Category: Electoral reform

Revisiting representation

It is hard to overstate how large a challenge to the parliamentary system the EU referendum result represents. Around three quarters of MPs judged that the UK was better off in the EU. But despite their judgment, our economic and geopolitical compass is being reset.

Our current predicament is a perfect demonstration of the problems of plebiscitary democracy grafted onto parliamentary systems. Using a referendum to validate a permanent, crucial step a government wishes to take is one thing. Sometimes the people should authorise a change in the rules of the political game as well as Parliament.

But here, a government offered a dramatic change it deemed profoundly unwise, with no plan for how to do it. It didn’t have a plan for Brexit, because it didn’t want Brexit. It couldn’t offer a prospectus, because any Brexit deal depends on the views of our EU partners as much as our own. That’s not its fault. But there wasn’t even a negotiating pitch to scrutinise. The Scottish referendum in 2014 abounded with dubious assertions. The Scottish Government’s White Paper was full of holes. But at least the holes were there to be picked.

In 2016, we were offered a promised land without any Moses tasked with getting us there. The unreality, the wilful dishonesty about what can and cannot be done, continues to this day. And in the name of democracy — in the name of the people — attempts to expose that are being delegitimised by government. The public were promised the chance to take back control from Brussels. Instead, the Government has taken yet more control from a cowed Parliament.

Defending parliamentarism

So as many have said, we need to stand up for parliamentary democracy. We elect people rather than choosing policies directly for good reason. Government is not a series of on-off and one-off decisions: policies need to be pursued over time and there are many variations. Further, policies intersect with each other. Deciding everything separately and giving priority to everything ultimately decides and prioritises nothing. (Electing people to run one particular service is a bad idea for similar reasons.) Representative democracy requires policy to be discussed: as we’ve seen, referendums can serve to prevent that.

Parliament needs to reassert itself, and we all need to reassert some of the basic principles of a parliamentary system. Parliament has every right to be forceful in shaping how the EU referendum result is implemented. The referendum answered one question. It didn’t give our new Prime Minister some unchallengeable, quasi-telepathic insight into ‘the will of the people’. And MPs have a perfect right to make a judgment their voters don’t like and judged in their turn at an election.

A parliament of representatives?

But if we want parliamentarians to do that, we need to make representative democracy work better and broaden its reach. We need to look at how our parliament works. The public rejected the (non-proportional) Alternative Vote in 2011. We’re unlikely to get another shot at voting reform soon. But our current Parliament’s make-up makes it harder for the public mood to be reflected through representatives rather than referendums.

By that, I don’t mean first past the post isn’t proportional and that’s a bad thing, though it isn’t and, in my view, that is. I mean that major changes in voting behaviour are stifled and points of view go unheard in the national debate for too long. Sometimes that means we ignore grievances for too long. Other times it means we respond to them too uncritically, because we didn’t argue with them openly.

Take the rise of UKIP. The obvious point, from a reformer’s point of view, is that for a party to win an eighth of the votes and one solitary MP is simply unjust. I agree. Others would counter that UKIP’s rise has nonetheless had a profound effect on the behaviour of Labour and the Conservatives. Well, yes. But how transparent has that effect been? On one level it sounds admirably democratic: rather than producing a mishmash, listen to UKIP voters and address why they’re voting that way. But while a political party can often be wrong, the saying goes that voters never can be. So how do UKIP’s policies and beliefs get tested and held accountable on a daily basis, like mainstream parties’?

That should be happening in Parliament. There should be a UKIP Shadow Cabinet, UKIP Select Committee members, UKIP voices at Prime Minister’s Questions. Yes, that gives them a platform. So be it: when an eighth of voters speak, they have earned a platform for their chosen party. But it also incentivises — forces — the other parties to actually argue with UKIP, not just ignore it and then try to flatter its voters. Every so often it’d get its way, but then it seems quite capable of doing so without MPs.

Its presence in Parliament, if earned, could have been an early warning for Parliament. In 2004, I was all for allowing free movement from the new EU member states from day one. Strategically and economically, I stand by it: we kept and cultivated friends in eastern Europe and we were richer for it. But politically I was utterly, catastrophically wrong.

Now, it’s quite likely that the House of Commons elected in 2001 would have had a few UKIP (or Referendum Party, or whatever) MPs, probably not all in Conservative areas, to raise the alarm about enlargement. Perhaps we’d have responded by imposing transitional controls after all. Perhaps we wouldn’t have. But the early warning mechanism would have been there. We might not be leaving the European Union now.

What kind of reform?

