AV+?
Well, I like it. It is straightforward enough (Scotland copes fine with a similar system). I don’t know if most people (or most people who think there’s a problem with FPTP, even) would agree that it offers a clear solution - can we assess what the likely results of this election would be under it? The necessity of “buy before you try” makes it hard to know what the effect of any change would be, which makes it easy to scare people into keeping the status quo. There would be a lot of guff about the constituency link, for example.
In any case, I fear AV+ is unfairly tainted by the AV referendum - many people will think we’ve already had that conversation. Of course, that referendum itself shows just how difficult it is to build up any kind of enthusiasm for electoral reform (crappy Lib Dem campaigning notwithstanding).
And that solution is Approval Voting.
If I remember correctly from my university days, I read a paper which crunched 1970-2005 electoral results under AV+, and it seemed to be a good system for ensuring single-party government, on the whole, but with substantially slimmed majorities. It would have meant the same period of Tory rule 1979-1992, but with far smaller majorities, and 1992 would have been a hung parliament with a Tory majority. 1997-2010 would have been Labour but smaller majorities.
Heavens knows what it would do with our present political makeup, though. I could try to find the article somewhere…
SDP-Liberal Alliance/Liberal Democrats vs First Past the Post 1983 - 2010
That did nothing and frankly I can’t see the situation changing. Mainly because the two main beneficiaries of the current system (Labour and Conservatives) need to get on board for anything to change.
Having followed this from across the pond, I’ve always assumed the last British election under FPTP will be the first election in which the LibDems make a really strong showing. Is that oversimplified? They’ve already managed to make a strong enough showing to get into the Government for the first time, but it doesn’t seem to have changed anything.
That was the assumption of many, yes, and that’s why there was a referendum on AV in 2011. The Lib Dems insisted on electoral reform, but the Tories played hardball, and agreed only to entertaining AV (which isn’t really proportional) and only if the decision were ratified by the people in a referendum.
Cue an aggressive referendum campaign which results in an overwhelming result against AV, kicking electoral reform into the long grass.
Honestly, I appreciate that the Lib Dems wanted to present themselves as a responsible party of power, but I’m amazed that folded so readily on presenting AV as the alternative to FPTP. It simply gave Labour and the Tories a stick to beat them with, and they didn’t particularly care for it either. A lost opportunity, for some.
No it doesn’t. For any given number of MPs, it makes constituencies larger to have a more proportional effect (which is a problem for the sparsely populated and larger geographical areas, like the Highlands and Islands), but its whole point is that voters get to express preferences between individual candidates within the same party (rather than voting for a party list and thereby only an indirect effect on which individuals get elected). So with, say, a three-member constituency, parties have an incentive to maximise their vote by putting forward a diverse set of candidates, and voters will end up with a choice of elected representative to go to with an issue (no guarantee they’ll end up with someone they find sympathetic, but more of a chance of it than at present).
Yes, the Lib Dems truly cocked that one up as they did for so many things in this administration, sacrificing much to get virtually nothing except the privilege of being the Tories’ whipping boys. Which is why they’re going to get absolutely slaughtered in this election (to the significant benefit of the Greens, who I anticipate will pick up a huge number of votes but few to no actual seats, thanks to FPTP); they’ve shown that they can’t be trusted to stick to their principles when offered the tiniest taste of power.
I’d like to see a less hamhanded referendum on either STV or AV+ but as noted the relatively recent and poorly handled AV one has scuppered any chance of that for a long while.
The campaign against AV was aggressive to the point of simply spreading lies or at least mischaracterizing AV. One thing strongly implied by campaigns such as “One person, One vote”, was that AV gave some people more than one vote and was therefore less fair, which was nonsense.
Unfortunately though, the result is still that any type of electoral reform is now way out in the long grass.
Yes indeed, the NO campaign was disingenuous in many ways. But then, so was YES - I think few on YES sincerely believed in AV, but only favoured it as ‘at least it’s not FPTP’.
I voted NO, myself, as while I can see plenty to criticise FPTP, what I saw of AV’s workings means it can be even worse on a national scale. I doubt voting YES would have changed any of what we’re witnessing in British politics today.
I doubt the Liberal Democrats or any other party that wants electoral reform will make the mistake of putting it to referendum again. Rather, it will be simply made a condition of any confidence and supply or coalition agreement.
