Who needs proportional representation when you've got Michael White's "crook representation"?

At the general election, the Conservatives won an absolute majority of seats in parliament, despite winning just 37% of the vote.  In Scotland, meanwhile, the SNP took 95% of the seats, despite winning "only" 50% of the vote.

How do you solve this problem?  Do you -

a) Introduce proportional representation?

b) Leave things as they are, but demand that an MP from a minority party who has committed serious wrongdoing should be allowed to stay in office, to avoid making the problem marginally worse?  Oh, and describe the people using the law of the land to hold that MP to account as a "lynch mob" who are trying to destroy political pluralism?

If you're Michael White of the Guardian, the answer is b) all day long.

You can't be half-pregnant, but it seems you can have PR without much proportionality

There's much consternation in the elites of the EU this morning, because it looks like the two pro-austerity parties in Greece, New Democracy and PASOK, will fall just short of an outright parliamentary majority. But in truth it should never even have been close. The two parties' combined share of the vote tumbled from 77.4% in 2009 to just 32% yesterday, so the fact that they've still ended up with more or less exactly half the seats is a perversion of the democratic process that you'd only ever expect to see under "good old British" first-past-the-post. Given that Greece supposedly has a system of proportional representation, how on earth did it happen? There are two reasons. The more prosaic one is that a great many parties fell below the 3% threshold required for any representation, meaning that all the parties that reached the threshold had surplus seats to share between them. The more eccentric reason is that the Greek system randomly hands 50 bonus seats to the party in first place. This applies regardless of whether the leading party has 60% of the vote or 7%, and regardless of whether its lead over the second-placed party is 23% or 0.00001%. It is, in short, a nonsense, and has clearly thwarted the democratic will of the Greek people on this occasion.

I can only assume that the rule was introduced to produce a decisive winner in old-style two-party contests, but when the party system suddenly becomes more fractured, the effect is far more distorting. To put it in perspective, New Democracy are projected to secure 108 seats with their "election-winning" 18.85% of the vote, whereas the left-wing coalition in second place will claim just 52 seats with their 16.8% of the vote.

But there are more insidious ways in which the devisers of electoral and governing systems can deliver 'proportional representation' without much proportionality. One of the very first posts I wrote on this blog back in May 2008 pointed out that PR for the London Assembly is a sham, and the election last Thursday illustrated that point beautifully. London voters were deeply divided - the Tories led by 44% to 40% in the mayoral vote, and Labour led by 41% to 32% in the Assembly election. The purpose of PR in such circumstances ought to be to produce balance and pluralism. But because a two-thirds majority is required for the Assembly to exercise its one and only meaningful power (to reject the Mayor's budget), the Tories are left with absolute power on a minority vote - just as would happen under FPTP. The irony is that, in combination with the two-thirds rule, PR for the Assembly actually makes it less likely that there can be any check on the Mayor's power, because the distorting nature of FPTP would have made it easier to achieve the big majority required to alter the budget.

So London has the superficial appearance of proportionality and pluralism without an iota of the substance - a characteristically Blairite concoction. Thanks heavens we in Scotland (to use Mrs Thatcher's phrase) have gone in completely the opposite direction, and instead of concentrating local government executive power in the hands of one person, have dispersed power by means of a genuinely proportional system.

Worried about elective dictatorship at Holyrood? Just think of it as a system "that works".

It's a bit rich to hear the opposition parties grumbling about the dangers of Scotland becoming an 'elective dictatorship' under majority SNP rule.  Perhaps the Liberal Democrats might have some credibility making that claim, but certainly not Labour or the Tories - any party that believes in royal prerogative powers and a majoritarian voting system for Westminster by definition believes in elective dictatorship.  That's what the Westminster system is all about, and it successfully delivers it 95% of the time.

One specific concern that is being raised relates to unicameralism - the committees are supposed to do all the work a revising chamber would do in a bicameral system, and it was never anticipated that a single-party government would have a majority in all the committees.  But the reality is that in bicameral systems it's scarcely unusual for governments to have majorities in both chambers.  Most obviously, every Tory government at Westminster until 1997 had the House of Lords in its back pocket thanks to the hundreds of hereditary peers.  No wonder it was only ever Tories who described the previous composition of the upper chamber as an "anachronism that works".