Reform doesn’t have to mean some remote national list system where parties with 1% of the vote hold all business up. Quite the contrary: British traditions of constituency representation and keeping party HQs from having too much control over who ends up in Parliament matter. But the idea that these preclude anything but one system, with no nod to proportionality at all, is quite some straw man. It is quite possible, building on systems we’ve already used in the UK, to design a system which fits into our parliamentary culture.

The obvious choice would be an additional member system designed to fit British political culture. Most MPs would be elected as they are now. The other list MPs could be chosen through an open list, representing local areas — not huge regions. A system where an area the size of, say, Surrey has 6–7 constituency MPs and 4–5 county MPs really won’t fling us all into Israeli-style chaos. The electoral areas wouldn’t be big enough — though you could add a 4–5% threshold to make sure. And the number of county MPs per area would be small enough for voters to meaningfully choose individuals, not just parties.

This would mean an end to the days when 10% or 15% of voters were denied proper reflection of their views in Parliament. That includes people whose voting choices I don’t like, and quite right too. Parliament should be the cockpit of UK national debate. Robin Cook argued that if you wanted that to be the case, you should want Parliament’s hours to fit the print media news cycle. I’d argue you should also want Parliament to represent the major strands of political opinion in rough proportion to their size.

Our current system fails to deliver that basic requirement. It also makes it harder for the two largest parties to hear from voters outside their strongest areas. Not insurmountable, of course — Labour and the Conservatives have both managed it in their time — but harder. That matters because Labour voters in Surrey and Tory voters in Tyne and Wear should have some political representation they choose. But a fairer system would also give Surrey a voice in the Labour Party, and Tyne and Wear a voice in the Conservative Party.

Co-operative government

Of course, a sensible proportional system would probably require a party to win around 44–45% of the vote to get a majority on its own. With current voting patterns, parties would have to work together to govern. Quite right too. I can see how a party with 45% of the vote — even 40% — might claim, on a moderate platform, to represent the popular will. I cannot see 35%, which my own party won in 2005, as much of a mandate to govern alone.

There is no reason co-operative government must end voter control. Parties in coalition-prone countries are generally good at signalling their priorities in dealing with others. In fact, such evidence as we have suggests our parties aren’t much (or any) better at delivering their manifestos than the continentals! Junior partners in coalition get about the share of ministries their share of seats suggests, and the broad political complexion of the legislature is generally reflected in policies passed.

At the moment, UK parties second-guess which broad electoral coalitions 35%-40% of voters might prefer. In other countries, voters themselves send a broader range of political forces to Parliament and meaningfully control their relative strengths. So in Sweden, voters know the four parties which will work together on the centre-right. But they can alter the influence each party has within that bloc — a larger say for the Centre Party, say, or the Liberals.

To my mind, that compares rather well to the UK, where mainstream social democrats and liberal-minded conservatives are (for now) wholly unrepresented by party leaderships. No doubt uncompromising leftists and traditional conservatives felt the same a few years ago. Why not let the people themselves decide how much weight they wish to give both?

Mediating mandates

There’s a tension here between two principles many constitutional conservatives cherish. The first is the doctrine of the mandate itself. In UK mandate theory, a party goes to the country with a manifesto, wins a majority in the Commons and then enacts said manifesto. The argument runs: a majority single-party government is clearly in power, clearly responsible and clearly accountable.

The second is the idea of ‘government by discussion’. This is surely key if we want Parliament, not just government, to stand up for its right to make its own judgments. Decisions should be debated and considered in Parliament, and will be so more fully than most people wish to do themselves. MPs can then be held accountable for their judgment.

It’s pretty clear why these clash. The first implies policies will be pushed through smoothly and easily; the second implies they’ll be tested and scrutinised. Obviously, no one actually treats both as absolutes. But contrasts between a pure plurality mandate and muddled coalitions are therefore unhelpful. Yes, the ‘mandate’ is more diffuse in a proportional parliament. But it’s broader, and a culture of negotiation fits better with ‘government by discussion’.

More than that, it’s government by discussion, not unchallengeable mandates, we need to bolster now. It makes sense for governments which only reflect a minority of voters and parliaments where new views find it hard to get a seat at the table to use referendums, precisely to make a mandate unchallengeable. An over-obsession with the mandate, narrowly defined, is part of the disease, not the cure.

Just now, reasserting parliamentarism means reasserting the value of deliberation, discussion and debate. To do that, we need to make sure the main strands of opinion are properly represented in Parliament. I know constitutional conservatives won’t like this argument. But they of all people should remember the old quote: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 13 March 2017.

