Electing and connecting

Lots of good politics in today’s papers, principally in relation to Alan Johnson’s letter to the Times about the need to hold a referendum on electoral reform alongside the vote at the next General Election.

Johnson, the Health Secretary, has suggested that the electorate need to be given the choice between fptp and AV+. The latter is an election system yet to employed anywhere in the world and was the brainchild of Lord Jenkins and his commission into the subject of electoral reform in Blair’s first term.

According the Electoral Reform Society website, this is how AV+ would operate:

‘AV+ has, as the name might suggest, two parts. The AV part, and the ‘plus’ part.

Under the AV part, about 500 MPs would be elected in single-member constituencies, but rather than voters simply putting an ‘X’ by their preferred candidate, they would be asked to rank them in order of preference. More details can be found on the Alternative Vote page.

On top of these constituency MPs, each elector would get a second vote to cast at a county (or equivalent) level. In Scotland and Wales, these areas would be the same as the ones used for the additional members in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly.

Each voter would choose either their favourite party, or their favourite candidate from the list proposed by their favourite party. This means that they do not have to accept the order of candidates set out by the party, i.e. the lists are ‘open’ rather than ‘closed’.

The county votes will be used to decide how many additional seats each party should get within the county. The constituency seats are then taken into account and the county seat or seats are allocated to the party or parties most disadvantaged by the share of constituency seats (the party or parties with the highest ratio of votes to seats).

The individual appointed as County MP will be the person from the winning party list who gets the most individual votes.

About 100 (up to 150) MPs would be elected in the ‘plus’ part, and would help correct the imbalance between seats and votes often produced by FPTP. AV+ is thus a crude cross between AV and AMS.’

Johnson sees this as a way for politicians to reconnect with the electorate, and thus joins a chorus of reforms suggested by high ranking profile politicians in recent days as part of the fallout from the MPs’ expenses scandal. Ed Miliband, the Climate Secretary, has called for more power for local government and reforms to PMQs. Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, has again urged for a directly elected Lords to be set up. But whilst some radical surgery of our constitutional architecture looks more necessary than ever since the tales of polticians exploiting allowances have come to the fore, we need to be suspicious when the same politicians get into discussions about deep and lasting poltical change. More often than not policians are driven by short term thinking about their careers than high minded ideals about democratic theory. It is no accident than Johnson has been touted as a genuine rival to Gordon Brown at a time when the public seem to be overwhelmingly in favour of an early election. Moreover it Johnson’s suggestion is something David Cameron is dead against.

Further we need to question if electoral reform really constitutes an overhaul of the engine, not just a cleaning of the upholstery as Johnson suggests.

As I wrote in an article for t2u’s fptp magazine on the media’s reporting of the MPs’ expenses scandal: ‘The incapacity of politicians to be able to halt Britain’s industrial decay, especially in the late 1960s, has fuelled a decline in deference’. In other words, economic performance drives our thinking about politics and polticians. This a theme developed in article by Larry Elliot, the Guardian’s economics editor in which he argues that government must have the courage to sort out endemic problems in the economy. He states:

‘Changing the public mood will not be easy, and will involve more than reform of the second chamber, a new system of voting, an independent watchdog for expenses, or any of the other proposed remedies. Westminster’s reputation has been shredded not because its officials march around in fancy dress but because its members have shown themselves incapable of tackling the issues that really matter to voters: a secure, decently paid job; an affordable home; a pension that provides enough to live on.

Cleaning up parliament and turfing out those guilty of the most egregious scams would be a start – but MPs should not kid themselves that it is any more than that. True rehabilitation will require humility, a plan of action for ­digging the economy out of its deep hole, and a degree of competence ­lacking until now.’

It is probably too much to expect politicians to put their short term personal ambition to one side and to instead focus on sorting out the deep recession. But we should see this as an opportunity to make changes in British politics that may well result in use being governed by a more responsive and efficient system.