Back to blogging

I am emerging from three months' silence on this blog that was partly though not wholly the result of the No vote in the AV referendum, which sent me into a bit of a decline from which I am now recovering.

By voting day it was clear that we were going to lose, but the extent of the defeat was a shock. This is how I felt about the result:


I also felt:
(1) angry about the outrageous lies put about by the No campaign and its lackeys in most of the press,
(2) even more than ever inclined to think that referendums are a bad idea,
(3) doubtful as the value of any sort of political activity, which in my case always seems to turn out to have been a waste of time.

One small crumb of comfort was that my London borough was one of half a dozen places in the country where the Yes vote actually won. Most of the others were also in London, plus Oxford and Cambridge I think. This reinforces my belief that London is not in England. Someone or other made a half-serious suggestion that in those places, at least local elections should be conducted by AV.

Nick Clegg has a lot to answer for. Settling for an AV referendum as the price for Lib Dem participation in the coalition was a reckless gamble, and if I were a member of that party I think I should have wanted him to resign the leadership when the gamble so spectacularly failed. It is now clear that no proper thinking had been done beforehand about what terms the party should insist on if the opportunity arose. AV just happened to be on the table because it was previously bandied about, in a half-arsed way, as a possible compromise with Labour (not the Tories), and that was not because anyone in the LD party actually wanted AV but because one or two significant Labour figures, such as Alan Johnson, had earlier made favourable noises about it. Once the negotiations with Labour were clearly going nowhere for all sorts of other reasons, the idea ought to have been dropped.

The end result for party politics is that the LibDems appear to have self-destructed as an electoral force with nothing much to show for it. Many of the supposed "liberal" achievements of the coalition, though certainly welcome, were things the Tories were committed to doing anyway (no Heathrow expansion, no ID cards).

But more important to me than the fate of one party is that electoral reform is now off the agenda for the rest of my lifetime, so I am now condemned to spend the rest of my years in a profoundly undemocratic polity with no prospect of any significant improvement.

A very short film on what to do about the referendum

Hello undecided voters! If you watch no other video clips about voting systems, please watch this one by TV's Dan Snow:

AV too complicated, innit?

I like this, from UncleMikey at b3ta.com (click on the image to enlarge):

"No to AV" and its campaign to deceive the public with a torrent of downright lies

I was just sitting minding my own business, watching International Youth Football from South America on Eurosport2, when a leaflet arrived, headed "Keep One Person, One Vote". That sounds reasonable, I thought -- but is anybody suggesting otherwise?

It turned out to be an astonishingly mendacious piece of propaganda from NO2AV. And there was the first falsehood right there on the front cover -- the suggestion that the Alternative Vote does *not* involve "one person, one vote".

Of course AV also means one person, one vote, and it has been pointed out a million times by now that under AV everybody has only one vote, which is counted again at each stage of the counting procedure, so all votes in each contest are counted the same number of times. Anyone who suggests otherwise either hasn't understood how the system works, or -- more likely in this case -- understands perfectly well how it works but is trying to deceive the public.

Most outrageous of all is that the leaflet solemnly regurgitates the barefaced lie that AV will require voting machines and hence extra public expense. How can they get away with this, when it has been formally clarified by the authorities that machines will not be used or needed? Isn't there anything in electoral law that forbids deliberately making assertions that are verifiably the opposite of the truth?

I was going to go on and point out all the other things that are wrong with this leaflet, at best deliberately misleading and at several points just plumb wrong. But somebody else has done the job for me, in graphic form, which you can see here.

One significant point not adequately covered is the scare story that AV will assist extremists such as the BNP. The fatuous Tory peer Baroness Warsi -- evidently not keen to have the issue clouded with mere facts -- has been pushing this line. It's not just wrong, it is the opposite of the truth. One of the main advantages, perhaps the only real advantage, of AV is that (provided people understand how to use it effectively) it *prevents* a poorly supported candidate "coming through the middle" and getting elected on a small percentage of the vote because opposition to him or her is split too many ways. That is how BNP candidates have occasionally got elected in local council elections under first-past-the-post.

