanced democracies.

The importance of this constituency link is often under-rated by political scientists who will point to the low number of voters who know who their MP is. But the point is, that the MP is directly accountable to those voters. The MP is easily identifiable to any constituent who needs help and MPs provide a valuable constituency service to hundreds of thousands individuals every year.

Additionally, in terms of re-connecting people and politics, this personal link works. If you look at levels of trust in politicians, the local MP is always rated at almost twice the level of politicians in general, and held in even higher regard by those who have had direct contact. If we want to connect people and the political system, the local MP is the most valuable channel for that process.

However, even such a change to the way vote in our MPs is not of itself going to heal the problem of participation or have voters flooding back to the voting booths. But FPTP makes the situation worse.

A new system like AV will, I believe, improve the incentives to vote and remove many of the barriers that are inherent in our current system. Many of these changes will be subtle, but will in the long-term enhance the quality of our electoral process and political representation.

Crucially, AV will give voters a greater sense of influence and ownership over the political process. This is the key, a politics that is owned by the people, not by politicians.