Why I’m voting ‘Yes’ to AV

The AV referendum is probably going to be our last chance to express a view on how to choose our MPs for quite some time. I can’t see the issue coming back for about 20 years. So if you’re concerned about our democracy (or, indeed, if you’re delighted with it the way it is), the vote on 5 May is a crucial one.

Whichever side wins, one MP will still continue to represent each local area; whichever side wins, the voting system will be almost equally likely to deliver majority governments. We’re being asked, instead, which of two options is the fairer way of choosing our (single) local MP.

On that basis, in the full knowledge that the question here is AV versus FPTP and independently of the chances of any further reform, I’m hoping for a ‘Yes’ vote – and for what they’re worth, here are my main reasons:

1. With AV, a local MP will better reflect local people’s views

AV will make sure your MP’s views are nearer the real centre of gravity in your local area – and prevent a cohesive minority, who don’t really reflect most people’s views, from taking over instead.

For instance, imagine a seat where the Conservatives win 35% of the vote, Labour win 30%, the Greens win 25% and the Liberal Democrats and Socialists both win 5%. Leave aside the fact that the Tories only got 35% of the vote: as a matter of pure common sense, looking at the political consensus in this area, would a Tory victory really be a fair reflection of how most people voted?  It would be the same if Labour won 35%, the Tories won 30%, UKIP won 25% and the Lib Dems and English Democrats both won 5%. In both cases, FPTP delivers the seat to a party who is strongly opposed by most voters: AV would fix that.

2. With AV, no citizen will have to fear voting for their real first choice and getting their last instead

A general election should be your chance to weigh up what different parties offer, look at local candidates and make an honest statement of preference. It’s the only chance you get to express your opinion on what kind of Britain you want and who you want in charge and, hopefully, have some bearing on the outcome.

But for too many people, elections have stopped being an expression of belief and become a glorified game of chess. Keeping the enemy out becomes the only aim: voting ceases to function as an expressive act, a positive endorsement, and starts to be a defensive (often grudging) manoeuvre. And people who might have voted Green, Liberal Democrat or UKIP (or Labour or Conservative, for that matter) end up hiding their true colours and walking away from the polling booth feeling cheated. This is no way to run a democracy.

3. AV will make our political system a little more open

For better or worse, British voters have been gradually drifting away from the two largest parties. Labour and the Conservatives barely won 65% of the total vote in 2010; in 1951, they won nearly 97%. This has happened under a system which actively discourages voting for new parties. At the last European election, Tory and Labour support fell as low as 43.4%. Although I doubt we’d see figures quite that low in a general election, I do believe the current voting system is suppressing the real range of British public opinion.

There is an argument that the voting system should guard against a mass of tiny parties making the Commons unworkable: there’s not much of a democratic argument that it should try and stop any new political force from being given expression by the people. But FPTP preserves our party system in aspic: and if we ever saw a real surge in popular opinion, the voting system would crush it.

We’ve got the proof from the 1980s. The Liberal-SDP Alliance failed, but not because it couldn’t command mass support (25.4% of voters endorsed them even under FPTP) or because it had no credibility (the Gang of Four had all been Cabinet ministers). Ultimately, people didn’t believe they could win and didn’t take the risk. They might or might not have actually done so under AV: but if they had, an Alliance government’s economic policy would almost certainly have been a much better reflection of public opinion than Thatcher’s. It is very hard to believe that democracy was well served by the actual outcome, whatever your politics.

4. AV will produce governments with a stronger democratic mandate

Even if you want majority governments, their declining electoral mandate ought to worry you – and AV can help there. AV would, for instance, still have given Labour a majority in 2005. But Liberal Democrat voters were pretty repelled by Michael Howard’s campaign: most of them would have ranked Labour above the Conservatives. SNP and Plaid Cymru voters aren’t known for preferring Tory governments. 65% of people voted against Labour in 2005, but it’s almost certain that a majority of people preferred a Labour government to a Tory one: with AV, we’d have known that they did, and that broader (though, yes, less committed) support would have been expressed at the ballot box.

When we do get hung parliaments, we’ll also have a much better idea of what voters want their preferred party to do. If Liberal Democrat voters in 2010 preferred a Labour-Lib Dem deal, we’d have known about it from their second (third, etc.) preferences: equally, we’d have a better idea of whether the country preferred a Cameron-led government from preference data. With FPTP, we have no real way of knowing what voters want when no one wins outright: with AV, we do – and so politicians have fewer places to hide.