'Yeah, they had that AV in Mongolia, that's how the giraffes went extinct'

I caught up with the Daily Politics AV debate on the BBC iplayer earlier, and I think I may have just discovered why the No campaign's star turn John Prescott was never made Foreign Secretary.  We were treated to an impressively confident recital of assorted 'facts' about the electoral systems of foreign countries, most of which Prezza seemed to have gleaned from a conversation with his mate Dave down the pub.  For your delectation...

1.  The German Greens dumped their Social Democrat coalition partners midway through a parliament, and put in the Christian Democrats instead.

(The German Greens have never done any such thing, and at federal level have only ever been in coalition with the Social Democrats.  Prescott is thinking of something the liberal FDP did in 1982.  This, is any case, has no relevance whatever to AV, given that Germany uses a proportional and non-preferential voting system that bears no resemblance to the preferential and non-proportional system we're currently being offered.)

2.  AV has led to the current coalition government in Australia.

(Australia doesn't have a coalition government at present, for the very good reason that the only independent third party with representation in the lower house of parliament holds just one seat.  What there is instead is a minority government, the first of its kind under Australia's AV system for several decades, and one that occurred simply as the result of an unusually close election.  In case Prescott hasn't noticed, something remarkably similar happened in Britain under his own beloved voting system just last year.)

3.  AV in Australia meant that the right-wing Liberal-National coalition was always in power until last year's election, and even then Labor was only able to assume office with the help of the Greens and "a couple of farmers".

(Prescott seems to have slept through the previous Labor administrations led by well-known Prime Ministers such as Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.  He also seems oblivious to the fact that the current Julia Gillard administration were the incumbents going into the last election, and had an outright majority.)

4.  How do we know that AV makes coalitions more likely?  Well, it's only used in three countries, and in Belgium they've been without a government for a year.

(A sentence that would make considerably more sense if only Belgium was actually one of those three countries that uses AV.  The proportional system it instead uses does of course make balanced parliaments and coalitions far more likely, but as that system bears absolutely no resemblance to AV, what in God's name is the relevance in pointing this out?)

But apart from these minor quibbles, I must say I learned a great deal.

Mebyon Kernow leader backs Yes to AV

I'm encouraged to read on his blog that Councillor Dick Cole, leader of the Cornish nationalist party Mebyon Kernow, is strongly supporting a Yes vote in the forthcoming referendum on electoral reform.  MK is an ally of the SNP and Plaid Cymru in the European Free Alliance, and like its Scottish and Welsh counterparts is firmly in the social democratic, civic nationalist mould.

"I say this because it is my strong view that the present First Past the Post system does not work as part of a 21st century democracy. I fully support a more proportional voting system (PR) and recognise that AV is not PR, but I do see this reform as a step in the right direction. At the present time across the UK, the vast majority of parliamentary constituencies are safe seats and the main political parties pour disproportionate resources into a small number of marginal seats...

Politics is also becoming increasingly pluralistic with more and more political parties entering the fray, but the electoral system has not caught up. In modern parliamentary contests, as I know from experience, great pressure is brought to bear on people to vote tactically to stop certain political parties from winning. I feel that this distorts political debate and often derails serious consideration of the issues that really matter to communities throughout the UK. AV will eliminate tactical voting, allowing voters to always support their first-choice candidate." 

In a Scottish context, this of course means an end to Labour's false - but all too often persuasive - argument that only a vote for them in Westminster general elections can keep the Tories out.  In future, voters will be able to simply say "no problem, I'll give you my second/fourth/seventh preference, ahead of the Tories".