The only way the BNP can get elected under AV is if either (a) their candidate gets 50% of first preferences, which isn't going to happen, or (b) the BNP gets quite a lot of first preferences and then also picks up most of the second preferences of all those candidates who have performed in the first count less well than the BNP. This also seems extraordinarily unlikely (because Greens and LibDems and Respect types are never going to put the BNP as their second choice, though I suppose a few UKIP supporters might).

So with AV we would be moving from a system under which the BNP can occasionally get elected by a fluke, to a system under which they have no real prospect of being elected at all. No doubt that is why the BNP is actively campaigning for the "No" side in this referendum -- a fact that seems to have passed TV's Baroness Warsi by.

The shameless gangsters at NO2AV have also put out a spectacularly misleading TV broadcast, clearly designed to confuse the viewer and provoke groundless fears. You can see a version of it, adapted to point out some of its faults, here.

I am not claiming here that AV is wonderful. Actually it is not a very good electoral system. There are much better ones, but they are not on offer in this referendum. The point to keep in mind for this 5 May vote is that, of the two choices before us, the present system, first-past-the-post, is plainly inferior to AV -- so deeply flawed in fact that almost anything, not excluding the tossing of a coin, might well produce a fairer result.

Two articles worth reading, among many on this subject: this by TV's Andrew Rawnsley, and this New Statesman editorial.

And see also this piece by Neil Harding on the agonies of tactical voting, which AV would make unnecessary.

Personalities against fairer voting

According to a website called Labour No to AV, if you vote "No" in the forthcoming referendum you will be in company with the following exciting intellects, all vying with each other to be at the very cutting edge of contemporary political analysis:

Margaret Beckett!
TV's Hazel Blears!
David Blunkett!
Margaret Hodge!
TV's John Prescott!!
John Reid!
Dennis Skinner!

It is also interesting to note that of the small parties, the only one campaigning against AV is the British National Party.

Lies and smears about electoral reform

A very good article by John Kampfner in yesterday's London Evening Standard, This referendum is about a lot more than vote reform:

Ultimately this referendum, on May 5, comes down to different visions of Britain. The "yes" campaign tends to be supported more by the young and optimistic. The "no" brigade is comprised mainly of Conservative Right-wingers who hate any form of change. These people opposed devolution for Scotland and Wales (now accepted as normal) and other forms of social change of past decades that have become part of the fabric of British life.

I hope he is right about that, because if so, the "Yes" side should win quite easily. Certainly the "No" campaign has got off to a lamentable start, with an irrelevant and mendacious focus on the supposed cost of changing the system. And they are also talking demonstrable nonsense about the system itself. Tom Newton-Dunn, who surely privately knows better but is presumably doing Rupert Murdoch's bidding, affects to believe in The Sun that AV is too complicated. Are they seriously suggesting that the British are too stupid to number candidates 1, 2, 3 in order of preference, as the Irish and the Australians have been quite capably doing for many decades? Is this really the best they can do?

As this campaign gets under way, I begin to feel that maybe it matters more than I thought it would. I mentioned the other day pro-STV friends who think AV almost an irrelevant diversion, so inferior is it to STV. While there was some force in that viewpoint in the abstract, now that the referendum is actually happening I suspect that it will be a disaster for progressive politics if the "Yes" side now loses.

Finally for today, may I commend a blog post by Neil Harding entitled 10 Facts About The Alternative Vote.

Changing the voting system

TV's Andrew Rawnsley has written quite a good piece about the forthcoming referendum on the Alternative Vote. In his view, the current polls are more or less meaningless; either side could easily win; and support on both sides is so far soft.

I must say I am a bit depressed to find that even some of my LibDem friends, who (like me) have been agitating for electoral reform for decades, are lukewarm about this particular proposal and, while they will vote yes if they can be bothered to vote at all, they won't be positively campaigning for it. This is because they want STV, and think AV is so inferior to STV that it is scarcely any better than what we have at the moment.

I also want STV, but the hard fact of life is that we are not going to get it anytime soon. I am of the "anything is better than nothing" view. We all know that AV is not a proportional system. It can sometimes produce distorted results, just like first-past-the-post (FPTP). But breaking the stranglehold of FPTP is surely a good thing in itself, and introducing the principle of preferential voting likewise. Numbering candidates in order of preference is better than the all-or-nothing choice of the present system, and could be a step towards STV: all that would be required to move from AV to STV is to join existing constituences together into groups of, preferably, five. The voters by then would have got used to the idea of numbering the candidates 1, 2, 3 and so on.

