As promised last week, today Lewis Baston of the Electoral Reform Society writes for The Disraeli Room to respond to 'World Authority on Referendums,' Matt Qvortrup, and to his provocative post here which argued against reforming the way we vote.

I am grateful to Phillip Blond for giving me the opportunity to respond to last week’s essay by Matt Qvortrup opposing electoral reform.

Qvortrup may or may not be right about the Prime Minister’s ulterior motives. The iron of conviction is usually alloyed with the base metal of political calculation when it comes to practical decision, and Labour’s move to promise a referendum on switching to the Alternative Vote (AV) is no exception. I do not mind this. The electoral reform movement, like the Catholic Church, accepts deathbed conversions (although this patient looks a lot perkier than he did a couple of months ago). I am not enthusiastic about AV, as it is a timid reform that does not embrace the pluralism and choice that is possible under PR systems such as the Single Transferable Vote. Nor do I like referendums very much per se. But Gordon Brown’s policy on AV doesanswer some pressing problems of the current system.

The First Past the Post (FPTP) system simply does not function in the way it did fifty years ago. Governments usually had the support of 45 per cent or more of those voting – between 1924 and 1974 only one majority government fell short of that threshold (1964). But because politics is becoming increasingly multi-party, governments enter office with lower and lower levels of active public support. Labour won a third term in 2005 with 35.2 per cent. The Conservatives could start a period of power with as little as 37-39 per cent. How low does the vote for a government have to go for supporters of FPTP to realise there is a problem? It concerns me that the electoral system is failing as a means of legitimating government, and if it continues to do so we risk the erosion of authority and consent. It is dangerous to do nothing.

Qvortrup points out that AV in Australia sometimes produces elections in which a party wins more votes but fewer seats than its main opponent. This is not an argument for keeping FPTP, whose track record in Britain on this is appalling. In three of the four close elections (margin of victory less than 2 percentage points) since 1918, the party with fewer votes won more seats (1929, 1951, February 1974). A system with a 75 per cent failure rate in testing conditions is unfit for purpose.

FPTP has been failing at a local level as well, in that two thirds of MPs lack majority support from their own voters. The single member constituency link is always claimed as an advantage of FPTP (usually by politicians elected this way), but the great responsibility of giving monopoly representation to a community is awarded on small shares of the vote and leads to the situation where MPs represent seats where they are actively opposed by a majority of their voters. In local government it is worse still, as there are unfortunate people represented solely by BNP councillors despite that party having only a third of the local vote. AV preserves the supposed sanctity of the constituency link, but does at least ask that those speaking for a constituency are not opposed by the majority of people there. The legitimacy of MPs has been tarnished by the expenses scandal, and in conditions of distrust and suspicion, a referendum on a system that requires more of MPs is a gesture towards renewing the political compact. We do not have FPTP in single member seats because people chose it – they have never been asked.

Labour’s policy for AV is not ideal – I would favour a more proportional system that ends the ridiculous business of safe seats and the fate of the nation depending on both main parties focus-grouping undecided voters in swing seats and telling them what they want to hear. But it is a start, and AV solves some of the problems caused by using FPTP in multi-party politics. It treats voters a bit more like adults. An ‘X’ under FPTP is in effect saying that the voter supports that candidate and thinks the others on offer are all equally bad. But people simply do not think like that; they usually have candidates that they quite like but are their second choice, and candidates they strongly oppose. Under FPTP people often do not even cast their vote for their real favourite candidate, because they do not want to let in a candidate they dislike, and vote tactically. AV is still majoritarian, and it surprises me that people who disagree with me on PR often seem to oppose AV. It is a more defensible and robust majoritarian system than FPTP, and if people really believe in single party government and single member monopoly representation they should have no objection to it.

I am much more concerned by the idea of making single member constituencies rigidly identical in size, because this pursuit of arithmetic purity will come at the cost of creating constituencies that bear little relation to community identities and frequently subject to further boundary changes. Edmund Burke must be turning in his grave at the prospect. But perhaps, mischievously, I wonder if this reductio ad absurdum of FPTP will discredit the system more thoroughly than AV ever could, and hasten the day when we have a proper PR system and the multi-party reality of what voters want is at last reflected in Westminster.