By my reckoning, all three leaders of the nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall are now supporting a Yes vote, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

The ever-resistable allure of a Farage à trois

The UK Independence Party confuse me, and I strongly suspect they confuse themselves.  According to the BBC report of their campaign launch, they want to scrap direct elections to Holyrood and instead have a Scottish Parliament comprised of double-jobbing Westminster MPs - all in the name of greater "democracy".  This would imply a very traditionalist Tory view of British democracy, and yet UKIP are supposedly strongly in favour of proportional representation.  Indeed, they are backing a Yes vote in the AV referendum, in line with the vast majority of PR supporters in the mainstream parties.  Why on earth, then, do they want to scrap PR for the Scottish Parliament and replace it with an in-built, overwhelming, near-permanent Labour majority?

It's plainly a double-edged sword that Nigel Farage spearheaded the launch - on the one hand he is the party's only remotely recognisable figure, but on the other hand it simply emphasises that they are basically an English party going through the motions of fighting a Scottish campaign.  One very silly blunder is Farage's repeated and patronising use of the word "our" in relation to Scottish institutions, which brings to mind Mrs Thatcher's infamous gaffes of the "we in Scotland" variety.  It's testament to the extent to which the Tory party of those days simply didn't 'get' Scotland that by all accounts she was explicitly advised to adopt such a condescending tone.  Apparently at one point it was even suggested she should put on a Scottish accent when venturing north - a comedy spectacle of truly epic proportions that in the end we were cruelly denied from witnessing.

Five reasons why Hamish Macdonnell has made my eyes roll to the heavens - again

I've just caught up with Hamish Macdonnell's Caledonian Mercury article from a couple of weeks ago, entitled 'Five reasons why the AV system should be voted out'. I of course wholeheartedly agree with his opening sentiment that the No campaign should be moving on to substantive points about the subject in hand, and away from their ludicrous and offensive "electoral reform kills babies and soldiers" claims. But as for the five suggested reasons themselves...oooh, where to start. Let's take them in turn -

1. "The current system works...whether it is the most fair system or not, it works. FPTP has, generally, delivered the outcome the country wanted to see."

I beg pardon? A clear majority of the electorate voted for centrist or left-of-centre parties in 1979, 1983 and 1987, and yet unalloyed Thatcherism was the outcome "the country" wanted to see? The only possible way of reaching that conclusion is via a kind of circular logic - it must have been the outcome they wanted because they voted for it. How do we know they voted for it? Oh, because that was the outcome the electoral system delivered. If we'd had PR during the eighties, there may well have been a more moderate centre-right coalition government (and quite possibly even a centre-left coalition), and we'd now have a journalist in Macdonnell's position looking back and sagely noting that what we got was, after all, exactly what the public voted for. The difference is that he would have been right.

"Far better, it would seem, to have a system which reflects the mood of those key swing voters who carry with them the mood of the nation, than to hand it those candidates who come third, fourth or fifth."

Yes, I think I can see where Hamish is going astray here. He believes the "mood of the nation" is not determined by the majority of the whole electorate, but rather by a majority of the 65-70% of the electorate who happen to vote for one of the two largest parties - a 'majority' that worked out as just 35% of the vote for the Labour government in 2005.

2. "FPTP usually delivers strong government."

For strong government read "elective dictatorship". Remember the poll tax, Hamish? Its implementation entirely against the public will may have been a sign of governmental 'strength', but how that was in any sense a good thing is a bit of a mystery.

3. "AV is not actually backed by any major political party in Britain."

But there are many, many parties and individual politicians who regard it as clearly preferable to first-past-the-post. In an imperfect choice between two systems, should they really be voting for the system they prefer less?

4. "The real argument here is between FPTP and single transferable vote (STV). The Lib Dems want STV, not AV. If that is what they want, then we should have a real and proper debate about the merits of a fair system of proportional representation and the current winner-takes-all system. That is the real argument."

Say what you like about the Lib Dems (and I generally do), but if the Tories had been democratic enough to offer a vote on the full range of options for electoral reform, it seems rather unlikely that offer would have been rejected. It is those opposed to electoral reform who have moved heaven and earth to prevent Hamish's "real argument" from taking place, not the Yes campaigners. Mysteriously, Hamish fails to clarify how voting No will actually take us any closer to having that real argument, rather than - as it surely will - move us much further away.