Even if STV proves to be beyond our reach, AV is still better than what we have because it very largely removes any incentive to attempt to vote tactically, i.e. the voter can safely write down his or her true preferences without having try to guess what everybody else is doing.

As Roger Mortimore of IPSOS-Mori points out in an excellent new paper, A Guide to the Alternative Vote (PDF), it's not true that it it impossible to vote tactically under AV, but the effects are unpredictable and it is difficult to see how in practice a candidate or party could organise it. They might try, but the important thing is that for the ordinary elector there is no point in it.

Andrew Rawnsley meanwhile thinks that the more people hear about preferential voting the more they will like it, so he is optimistic that the campaign could produce a majority for change. Certainly David Cameron's speech on the subject last week was a disgraceful tissue of lies which the pro-AV camp ought to be able to demolish quite easily.

Baby P and local vs. national

Here is an important philosophical issue that keeps arising in politics, but never seems to get any nearer to being resolved: the tension between local decision-making and central government control.

I am among those who have argued in the past for a large dose of decentralisation from Whitehall and Westminster on those issues that can better be decided locally. This used to be long-standing Liberal Party policy. In more recent times, the Tories have also used the rhetoric of decentralisation (although in reality Mrs Thatcher was a great centraliser, the abolition of the GLC and the metropolitan authorities being only the most egregious example).

The Labour Party, by contrast, has tended (with some exceptions) towards a centralist view, both on the old left and among social democrats. I remember this being eloquently expressed by Neil Kinnock when he was fiercely opposing Welsh devolution in the 1970s.

The public (led by the gutter press) seems to be completely at sixes and sevens on this question. On the one hand, they seem to like the idea that "the man in Whitehall" does NOT know best. A good example of where I agree with them is the recent grotesque micro-management by the Department of Transport of local railway services all over England (though not Scotland and Wales), even down to how many carriages a particular train should have. Some of the railway franchises have been absurdly tightly specified.

On the other hand, when some local autonomy is granted, leading inevitably to different outcomes in different places, a huge clamour goes up against the "postcode lottery". That very phrase implies an expectation that everything ought to be identical everywhere -- the complete opposite of the local accountability that people say they want.

In theory, the trick is supposed to be to locate each sphere of decision-making at the most appropriate level for the function in question. This is what the EU calls "subsidiarity". The trouble is, when it comes down to it, how do you reach any consensus about what that level is?

Steve Richards ponders this question in relation to the dreadful events in Haringey:

In the abstract, the political fashion is for localism, especially in the Conservative Party. It is a common theme of the Tories: let a thousand flowers bloom! Central government should keep out of local matters even if things go wrong!

I have heard shadow cabinet members argue that, when in government, if things go wrong locally, they must declare that the crisis is not their responsibility. Yet look what happens when a single local story makes the national front pages. Cameron leapt in and demanded that the government acted. Within hours the government did act. The only issue was whether it should have done so earlier. No one was arguing that this was a matter for Haringey council and that it was up to the voters to kick out the ruling administration at the next local election.

As Steve Richards points out, giving the London Borough of Haringey the local autonomy to decide its own affairs has also meant that that same council was free to make calamitous mistakes. Most mistakes by local authorities do not get as much publicity as this one, but any reader of Private Eye's  "Rotten Boroughs" column knows that there is no shortage of examples of gross mismanagement, even -- or perhaps especially -- by big councils with their hugely overpaid, self-important chief executives.

And yet we do not, I think, want to abolish local government: on the contrary. One step forward might be to improve local accountability by electing local authorities by STV, so that there would not be such a tendency for some of them to be a permanent one-party state, as Haringey is for Labour.

Then again, can it seriously be claimed that the quality of decision-making at national government level is all that much better, when we consider all the monumental cocks-up that have been made in recent times?

Comments round-up, part I

Thanks to various readers who have kindly taken the trouble to comment on some of my posts, a selection of which follows:

-- Tim Roll-Pickering criticised several items in my piece about electoral systems, 14 reasons why only STV will do. I think he is mistaken, but did not immediately have time to respond to his points. Since it calls for a fair bit of anorak-ish detail, I will come back to this issue later in a new post.