Finally …

Unless trends change radically, we can expect a number of things to happen under FPTP in the coming years. MPs will be elected with ever lower levels of public support. Governments will win majorities with smaller and smaller mandates from the voters – Labour’s 35.2% of the vote in 2005 could just be the start of things to come. Whether we get a government in line, even roughly, with the people’s wishes will become more and more a matter of luck, electoral geography and how many parties split the vote on which part of the political spectrum. And by the way, we’ll probably get a few more hung parliaments, whatever the voting system.

AV isn’t perfect and it won’t fix every problem. But it’s a better and a fairer way of choosing our representatives than the one we’ve got. MPs will have stronger mandates from their constituents – not a perfect mandate, not the whole-hearted support of everyone in their area, but a reasonably broad base of support in a multi-party system where voters can cast an honest preference. Governments will rely on broader support than they do now – and because they’ll need to maintain (qualified) support from other parties’ voters, they’ll be wise to govern in a way which reflects that broader support. And our political system will be better able to give big shifts in public opinion some form of expression, rather than just bottling them up.

If you want to be able to vote with your heart and your head at the same time; if you want governments to listen to a broad swathe of the people; if you want a politics which lets new people and new ideas into the debate: vote ‘Yes’ on Thursday.

If we get fairer votes, we need some better stats too

If AV is passed by referendum in a month’s time – which I hope it is – voters will be able to give much more information about their real preferences than they currently can. That is, of course, the point: by giving second (and third, and so on) preferences, voters will no longer have to choose between heart and head. They can choose both, all on one ballot paper.

Against that, ‘No’ campaigners pit the fear of more coalition governments. I don’t accept the premise that these are a bad thing; better a compromise government, reflecting a plural electorate, than winner takes all on 35% of the vote. But that’s an argument for another post; AV is perfectly capable of delivering majority governments, and in Australia it generally does. In a British context, majority governments would be more legitimate, too: by allowing the expression of subsequent preferences, most governments would be shown to have a base of (partial) support extending well beyond their total share of first preferences. The fact that most Liberal Democrat (and SNP and Plaid Cymru) voters preferred a Labour government to a Conservative one in 2005 would have been made explicit and measurable in second and third preferences: and Labour’s mandate would have looked much stronger as a result.

But even where AV produces hung parliaments, it will produce hung parliaments where the will of the electorate is made a little clearer. Looking at the spread of their voters’ preferences, the party or parties which held the balance would have a much clearer idea of which partner their voters would prefer; and if the second-placed party had a much wider support base among the electorate as a whole than the first-, we’d be much more likely to know about it. So an AV hung parliament would be more democratic than the FPTP version: it would be that bit clearer if a party defied the popular will and chose the ‘wrong’ coalition partner, and that bit easier to punish them later.

The Australian election of 2010 provided a good example of how AV can help clarify an unclear result. A strong Green vote cut the Australian Labor Party’s voteshare down to 37%, well behind the Liberal/National Coalition’s 44%. But when the full preferences were tallied and allocated to one of the two major groupings, the ALP had 50.12% of the vote: a very small lead, but clear. When given a choice between the two options, the Australians’ voting system allowed the politicians to see which option they preferred. FPTP would have given no such clarity.

The slight snag is that, under British counting procedures, we might well not be given the information which AV creates and makes available. The Australians record the full preference data for their elections, allowing much more information to be gleaned from them – even if you vote for a leading party in your constituency and your other preferences never need to be used, they’re still kept on record. In Britain, by contrast, we tend to perform the minimum checks on our ballot papers compatible with making sure we get the right winner – which means that a lot of that preference data would probably be lost in our version of an AV count. We wouldn’t necessarily get an equivalent of two-party-preferred voting data (in 2010 this would presumably involve a Labour-Conservative, Labour-Liberal Democrat and Liberal Democrat-Conservative analysis) here.

Technocratic though it sounds, the time could come when that information matters. It matters because, when no one party has won power and politicians therefore have to strike bargains, this information leaves them with fewer places to hide. A party whose voters split 70% in one direction but then went the other way in its choice of coalition partner would live to regret it: and they’d have been warned in advance, too. But equally, if the people expressed a clear preference for one leading party or another overall, they’d still stand warned: and if they ignored it, again, they would be likely to pay for it. The democratic basis of a coalition would be much better spelled out for all parties: and that would help to make sure that coalition did reflect the broad wishes of the electorate.

