Change that works for them

April 28, 2010 — simonashall

During the last few days, the Lib Dems have been playing a clever PR game by trying to link electoral reform – by which they mean proportional representation’s introduction as our voting system – with “new”, post-expenses, politics.

I’m not altogether against electoral reform. I think that the boundaries currently used for our first-past-the-post system are unfair and give Labour a huge advantage by handing them a built-in majority of about 90 seats, according to Electoral Calculus. I want to see those boundaries re-drawn and the number of seats re-calculated to make for a fairer local representative system – and that includes fairer to the Lib Dems as well.

You routinely hear commentators in the press and the BBC say that the FPTP system discriminates against the third party, as if they had done some research on it and drawn a scientific conclusion. That’s rubbish. All that conclusion is based upon is the realities and record of the system – there is no reason why the Liberal Democrats should have any more difficulty in winning constituencies than anyone else.

The reason it is biased against them is quite simple – they pretend to be a centre-right alternative to the Conservatives in London and the South and a hard-left alternative to old Labour in the north and Scotland. Their manifesto for 2010 cleverly leaves either possibility open. But it does mean that such a dual-personality party cannot hold a “core” vote sufficient for it to win constituencies in sufficient numbers to hold power in FPTP. If the Lib Dems decided what they wanted to be – rather than just pitching for whatever they think they can get away with – their vote in some areas would harden and in others soften. It’s their choice to be at a disadvantage in the system.

But they’re quite happy to overlook that. What they want to do is hold the country to ransom by demanding a referendum on proportional representation in return for offering stability in the event of no party receiving a majority. PR, of course, would not only allow them to hold the balance of power, it would help put pay to their biggest weakness – the idea that a vote for the Lib Dems is a “wasted vote”. It would also allow them to pretend to be “savage cutters” in the south and “tax the richers” in the north while scooping the maximum value from each deluded voter.

It’s not a bad strategy for them – but it should be ringing alarm bells with every single previous Conservative supporter who’s thinking of giving Clegg a chance because he came over well on telly. If you give him the chance he wants, he’ll go into coalition with Brown (or more likely Miliband). They’ll embark on a series of tax hikes and spending cuts not witnessed before in the post-war era. That’s not necessarily to their discredit because any government will have to do the same.

But if you decide after four years that you don’t like them, if Clegg turns out to be not quite what you thought (on Europe, immigration and law and order) and you think in 2014/5 that you’re going to give the Conservatives a chance after all – well, you won’t be able to. Because Lib/Lab will have changed the way things are done and neither the Conservative Party nor Labour would ever be able to govern on their own again. And guess who the beneficiaries of this gerrymandering will be? That’s right, the Lib Dems.

They may call themselves Liberal Democrats, but that doesn’t seem very liberal or democratic to me.

Posted in elections, lib dems. Tags: , , , , , , . 6 Comments »

Wasted opportunity for change

February 25, 2010 — admin

The debate tonight in council over whether to change the voting system in Woking to one all-out election for councillors every four years instead of the contrived thirds system we have at present was a frustrating experience. I had hoped against hope that the sensible cross-party voices of David Bittleston, John Kingsbury, Peter Ankers, Ric Sharp and Richard Sanderson would pursuade some of those with fears about all-out elections to take the plunge.

It was a big ask and needed a two-thirds majority (24 out of 36 councillors) to get through – in the end it was defeated 16-17 by those wishing to stick to the current system. There were some really good points, ranging from the structural ie that all-out elections provides a period of election-free space to encourage longer-term thinking and decision-making by councillors to the equitable ie that resident in three-member wards such as Horsell West get to vote three times as much as those who live in one-member wards like Brookwood.

There are also questions of clarity for voters, of being able to spend less time electioneering and more time engaging with residents and of the £100,000 three-years-in-four cost benefit. But the sticklers, of whom the “radical” Liberal Democrats formed the backbone, won through, obviously worried about their seats and the prospect of four years in the wilderness. Denzil Coulson told the chamber that in 2011 he was sure the Conservatives would be unpopular and thrown out of administration – and then proceeded to defend the thirds system by way of it being more “democratic” because it forced people to work together and gave councillors contact with residents.

Lib Dem leader Ian Johnson too said that the council was best when it worked together on projects and made out that all-out elections would somehow preclude this, allowing one party to bully its agenda through. Other thirds supporters opposed the idea of too radical a change in the council’s makeup after a four-yearly election, with it taking time to retrain new councillors. Yet successful authorities like Guildford, Elmbridge and all the Berkshire unitaries – as well as all London boroughs – are elected this way and seem to overcome these issues.

