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Sunder Katwala
Gordon Brown should broker a historic compromise on electoral reform by proposing the Alternative Vote alongside a second chamber elected by PR, argues Fabian general secretary Sunder Katwala in a new essay for September's Fabian Review. The plan would end a century of stalemate - and head off a legitimacy crisis under our current voting system.
Electoral reform feels like an idea whose time has come - and gone. There was an undeniable momentum a decade ago, with a new government elected pledging a referendum. But the Blair-Ashdown liaison, the Lib Dems' constitutional co-operation with Robin Cook, and Roy Jenkins being sent around the country to stir up interest in electoral reform are now scenes from a lost political era. Partisan hostilities have been eagerly resumed on the centre-left. Non-party reformers have focused much more on the moral case for change than how to build the alliances to make it possible. Despite historically low levels of turnout, reform prospects have faded.
Gordon Brown has made democratic accountability a central theme of his premiership but has said little on voting reform, beyond telling the Fabian Labour leadership hustings that he is "not closed" to it. He should use his Governance of Britain consultation to broker an historic compromise: electoral reform without proportional representation. By backing the Alternative Vote (AV) for Commons elections as part of a democracy package that includes a second chamber elected by PR, Brown could end a century of stalemate over voting systems and Lords reform.
This would not offer supporters of Proportional Representation the electoral system of their dreams. Still, it would be a deal worth backing. From a pro-PR perspective, AV would deliver significant advances over the current system. Every MP would need to seek majority support in their constituencies. Every party could poll its full support everywhere, ending the dilemmas of tactical voting. And AV would mostly deliver more proportional results than the current system.
At the same time, the Alternative Vote is much better placed than PR to broker that elusive consensus for reform. It can offer reassurance about change by preserving the most valued features of the current system: strengthening the MP-constituency link and avoiding 'two classes' of MPs. Voters would retain a clear choice of alternative governments.
This ability to unblock the reform stalemate is important. Few feel any urgency about voting reform. But the hidden truth of our democracy is that the electoral system is broken, and no longer fit for purpose. If elections ever became close contests again, this would reveal that we are playing Russian roulette with British democracy every four or five years.
The electoral reform time warp
Sixteen times in seventeen post-war General Elections, one party has won a majority of seats in the House of Commons, though none has ever won 50 per cent of the vote. The traditional arguments for and against the 'first past the post' (FPTP) system revolve around this 'majoritarian' tendency (though the pattern is not guaranteed: half of the twentieth century elections before 1945 led to hung parliaments).
The case against is unfairness: the starkly disproportional representation in parliament of voters' views, most strikingly in 1983 when Labour held off the Alliance by just 27.6 per cent to 25.4 per cent but was rewarded by 209 seats (31 per cent) to 23 (3.5 per cent).
But the counter-argument is accountability: voters choose governments, rather than minority party leaders in some smoke-filled room having disproportionate power to decide who governs.
This well-worn debate is stuck in a time warp. Barely a word has changed, on either side, since the 1980s. That might seem only natural - the way we elect the Commons remains unchanged. But that ignores the most extensive constitutional changes since 1918, including several different electoral systems being adopted for various UK elections. John Denham, Chair of the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform, rightly warns fellow advocates that their arguments risk becoming 'ossified' if they do not adapt to this changed world.
Opponents of reform are just as guilty. They know where they stand – so have overlooked profound changes in how the unreformed system works. "We should not change a system which works so well", the Conservative Party told the Jenkins Commission in 1998. But how well does it fulfil the criteria of its own supporters? "The most popular party almost always wins a majority", they wrote. This is the central argument for the status quo. It surely fails if the system cannot expect to pick the right winner – the party with the most votes.
A broken system: why 'first past the post' now fails in its own terms
It is one minute past ten pm on Sunday 4 May 2013. After a hard-fought campaign, the most expensive pie chart in BBC history spins towards the viewers. Has the New Tory call for 'change' finally worked? Their fetching new sky blue segment at 39 per cent edges the Prime Minister's deeper red back to 37 per cent, and the Lib Dems are squeezed to 21 per cent. Seven nail-biting hours later, Labour is back for a fifth term with a slim working majority of 14. Not because the exit polls got it wrong – they turned out to be uncannily accurate - but because the electoral system did.