5. "There is no reason to change the system if it’s not broken."

See above.

"I worked at Westminster during the dying days of the John Major government, which had such a narrow majority it risked defeat on every vote. The precarious nature of that administration reflected the public mood and worked at keeping the government from doing anything too outrageous."

Well, do you want an electoral system that delivers "strong government" or don't you, Hamish? If you do, that clearly wasn't what we had during the Major years, was it? And are you now suddenly saying you want an electoral system that prevents a government from doing anything "too outrageous" against the public will? In that case, why do you support the system that gave us unalloyed Thatcherism on 42% of the vote?

Taking the five points together, the thrust of Hamish's argument is as clear as mud. He seems to concede that PR would be fairer than the current system and a referendum on that would be worth having - and yet two of his points are really arguments against PR and in favour of majoritarian systems in general, of which (more's the pity) AV is one.

He finishes by going off on a rather random tangent to inform us that not only does first-past-the-post 'work', but the old system of hereditary peers making laws for the rest of us mere mortals also worked "really, really well". At least that helpfully puts in a better perspective where he's coming from. Yes, of course the Lords 'worked', if your main political concerns were protecting privilege, preserving discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and permitting animal cruelty in the name of sport - and doing it all against the democratic will of the electorate, naturally.

Why is less democracy always the solution?

Interesting to learn from Subrosa that Their Man In Edinburgh, the esteemed Michael Moore, is touting the idea that the one-off planned five-year term for the next Scottish parliament should be made a permanent arrangement. Subrosa poses this question -

"The cynic in me ponders the benefits to unionist Westminster; there must be some or the idea would never have been mooted, although there is evidence from Germany that when Bundestag and state elections (which are conducted by Länder rules) are the same year, the state elections were completely overshadowed. Yet what are the benefits to Westminster?"

I actually don't think there's any great mystery about what's going on here - it must have finally occurred to some bright spark in the Lib Dems that the 'solution' of putting the 2015 Holyrood election back a year doesn't even begin to address the problem thrown up by five-year fixed term parliaments at Westminster. If the Holyrood parliament starting in 2016 runs its natural course, there will again be a scheduled election that would clash with a Westminster contest in 2020 - presumably necessitating a further 'one-off' extension, and the whole process will continue on into perpetuity, leaving everyone (not least London Lib Dems) looking extremely stupid. Of course, this snag could have been deferred for quite a while if only the 2015 election had been brought forward by a year, rather than put back. Three-year parliaments work perfectly well in Australia without the sun falling out of the sky - but it seems giving the public more democracy rather than less is an option that would never even occur to our masters.

But my own question is this - what happens if (as is perfectly possible) the Westminster coalition collapses in a heap well before 2015, rendering all these shenanigans totally redundant? Can we have our own election back then, please?

Subrosa also makes this observation -

"All these constitutional changes we're hearing about at present favour the libdems. No matter how badly they do in future voting, if the AV result is a yes, then they will be the king-makers."

That's not really true. As a majoritarian system, AV will for the most part continue to produce majority Tory or Labour governments, which for the avoidance of doubt is a bad thing not a good thing. Because of the specific circumstances of UK politics, though, with a medium-sized third party that is ideologically somewhere between the two larger ones (and thus well-placed to attract second preferences) it will give the Lib Dems more seats than the current system would, and therefore make future balanced parliaments very slightly more likely. The Lib Dem-sceptics among us shouldn't be squeamish about that, because without balanced parliaments there's simply no hope of achieving more meaningful electoral reform at a later date. The idea that a majority Labour government would ever voluntarily introduce PR is in the realms of fantasy.