-- Yaffle commented on my post Irritating women, suggesting that it looked as if I was irritated by women who held opinions, in which case it probably said more about me than about the women mentioned, in Yaffle's view.

I countered this by naming several women with opinions whom I do NOT find irritating.

-- Neil Harding commented on my post Roads vs. trains, in which I drew attention to Christian Wolmar's question, Why are roads favoured by the right and trains by socialists? Neil thinks that public transport is, by its nature, too egalitarian for the Right to swallow, and also they don't like it because it is one "product" which is not made more efficient by competition (I agree that is certainly true of local transport, less so of long-distance travel perhaps). He also noted the massive lobbying power of the car and oil industries, who have a huge vested interest in promoting private transport at the expense of public.

All very true, but the fact remains that, as Christian Wolmar suggested, we should be much more aggressive in highlighting the Right's lack of intellectual inconsistency in supporting public expenditure on roadbuilding while generally tending to be hostile towards government spending on railways or any other form of public transport. At the least, we should be demanding a "level playing field". If railways are expected to "pay their way" without subsidy, so should roads -- which means some form of charging for road use.

One could add that all hidden subsidies for air travel should stop, too, such as the fact that airlines pay no tax on their fuel.

-- John Band commented on my 8 reasons why the government must go. He said I was wrong to say that the government was building roads. I referred him to the Campaign for Better Transport, which shows how the current regime is pressing ahead with a massive roadbuilding programme, in complete contradiction to Gordon Brown's claimed environmental objectives.

-- In response to my post Gridlock and Road Rage, Lola defended the motorcar as the right answer for personal transport. He or she claimed that "The car enables everyone who has access to or owns one to make extremely flexible choices about their lives without waiting on the whim of a bureaucrat or other gauleiter - which is of course exactly why the left loonies hate them so much."

I pointed out in reply that, if you are going to insist on everyone hurtling around in their own personal tin box on wheels, you will have to abolish the whole concept of cities as we know them in Europe, which are the whole basis of our civilisation. (I suspect Lola might be an American.)

London, for instance, simply could not function but for the fact that the great majority of people travelling into its centre are NOT using their own individual vehicles.

To be continued .......

14 reasons why only STV will do

I don't want anyone to think I am some sort of lackey of Johann Hari, though I tend to agree with him at least 50% of the time. It just happens that he has written two very interesting and pertinent articles on two consecutive days.

I've already noted his piece about gay voters and the London mayoral election, in which he points out that, while Paddick is "One of Us", it is the straight but very pro-gay Livingstone who has the policies and the track record on gay issues.

Hari now turns his attention to electoral systems for Westminster, in an article entitled Don't fall for Jack Straw's electoral trap, the trap being the Alternative Vote system (AV). He explains why the present first-past-the-post (FPTP) system is completely unacceptable, and notes that AV, far from being a PR system, can be even less proportional than FPTP.

So far, so good. Sadly he then plumps for the hybrid "AV Plus" top-up system which David Lipsey cobbled together on the back of an envelope for the Roy Jenkins commission in 1998.

I bow to no-one in my admiration for Roy Jenkins, as a brave, reforming 1960s Home Secretary, a powerful and clever political thinker, and an urbane, witty and elegant writer. But unfortunately "AV Plus", while at first glance offering a quick and dirty way out of the mess, becomes less and less satisfactory the more you look into it.

For one thing, it isn't even particularly proportional. For another, you would have to completely redraw every single boundary across the land, because to achieve a House of Commons of about the present size you have to reduce the number of constituencies to about 500. This alone would take several years.

"AV Plus" has never been tried anywhere. It could produce quite perverse results, because of the way the county (top-up) seats are to be allocated to the parties most disadvantaged by the share of constituency seats, i.e. those with the highest ratio of votes to seats. This just was not properly thought through by Lipsey, and nobody else on the commission had any technical expertise in the matter.

If we really must have a hybrid top-up system -- and I would much rather not, for all the familiar reasons about creating two classes of members, but also because it still leaves too much power in the hands of the party machines -- we would probably be better off with AMS, the German system, now being used for the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the GLA.