Result: meltdown. "Democracy crisis as losing party wins" reports the Times. "Labour's Strange Victory – half a million votes behind", says The Guardian. "Disunited Kingdom: Tory England denied" complains the Telegraph. "Stolen: The Great Election Shambles", shouts the Mail. "No Mandate to Govern", declares The Independent. One question dominates angry radio phone-ins: why weren't we told this could happen?
As commentators observed over the next few days, there were historical precedents. Attlee had won Labour's highest-ever share of the poll in 1951 on 48.8 per cent, yet Churchill, trailing on 48 per cent, won a majority and the Tories governed the age of affluence. (Harold Wilson turned the tables in the first 1974 election, winning most seats when a quarter of a million votes behind). But few were convinced by the history lesson. The 1951 election had taken place in a different political universe from our own. With no national TV or radio reporting, the local constituency contests were the focus of the campaign. Polling was in its infancy and totting up the final national vote was almost an afterthought.
More importantly, the electoral system had deep and almost unquestioned legitimacy. The institutions had come through the war. The two main parties had 97 per cent of the vote on an 85 per cent turnout. Both strongly supported the system, treating unfair results like bad umpiring decisions, likely to even out over time.
That broad legitimacy lasted almost three decades. This always depended on some luck: the General Election is just the aggregate of over 600 separate contests. But, in elections before 1974, the electoral geography tended to deliver a winner's bonus (which psephologists put down to 'cube law') and thereby get the right result.
It no longer works. At the next election, a six point lead could give Gordon Brown a majority of 100, while David Cameron would need to finish nine points ahead just to escape hung parliament territory. Labour could expect to be 90 seats ahead of level on votes, and still be the largest party in the Commons even if they were up to five points behind.
The causes are complex. There are too few marginals as the country has polarised. Turnout has fallen unevenly, and is much lower in safe Labour seats. An electoral system unlikely to cope with a close election, and much more likely to spark a legitimacy crisis if it does not, is no longer fit for purpose.
Close elections have become very rare in Britain. That is why these flaws have remained hidden, the subject of academic rather than public debate. The last election was the first for over thirty years where the second party was less than 5 per cent behind - and that was in large part because voters refused to believe the Labour scare that Michael Howard could win. It is 15 years since the country did not know who would win as the campaign began (and then John Major ended fully 7.5 per cent ahead of Labour).
'Fairness for Tories' is not a slogan to evoke universal sympathy. The Conservatives staunchly champion the current system. Perhaps, like Attlee in 1951, they should take rough justice on the chin. Perhaps they should, but their instinct might instead be to fuel grievances over England and the Union (a red herring in explaining anti- Tory bias). While Labour reformers might hesitate to spread the word about pro-Labour bias, there is a world of difference between changing the scale of victory and picking the wrong winner. A governing party re-elected on this basis could suffer significant long-term damage. (Would sceptical voters understand that the bias is not of this government's making?) There is a compelling nonpartisan argument about the risk to democratic legitimacy, but Labour's enlightened self-interest might also be best served by proposing reform after the next election. Labour is well placed to win a fourth successive victory – but it must then simply be a matter of time before another party one day leads the popular vote.
The politics of reform: Is PR possible?
If reform is necessary, is it possible? Proportional Representation, the goal of most reformers, has been a recurring cause of the 'outs', not the 'ins', of British politics. The Liberals began an eight decade campaign on leaving office, while Labour's Keir Hardie backed PR before 1914. The 1970s Tory groundswell for PR and the ascendancy of Labour's electoral reformers after 1992 both melted away.
Put three electoral reformers in a room and they might propose four different voting systems. The Independent Commission on the Voting System, chaired by Roy Jenkins, appointed to clear up this internecine struggle, surveyed every electoral system ever used anywhere and invented a new hybrid of its own.