Why a Yes to AV would make it impossible for the BNP to win a seat at Westminster

I see from yesterday's Daily Mail that a Tory party panicked by the possibility of a Yes vote in the AV referendum is about to raise the silly spectre of "advances for the BNP" under a reformed electoral system. Now, I'm all for saying we shouldn't be squeamish about the potential effect of PR on representation for extremist parties - a fair voting system is a fair voting system, full stop. But the fact is that AV is not a proportional system, and far from making it easier for far-right parties to win seats, it will actually make it much, much harder. For a vivid illustration of why this is the case, let's have a look at the 2002 French presidential election, fought under a run-off system that is similar in principle to AV. Here is the first round result -

Jacques Chirac (Rassemblement pour la République) 19.88%
Jean-Marie Le Pen (Front national) 16.86%
Lionel Jospin (Parti socialiste) 16.18%

So if that had been a first-past-the-post election, Le Pen would have come within a terrifying three per cent of becoming President of France, on an absurd "mandate" consisting of less than a fifth of electors who turned out to vote. But as it was, the backers of the assorted eliminated candidates (Jospin was one of fourteen) were given the chance to express a preference between Chirac and Le Pen in the run-off vote. Look at the difference that made in terms of how close the National Front came to claiming the keys to the Élysée Palace -

Jacques Chirac (Rassemblement pour la République) 82.21%
Jean-Marie Le Pen (Front national) 17.79%

The lesson could hardly be clearer - if you want to make absolutely certain that Nick Griffin will not become an MP, vote to replace first-past-the-post with the instant run-off system AV.

The unavailability of loaves is no argument against taking half a slice

Max Atkinson is scathing about David Cameron's speech opposing AV -

"you may, like me, come to the conclusion that Cameron's case against AV actually amounts to a rather powerful argument for a more proportional voting system than AV (e.g. STV) - in which case one wonders why he's bothering to oppose what could be a first serious step in that direction."

If Steve Norris' line of argument on 10 O'Clock Live last week was at all typical (although admittedly Norris is rarely typical of anything), the Tories seem to be rather brazenly asking "if you want proper electoral reform, why on earth choose AV of all things?".  Which would be fair enough, if the possibility of choosing any other type of electoral reform hadn't been blocked by...the Conservative Party.  A referendum on AV alone was "a final offer, to go the extra mile" - weren't those Mr Hague's words?  Of course, the Liberal Democrats are equally culpable for settling for the prospect of such a modest reform (it is, of course, mere coincidence that they are just about the only smaller party that would stand to benefit under AV), but really the charge against the Tories on this issue is the same as the one against all three unionist parties on the Scottish constitutional question - if you're so sure you're on the right side of the argument, why are you so afraid of giving the public a proper choice?  Until you do, it's utterly absurd to suggest that reformers shouldn't be grabbing the few scraps that are actually on the table.

Will someone please tell Norman Lamont that AV does not stand for Proportional Representation?

Don't worry, I haven't lost my marbles and paid the Murdoch Levy, but courtesy of ConHome I've been reading a little snippet of the former Tory Chancellor's bizarre rant in the Times about AV. Or at least, he seems to earnestly believe it's about AV...

"Under AV we would have permanent coalitions and institutionalised breaking of election promises. Politicians, not voters, would decide which parties were to form the government. In Britain, we don’t have to demonstrate in public squares. People vote and the government is out. AV would make it more difficult for voters to summon up the removal van and kick the government out. AV would change the nature of elections, which would become high on rhetoric, low on policies. Party manifestos would become meaningless, full of “aspirations”"

Memo to Lord Lamont and the Tory party : if you really want to spend the next two-and-a-half months going off on one about what a God-awful idea proportional representation is, it might have been an idea to actually hold a referendum on proportional representation. Not a single one of those gripes has the slightest relevance to AV, which is a majoritarian voting system every bit as much as the current one is. To be sure, it's a somewhat better majoritarian system, in that it empowers the voter more and doesn't produce such perverse results in individual constituencies, but it's a majoritarian system nonetheless. It doesn't particularly make coalitions more likely, and the idea that it would produce perpetual coalition is in the realms of fantasy. More's the pity, in a lot of ways, but there it is.

Which leaves only one question to be answered. Are we witnessing delusion, or pretence?

Welsh Labour leader wants perpetual Labour rule in Wales - who'd have thunk it?

