Professor Matt Qvortrup, a 'World Authority on Referendums,' adds his voice to those urging Conservatives to seriously consider the merits of voting reform
‘A week is a long time in politics' as Harold Wilson said. It follows that a couple of months are an eternity. One of the seismic shifts that have occurred in the past months was of course the unclear outcome of the election.
One thing that has become clear is that the electoral system is in need of repair. To be sure, the system ensured that an unpopular prime minister was removed from office, but the system also showed that First-Past-the-Post wildly exaggerates the support of some parties at the expense of others. In the most recent election it only took about 60.000 votes to elect a Labour MP, but roughly twice as many to elect a Liberal Democrat one. The Labour Party won roughly 40 percent after winning 29 percent of the votes, conversely, the Liberal Democrats won 23 percent of the votes but only a little more than 8 percent of the seats.
Of course, it used to be said (and I admit I used to argue this too) that a hung parliament would lead to indecision, but the Coalition Agreement and the ‘love-in' between 'Nick and Dave' has surprised many who weren't sure that such cooperation would be possible or sustainable.
Moreover, many governments of a centre-right bend have enacted quite far reaching reforms under alternative systems of majority voting. The so-called Alternative Vote System, which currently operates in a moderated form in London, is used in Australia. There it has secured the dominance of Conservative parties for much of the 20th Century. Apart from a period in the 1980s, the Liberal Party (Australia's Conservatives) had a majority with the National Party from the Second World War to the early 1970 and again from the mid 1990s to 2007. In the latter period, the Government led by John Howard introduced quite radical reforms of economic and social legislation which were every bit as radical as what had been enacted in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.
The reason that this was possible was due to Howard successfully appealing not only to the National Party, the Liberals' traditional allies, but also to Australian Democrats, a now practically defunct party, which shared many of the characteristics of the Liberal Democrats. Now, I do not want to turn this blog into a party political broadcast. I merely join
Phillip Blond and Lewis Baston in writing to say that it would be unwise for Tories to dogmatically campaign against AV. As Michael Portillo too has argued: ‘The first-past-the-post system is now difficult to defend. Sooner or later it will be replaced. It would be better for the Conservatives to remodel it rather than allow Labour at some future date to choose a system that brings a partisan advantage' (Daily Telegraph 8 May, 2010). First-past the post is teetering. The suggestion that it be replaced with AV seems reasonable, without being revolutionary.
As Boris Johnson – a beneficiary of AV - said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, ‘I have to accept that there are arguments [about electoral reform] that are difficult to dispatch very easily.' There is an unfairness in the current system. The advantage of First-Past-the-Post is that it delivers a decisive result. But that very virtue may be disproved if things in future turn out differently; if it turns out that those we wanted to kick out we couldn't. That is the unspoken argument against First-Past-the-post. It is difficult to disagree with it.