Reformers who adopt a theological insistence on a particular system guarantee their own defeat. Single Transferable Vote elections are the most fun for the political anoraks among us, with a choice between candidates from the same party. But ordinary voters feel this demands unreasonable levels of knowledge when their priority at the polls is to elect a government. The greatest barrier to STV in Britain, as Jenkins identified, is that constituencies of 300,000 would be too large outside big cities.
The most plausible PR alternatives are a German-style additional member top-up systems (already in use for Scottish and Welsh devolution), or the Jenkins variation, using the Alternative Vote for constituency contests and reducing the number of top-up seats to 15 - 20 per cent. PR list systems are a non-runner. However, the almost sacred status accorded to the MP-constituency link is a problem for all forms of PR, because it often translates into hostility to any 'two class' system (where some MPs have no constituency responsibilities) or to breaches of exclusivity, by having several MPs represent the same constituents. Any PR system must overcome one or other objection.
Whatever form it takes, how could PR come about? The hung parliament scenario is implausible. The Lib Dems would struggle to successfully extract PR as the price of coalition. Even if possible, this would be hazardous. A referendum would be necessary, and polls show it could be won. Gifting opponents the charge of a political fix, not a principled reform, would be an own goal which could scupper reform for generations.
Reform must be proposed on its merits. But this raises the 'turkeys voting for Christmas' conundrum. Some see a Citizen's Convention as an escape route – but how then is the Convention to be secured? Campaigners show no sign of creating anything like the scale of sustained pressure seen in Scotland after 1992. The argument for excluding party perspectives in electing a Convention is weak and undemocratic. (And why would a randomly selected convention be legitimate?) Whether electoral systems work well depends on the party system they sustain.
It is a fallacy that removing parties would magically lead to consensus on the ideal system. Reform should not pursue narrow party advantage – and the hurdle of a referendum prevents that. But choosing voting systems is unavoidably political: views about democracy differ. Is consensus politics better, or does it stifle ideology and choice? Reformers can not wish away political parties: there is no short cut to building enough support for change.
Certainly, those who advocate PR should be ready to back any proportional system capable of winning sufficient backing. But a non-PR reform has better prospects.
An historic compromise: electoral reform without PR
Backing the Alternative Vote – a non-proportional system – would be a more difficult compromise for supporters of PR to make. But it is the most plausible route to a more pluralist democracy.
There is no perfect electoral system. British General Elections use a single contest to elect the government, a national parliament and the local constituency representatives within it. Trade-offs are inevitable. The Jenkins Commission sought to balance stable government with greater proportionality, voter choice and a strong MP-constituency link.
The case for the Alternative Vote is a pragmatic one. It has a good claim to offer the best balance between these competing demands. It is by some distance the voting reform most likely to command a consensus. It is the least complex reform, yet would deliver significant benefits which are easy to communicate to voters. The only change in British General Elections would be that voters would rank candidates in order of preference, and candidates would need a majority of votes to be elected.
This would increase the legitimacy of MPs, each elected with 50 per cent, enable more voters to influence the result and end the dilemmas of tactical voting. Enabling Southern Labour voters, northern Tories and supporters or small parties to vote sincerely, without sacrificing their chance to influence the choice of MP, would mitigate geographical polarisation.
The objection that second preferences should not count ('vote useless, vote often' say some critics) is bogus. If we keep single-member constituencies to elect all MPs, the case for AV is compelling. Every major party uses preferential voting when filling a single position – from parlia- mentary candidates to the party leader. None would think it was all over because one candidate led with 26 per cent on first preferences, yet that was how Inverness elected its MP in 1992.