So hung parliaments and coalitions shouldn’t necessarily be feared; AV doesn’t necessarily create more hung parliaments; and when it does produce hung parliaments, it provides more information than FPTP about the outcome voters would prefer. But if we want to have that information to hand, we need to make sure it’s recorded. So if there’s a ‘Yes’ vote, a word in the ear of the Electoral Commission might be no bad thing.

Coalitions, majorities and mandates

One of the most interesting questions of the next few years is whether or not we’ve embarked on an era of hung parliaments, minorities and coalitions. I’m not necessarily convinced: I certainly don’t think we’ve started a period of constant hung parliaments, and post-coalition Conservatives and a more liberal Labour might even reinvigorate the two-party system (at least for a while).

So Vernon Bogdanor’s piece in The Guardian covers important ground. Our current Coalition has caused enormous anger for many – in large part because of the sheer scale of the damage being done to public services and the welfare state, but also because people feel that ‘this isn’t what I voted for’. Liberal Democrat voters, of course, feel this way particularly strongly. Bogdanor is absolutely right that the formation of government mustn’t become insulated from the people.

I assume he isn’t being literal when he says that parties should be required to signal their intentions and likely concession in a hung parliament scenario. It’s not just impractical for parties to show their hand in advance (no party leader is going to throw away all their bargaining power before they even know how much they have); it’s actually vital, if coalitions are to reflect the election results, that concessions by coalition partners have some flex. In terms of democracy, the Lib Dems should expect to make more concessions if they win 15% of the vote than if they win 24%; and no formula can pin that down in advance. He does have an important point about preferred coalition partners: British parties have, morally if not pragmatically, something to learn here. It’s worth pointing out that Clegg, for all his faults, did stick to his pre-election commitment (‘the party with the strongest mandate – the largest number of seats and votes – has the first right to seek to govern’) on government formation: but in Germany or Sweden, for instance, parties make it quite clear who they will and won’t work with. A Swedish vote for the Moderates, Liberals, Centre or Christian Democrats will go towards a four-party, centre-right coalition; Green votes in a German federal election will help support a centre-left, Red-Green government. That makes the electoral choice clearer and it helps legitimise the coalition process.

But I would also question the implied account of what actually happened in 2010 and in previous elections: the notion that normally we elect governments directly, but that in 2010 the third party decided who governed Britain and voters were excluded. I don’t think Bogdanor thinks exactly this, incidentally, but it’s a narrative which informs the argument. It deserves some scrutiny.

At the heart of the case for coalitions is a sense that the largest minority party, which generally wins a majority under first-past-the-post (and usually would under AV too), isn’t necessarily in possession of a clear mandate to govern. I am not convinced that the Labour Party, which won 35.2% of the vote in 2005, was a ‘directly elected government’. Granted, political negotiation plays an essential role in delivering the government in hung parliaments; the government’s election is, in that sense, indirect.

But normally, the voting system just turns minorities into majorities for us instead. I don’t see that that’s a more democratic approach. I believe that when the voters don’t give any political party anywhere near a majority of the vote, a coalition government – a compromise between two positions – has a better shot at reflecting the balance of views of the public than a single-party government. Would a majority Conservative government be nearer the political centre of gravity in the UK than the Coalition, for instance?

I’m also unconvinced by the (implicit) analysis of what happened in May. The formation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition was absolutely bound up with the electoral arithmetic and with perceptions of legitimacy. 306 Conservative, 258 Labour and 57 Liberal Democrat MPs meant that a Lib-Lab coalition deal didn’t have a majority: and crucially, it was felt that the Labour Party had lost the election. The Liberal Democrat leadership feared the consequences of a ‘coalition of losers’: a government which many might deem illegitimate. Far from representing an overriding of the election result in the name of ideological agreement – even now, we need to bear in mind that most Lib Dem members, activists and even elected representatives would have found Labour a more natural partner – the resulting government was absolutely bound up with a particular interpretation of who won, who lost and what the electorate wanted.

Part of the problem with our debate at the moment, I think, is that all parties were evasive at best about what lay ahead. All three parties failed to outline more than a minority of their plans to tackle the structural deficit: all three parties emphasised ‘waste’, fairness and protecting the vulnerable. No one said that they planned to take an £18 billion axe to welfare benefits!  Labour in government would have found themselves assailed by the same cries of ‘broken promises’.

Our present position isn’t an indictment of coalition government: it is in large measure the consequence of a belief, shared by all mainstream parties, that the people simply will not vote for frankness in a general election. I’m not convinced they’re wrong about that: but in any event, the fact that politicians are either too scared or too canny to face voters with unpalatable truths in an election campaign says very little about the merits of coalition government.