But there is a far superior solution, the single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies (STV). Among its many advantages:

(1) It is tried and tested, in Ireland, Australia and elsewhere.

(2) It is a British system which arises organically out of the British constitutional tradition (whereby we elect people, not parties per se), not an artificial "continental" concoction.

(3) As a preferential system (i.e. the voter puts candidates in order of preference) it allows the voter a much more nuanced and sophisticated expression of opinion, on whatever issues he or she rates as important.

(4) There is no need for tactical voting: the voter does not have to try and guess what other voters are doing.

(5) As with most proportional systems, there are few "wasted votes" and no "safe seats".

(6) There is no need to redraw the boundaries. The multi-member constituencies will be created by joining together existing single-member seats in groups of (ideally) about five.

(7) Boundaries would cease to be in a constant state of flux as under FPTP. When the population of an area rises or falls significantly, you just add or subtract a seat from the multi-member constituency.

(8) STV greatly reduces the power of party patronage. It takes power out of the hands of the party machine and puts it where it belongs, in the hands of the elector.

(9) There are no party lists. Anybody can stand, with or without a party label. If a "maverick" falls out with his party and is "deselected", he can still stand, and let the voters decide.

(10) Primary elections become quite unnecessary. The system incorporates its own "primary" by allowing voters to choose between different candidates of the same party, if they so wish.

(11) The great majority of electors will end up with at least one MP in their multi-member constituency with whom they will feel some affinity (party affinity, if they have a party allegiance, or affinity of views on various issues, if not) and this will be the MP they will want to contact on constituency business. So far from destroying the constituency link between elector and elected, this actually makes it more meaningful.

(12) Unlike some PR systems, STV has no inherent tendency towards party splintering. If anything, probably the opposite. Ireland, with STV, still has the same two main parties it has had for 70 years: the system has not particularly favoured breakaway parties (the PDs who broke away from FF have not prospered in the long run).

(13) STV encourages the election of women, ethnic or religious minorities, gays, etc. to the extent that significant numbers of voters want this -- but not if they don't. There is absolutely no need for parties to invent artificial quotas for women, or black people, or anyone else, for their candidate selection shortlists. Just the fact that the selection will no longer be for just one candidate, but for several, will force parties to put forward a diverse slate.

(14) It becomes much less likely that one party could have a monopoly of a whole region's representation in Parliament. At present the electoral map would lead you believe that there are no Tories in Manchester and no Labour supporters in Surrey. This is not in fact true. STV would allow those people to be represented.

Does STV have any disadvantages? None that I can think of. The Jenkins commission conceded its "unique practical contribution to voter choice", but rejected it as follows:

STV would be too big a leap from that to which we have become used, and it would be a leap in a confusingly different direction from the other electoral changes which are currently being made in Britain.

In my view this is quite wrong. In terms of constituencies, it is much less of a leap than AV Plus. From the voter's point of view, the only change is that there are more candidates to choose from, and you mark them 1, 2, 3 in order of preference instead of just writing a crude X against one of them. If this is a "big leap", it is surely one which most voters will welcome as giving them a lot more power.

If all this is too technical and anorakish, the overarching thing to bear in mind is this: most debate about PR takes it as read that we are talking about proportionality in purely party terms. Johann Hari, like nearly every other commentator, falls into this trap. STV is not absolutely arithmetically proportional to two decimal places in that narrow party sense. Uniquely, it offers broad proportionality of opinion in a manner that transcends party. The voter with no strong party allegiance (which is probably most voters these days) can express his or her preferences as between all the candidates, irrespective of party, according to their views on the issues that the voter him- or herself thinks are important.

Political Performance Index

Iain Dale has a ...

Q. Hang on, what are you doing reading a Tory blog?
A. I happened to be over there putting them right about proportional representation.

As I was saying, Iain Dale has a monthly survey where you can give scores to 40 leading politicians on their performance. He wants non-Tories to take part. He's just added Caroline Flint to his list, thereby affording me the pleasure of giving that ignorant and stupid guttersnipe 1 point out of ten. How on earth did she get into any Cabinet?

Anyway, here is the page that links to the survey:

Vote in the March Political Performance Index