More to the point, the strong leader model adopted by the council tonight also seems to point to the need for a all-out election, as the leader’s four-year term should co-incide with the council’s. By keeping thirds, members have essentially nullified the strong leader idea and kept the system we have now. Woking is a good council but it is not helped by its marginal and shifting control. It needs a stability and permanance that at present only the officers of the council enjoy.

A number of members felt that those in safe seats were more in favour of all-out elections because they were less likely to find themselves booted out for four years. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again – as someone who is standing for election in a marginal ward, I’d rather lose the seat and not have the opportunity to stand again as a consequence of the best system than win it and have to work within a second-best model that hinders strategic thinking and bold decisions.

It’s a shame that I have to get party political but I think that the Liberal Democrats have let the borough down by not being bold enough to embrance this change. It is only fair for me to mention Cllrs Ian Eastwood, Ric Sharp and Richard Sanderson as the honourable exceptions to this – they voted against the rest of their party in the free vote and also Independent Peter Ankers for coming down on the visionary side too. Interesting to note that Lib Dem PPC Rosie Sharpley, your agent of change if the Lib Dem literature is to believed, didn’t feel able to vote for it on this occasion.

The next opportunity to get rid of our thirds system is 2015. By then I hope the case will be clear.

Posted in Woking Borough Council, elections. Tags: , , , , , . No Comments »

Fiddling the system

February 3, 2010 — admin

Tony Blair talked about it after his win in 1997 but soon kicked it into the long grass when civil servants pointed out the advantage that it could potentially give him during the next 10 years. I am of course talking about the first-past-the-post voting system, which has served the country well for 150 years by delivering strong governments in a two-party system.

Yes, it tends to flatter the winning party – enabling them to get legislation through that would otherwise be compromised by protracted negotiations with coalition partners. We haven’t had a hung parliament in this country since 1974 and you have to go back to 1929 for the one before that. In that time, the country has undergone radical economic and social change and the fact that we’ve had governments able to push through their legislation – both popular and unpopular – has been one of the factors that still allows us to be competitive nearly a century after the onset of post-Imperial decline.

Now Gordon Brown wants to change all that.  Isn’t it interesting that having thought about it in 1997 as Chancellor only now is he coming to realise that perhaps it might be a good idea after all? Or, more likely, isn’t he just after a chance to gerrymander the electoral system? He knows that if he wins the election in May, he’s very unlikely to deliver a fifth term for Labour in 2015 because governments just don’t stay popular for that long. So, he reasons, let’s change the system to make it tougher for the Tories, if they don’t win in 2010, to get in at a later point.

And it’s interesting that a graphic in the Guardian today shows how the House of Commons would have looked if the AV system had been in place already. We can see that while it appears to bolster the interests of the largest and smallest parties at the expense of the one in between, that isn’t really what happens. What happens is that Conservative voters are far more likely to vote Lib Dem as their second choice, Lib Dem voters far more likely to put Labour as theirs and Labour voters also likely to vote Lib Dem as a second preference. So with Conservative shorn of the majority of second choices, they have to win on the first preference votes alone, whereas the other two parties are more likely to win on second choices.

It, in effect, seals an unofficial electoral pact between the Lib Dems and Labour – even though a good many people who vote Lib Dem do so because they don’t want to vote Labour or Conservative and have little idea what they are voting for – except they “think that Vince Cable is ever such a nice chap”.

There is an issue with the first-past-the-post system in how it works in a three-party, not two-party system. The largest party is inflated, the smallest party negated. But the Lib Dems have always called for proportional voting out of self-interest and not because they believe it enhances democracy. I don’t remember it being quite so far up their list of priorities 100 years ago when they were forming governments on the back of the FPTP system.

Thankfully, not everyone is taken in by the PM’s Saulian conversion to the cause of electoral reform. I’m heartened to see that the BBC reports (I’ll quote becuase it’s a long way down):

“Campaigners for democratic reform give a mixed reaction on Mr Brown’s proposals, with some, such as Power 2010 saying it did not go far enough: “Without troubling the public for their views, ministers hand-picked the voting system they favour in a cynical exercise aimed at wrong-footing the Tories ahead of a likely election defeat.

“The future of our democracy is far too important to be decided by empty gestures such as this.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Posted in Labour, elections. Tags: , , , , , , . No Comments »
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