Actually it’s worse than I thought…
They actually ran a leaflet with a picture of a newborn baby and the slogan “She needs a maternity unit, not an alternative voting system” :smack:
Would it play out any different, do you think, in a Labour-LibDem coalition government?
Quite possibly. Given the only party I can see that defends FPTP outright is the Tories, I can see the Lib Dems ganging up with the smaller parties on a Labour party that only keeps FPTP out of inertia and inaction, but if it recognised that two-party politics are long-gone, they could be persuaded to take the initiative - as long as the replacement is to their advantage, of course.
As to whether there would be a referendum to endorse such a move, I reckon it would be inescapable - the convention has now been set. As for what the result of that referendum would be? Absolutely no idea. I have suspicions that sometimes constitutional and electoral reform, while sensible and urgent from the point of view of politicians and talking heads, is utterly boring and remote to the average Joe, and would rather their guys simply win rather than fiddle about.
This article by Jack Monroe in the Guardian “I didn’t leave the Labour Party, it left me” illustrates how things have changed. In the past, people who felt that their party was drifting in the wrong direction would have no choice (assuming they wanted to stay active in politics) but to stay in and fight to drag it back to where they thought it should be. Now, they can leave for another party that does reflect what they want. With the result that the major parties lose the dissenting voices and become more centrist by default. If this process continues long enough, then the UK will eventually become a genuine multi-party democracy, with people able to shop around for the party that best matches their politics - but at the cost of seeing these parties watered down in the inevitable coalition.
(With respect to the Greens and UKIP, this watering down would be considerable - they just don’t have the actual talent to be in government. Less so than even the LibDems.)
It might not work like that though. If enough Labour voters were to follow Monroe’s lead and vote Green, then it would send a powerful signal to the party that they needed to recalibrate leftwards. If they managed to reform their politics in response they could quite rightly sell themselves on the fact that they can actually get into power in a way that the Greens can’t. But that requires them to read the signal’s right. That article lists the benefits of the Greens as:
Only one and a half of those are actually Green policies. But the odds are Labour would respond by coming out with anti-GMO policies, or banning nuclear power. The right-wing parallel is voters who want out of the EU voting UKIP, and the Tories responding with anti-immigration measures. (In fact Labour and Tories are doing precisely this in response to UKIP already.)
How does that get the UK to electoral reform? We could get there if: there’s a coalition government, where the junior members of the coalition are needed to form a government but not really in a strong enough position to get very much done (e.g. the Greens in a left-wing coalition); that might get their voters sufficiently exercised by the idea of PR, in order to give their party more weight in coalition, that it becomes an issue. But it still needs both a substantial vote share for the ignored minority parties, and an enlightened major party to back it with the aim of taking a hit in the short-term but of winning more seats in the long-term by getting the system to work for them.
I have a feeling the OP doesn’t quite grasp the effect of, say, STV. Just because the Green party gets 8% of the vote under STV doesn’t mean it’s going to get anywhere near 8% of the MPs. AFAIK, the only reasonably large country where something like this is true is Israel.
The closest I can see to true PR is if they abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a “senate” where the seats are distributed among the parties in proportion to the total votes for their candidates (so, in this case, the Greens would get 8% of the seats). No, I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon, either. You also can’t really have this in the Commons as you end up losing any link between the people of a particular area and any of the MPs.
As the author of the OP I can assure you that I do understand the problem. I did not mention STV which is a voting system, but Proportional Representation which is a goal.
We have no problem in Scotland where we have a system which is pretty close to proportional, and where we have an identifiable constituency MSP, with a further seven regional MSP’s meaning that we have a variety of political approaches to Holyrood. My local MSP is Labour, but if I have a problem with something not high on the Labour Party agenda, I can access a local MSP from the Conservative, Green, LibDem and SNP Parties. My local MP is Conservative and if I have a problem low on the Tory agenda, I have no choice of representative at Westminster.
The other failing of FPTP is that only a few votes in a limited number of swing constituencies decide the outcome, whereas with more proportional systems, every vote counts.
However, the main problem in May will be explain how 15% of the electorate return two UKIP MPs and 4% of the electorate return up to 50 SNP MPs.
It’s not a problem. The answer is simple, as I said earlier, that SNP are massively popular regionally, and UKIP are unpopular nationally.
So Pjen, do you have confidence that a fragmented parliament is actually going to push for, organize and campaign for yet another nation shaking referendum? No. They won’t. So the answer is no, this will not be the last FPTP election.