The FishTank

With a hung parliament, it appears that electoral reform has become almost inevitable. Of course, in a democratic country, the system of government should always be kept under  review, but is a wholesale rewrite of our electoral system a way to deliver the elixir of fairness or simply the desire of a party which sees no other way to get its hands on power?

It was, of course, a classic bait and switch. When the expenses scandal broke it was equally scandalous the way the Lib Dems leapt into the breach with the proposition that the only reason MPs were helping themselves to our money was because of the way we voted for them. Labour too, saw an excuse to finally remove the troublesome House of Lords and replace it with a body which, rather than scrutinising and rejecting some of their more illiberal legislation, would rubber stamp everything sent through it. Journalists accepted the position without question, characterising Tory resistance as an attempt to cling to a status quo which served them best, conveniently overlooking the fact that – under some of the proposed changes – the Tories would have won the 2005 election. By the time we reached the election last week, it had become accepted fact that some kind of change was needed, whether recall ballots, fixed-term parliaments or fully-fledged rewrites of the voting system itself.

Some of these changes are sane enough: the recall ballot as a mechanism for ejecting an MP who fails to serve his community would have done much to quell the furore over the expenses scandal. There are questions about implementation – should they be allowed to appeal; if they are thrown out, should they be replaced by a member of the same party or force a by-election; should they be allowed to stand again at the next general election; should they affect their pension provisions? – but the premise itself is sound. Others are less clear: a fixed term parliament would not only prevent an unpopular government from choosing the best time for the election, it could also encumber us with a failed party or coalition who couldn’t quit even if they wanted to. Perhaps a better solution here would be to retain the existing system and allow a ‘tipping point,’ where a series of recall ballots of sufficient magnitude can trigger an election across the country. And measures either to restrict the powers of prime ministers or to trigger elections when they change seem eminently sensible.

The electoral system as a whole, however, is much more complicated. The Lib Dems clearly want change for their own benefit, which is why they stress the idea that the current system is unrepresentative. But would a pure PR system like in Israel, where the smallest parties can trade votes to get through policies – policies which clearly do not command the vote of most of the population – really be more representative? What place would there be for independent candidates? Surely, if we had the same number of MPs, except returned by proportion of votes, the only way an independent could get in would be the equivalent of getting 100% of the vote in an existing constituency! And even if it was, say, a celebrity who could command enough airtime to get those votes across the country, what would happen if they got enough votes to return two MPs? Would they have to clone themselves?

Even for the major parties, pure PR – or (STV) Single Transferrable Vote – is no better. Under STV, MPs are no longer chosen by a specific constituency. Instead, they are taken from a list chosen by the party. This means that government becomes more powerful and less accountable: more powerful because any MP who wishes to stay in power has to please those who choose the list, less accountable because it is impossible for the people to vote out a particular MP with whom they have a problem. In fact, the recall mechanism cannot work with STV, because an MP would not have a constituency to recall them.

The system being touted at the moment is called Alternative Vote or AV. Under AV, people still vote for candidates in their constituency, but they express a first and a second preference. If no candidate gets 50% of the first preference votes, the last candidate is dropped and their votes are redistributed according to the ratio of the second preferences. This is then repeated until someone has 50% of the vote. The trouble, of course, is that if the parties are genuinely distinct from each other then none of us should have a second preference. If we consider the deficit the most important thing and want to vote Conservative because we agree with their stance then, if neither of the other parties share that view, by definition we can’t have a second preference. By contrast, those voting Lib Dem or Labour will be able to choose a second preference, meaning that the system would almost guarantee a Labour or Lib Dem government. Democratic it ain’t.

So, is there no way to improve matters? David Cameron has talked about ensuring constituencies have equal size, which would definitely be more democratic, but is that as far as our reforms can go? It strikes me as odd that, given all the other policies we seem to have stolen from Sweden (tax credits, academies) we’ve never actually looked at their voting system.

Sweden has, like us, a system based on constituencies.  Unlike us, however, they have far fewer of them – 36 constituencies in total. Each constituency, however, returns more than one MP. The way it works is basically like this: each party can stand as many candidates as they like in a single constituency. The voters can then choose preferences for both party and candidate. The votes are divided by party and then by candidate, meaning that if a seat returned ten candidates and had votes of 38%, 29%, 28% for the major parties there would be four, three and three returned with the most popular from each party being returned in each seat. It’s simple, somewhat more proportionate and it retains the constituency link and the prospect of a recall ballot. It also has another benefit in that it does away with the drivel about candidate selection. If a party can stand as many candidates as they like then they don’t need all women shortlists or carefully placed ethnic candidates: they can allow all those they feel appropriate to stand under their banner and let the constituents decide whether they are better represented by one person or another. This could still return fewer women or minorities, but that would be the choice of the voters and it’s hardly democratic to foist an unpopular candidate on people just because you feel it ticks one or another equality box.

There are other elements to the Swedish system: limits to reject extreme candidates with small proportions of either the national or constituency vote; top up candidates to make up for rounding errors across the seats, but there’s no reason we would have to take the system exactly as they have it. As with the other policies we’ve pinched, the basic idea can be tailored to our needs.

Centuries ago, the UK led the world in creating institutions of government. Over the years other countries have made their own way. Some have followed us, others have trodden their own paths. It would be arrogant for us to assume that none of them could have come up with improvements on our achievements. It would, however, be foolish to allow ourselves to be dragged into a system which has been chosen because of the way it favours a particular party.