The main argument against AV is that it can sometimes be more disproportional than FPTP. Labour would have won an even larger landslide in 1997. The Tory party was toxically unpopular: the electorate as a whole preferred a Labour to Tory government by 58 per cent to 32 per cent. Almost everybody who had voted for neither main party preferred Labour. AV will only boost a party which is generally popular in this way. FPTP is different: a party feared by the majority could triumph by organising its vote efficiently. That is because geography (an arbitrary factor) decides FPTP elections, while AV uses (politically relevant) voter preferences.
The Jenkins Commission proposed using top-up seats to mitigate AV's tendency to exaggerate decisive victories. There is a good argument in principle, but the practical barriers are formidable. The 'two classes of MP' argument returns. Under what is called 'AV plus' every constituency on the electoral map would need to be redrawn, making it difficult to hold a referendum and implement reform in one parliament (while straight AV would use the current constituencies). It would be bizarre to hold a final general election under a system rejected by voters, while holding a one-off election under AV while preparing for 'AV plus' would be unnecessarily confusing.
A much better approach than seeking to achieve every objective through a complex, hybrid voting system would be to link electoral reform with a broader democracy agenda.
Democracy package
British politics used to be 'winner takes all'. But much has changed since Lord Hailsham warned of 'elective dictatorship' and Margaret Thatcher demonstrated its practical potential when combining a majoritarian voting system and unwritten constitution in western Europe's most centralised state. We have since seen devolution, the Human Rights Act and unprecedented judicial activism. There is a strong case for codifying a new constitutional settlement.
The electoral reform debate has remained strangely isolated from these changes. But linking voting reform to the unfinished business of Lords reform can combine effective government with greater parliamentary proportionality.
Gordon Brown should propose, in Labour's election manifesto, a referendum to introduce the Alternative Vote for Commons elections, alongside a second chamber which would be 80 per cent elected, by proportional representation. This democracy package could also include a review of local government, including voting systems (where there is a strong case for PR, perhaps by STV given the existing tradition of multi-member constituencies).
The cry of 'deadlock' would come from those who would abolish the upper house. The answer is pluralism. There is no point in two identical chambers.
A PR election to represent a broader range of opinion is the natural choice for a revising chamber, which does not sustain an administration. This combination could deliver effective government, but not the untrammelled power to ram through a poll tax against all objections. We are moving in this direction already, now that the Lords has no party majority, but the unelected upper house lacks legitimacy. A predominantly elected second chamber would not threaten the primacy of the Commons: powers and conventions, such as not rejecting the core principle of manifesto bills, would need to be defined.
But the contested Commons voting system should also be publicly settled. A referendum would establish the different, legitimate roles of two elected chambers. That would also be the case if the current system were to prevail, though reformers should be able to show that the case for a 'tried and tested' system is much undermined by its increasingly erratic behaviour.
Some argue that AV would eliminate the Conservatives as a party of power. But Margaret Thatcher would have won under it. A party stuck on its core vote and unpopular across the country will do badly under AV (whether Labour in 1983 or the Tories in 1997). But such a party is also unelectable under FPTP and uncoalitionable under PR. The real Conservative problem is that they remain far from power under any system. They have a mountain to climb under FPTP and would struggle to reach the summit without a deal with Lib Dem parliamentarians; that could be as difficult as the much greater appeal to centrist voters they would need under AV.
The current system is heavily biased against the Conservatives. To prefer it despite this is either unthinking masochism, or a deeply ideological argument of the unreconstructed Tory right: that, however the odds stack up, they must still gamble on a system which demands minimal co-operation between parties and voters (while trying to buck the system by flooding the marginals with cash). If a majority coalition wants to prevent that possibility, it is a legitimate purpose. The breadth of the democratic reform package would make this a clearly pluralist reform, capable of securing public consent.
Whenever we have come to close to voting reform in practice, the Alternative Vote has been in the frame. The 1917 Speakers Convention unanimously backed an AV/STV hybrid, while the House of Commons passed a bill to introduce AV in 1931 (which fell in the Lords). The Jenkins Commission proposed four-fifths of the Commons be elected by AV. It is a simple but powerful reform which adapts British political tradition to a more pluralist era. Those who want to see electoral reform should back it.
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