Well, I've seen some cynical political manoeuvres, but this one takes the biscuit. Welsh Labour leader and First Minister Carwyn Jones has declared his support for a Yes vote in the forthcoming AV referendum, and has also innocently suggested that AV would be a rather good electoral system for the Welsh Assembly. Which is just about the only way a Labour politician could possibly hope to call for the scrapping of proportional representation and its replacement with a permanent artificial Labour majority without looking breathtakingly power-crazed. Mr Jones poses what he describes as an "important" question (presumably while struggling manfully to stifle his guffaws) -

"if this change is good enough to elect Members of the House of Commons, then surely it’s good enough to elect Members of the Welsh Assembly too?"

On the million-to-one chance that was a serious question, I'll spell out the bleedin' obvious for Carwyn - the bulk of Yes supporters categorically do not think AV is "good enough" to elect MPs. If they were offered a system like the one which elects the Welsh Assembly, they'd bite your hand off. In the meantime, they're simply making a rational choice for the better of the two rubbish majoritarian systems on offer in this referendum.

Incontestably contradictory

I'm slightly bemused by the insufferable Daniel Hannan's list of twelve "incontestable" reasons for voting No in the AV referendum, not least because two of them directly contradict each other. Observe...

"4. AV IS ‘EVEN LESS PROPORTIONAL’ THAN THE CURRENT SYSTEM: So concluded the independent Royal Commission chaired by the senior Liberal Democrat Roy Jenkins in 1998.

11. AV WILL MAKE POLITICIANS’ PROMISES EVEN MORE MEANINGLESS: AV is a system which will deliver more hung parliaments and therefore necessitate more coalitions. Coalitions mean political leaders picking and choosing which parts of their manifesto they seek to implement after you’ve voted for it, meaning you cannot have confidence that they will stick by any of the promises they have made if they enter government."

Simple question, Mr Hannan - how precisely will AV make hung parliaments more likely if it is EVEN LESS PROPORTIONAL than the current system? More pertinenently, if the (laudable) premise of question 4 is that too little proportionality is an inherently bad thing, how can the (bogus) prospect of greater proportionality under AV become an inherently bad thing by question 11?

The most nonsensical of all the reasons, though, are numbers 2 and 3 -

"2. AV IS UNFAIR: Supporters of fringe parties can end up having their vote counted five or six times – and potentially decide the outcome of the election – while people who backed the mainstream candidates only get one vote.

3. AV IS UNEQUAL: AV treats someone’s fifth or sixth choice as having the same importance as someone’s else’s first preference – but there is a big difference between positively wanting one candidate to win and being able to ‘put up with’ another."

Memo to Dan : many people are voting for a candidate to 'put up with' as it is. It's not as if we get to choose the shortlist, is it? In each count of an AV ballot, everyone's vote counts just ONCE - exactly as present. Indeed, votes for the 'mainstream' parties remain more meaningful, as they are successfully preventing those parties from being eliminated in the early counts. But what does change is that in the later stages, everyone has an equal chance to choose between the two leading candidates. That's not a fifth or a sixth choice - it's a first choice between the candidates remaining in contention at that point, and is therefore indistinguishable from the routine process of plumping for the best (or least worst) candidate that happens to be on offer in any election. FPTP votes are not weighted according to the enthusiasm of each elector for their choice, but if they were you'd find variations every bit as stark as anything you'd encounter under AV.

And what is Hannan's alternative? Most FPTP contests are de facto two-horse races, just like the final count of an AV ballot - the only difference being that a huge chunk of the electorate are effectively excluded from having their say on the outcome. So Hannan favours a continuation of the current tyranny of forcing supporters of smaller parties to choose between voting in the 'real election' that consists of the top two candidates, and voting honestly but disenfranching themselves in the process. The fact that the likes of Hannan and David Blunkett evidently regard that disenfranchisement as a thoroughly desirable thing is really quite startling.

Fresh hopes for modest electoral reform at Westminster

The conventional wisdom that the 'No' side are coasting to victory in the AV referendum has been blown apart by a new ICM survey that shows 'Yes' ahead by 35% to 22%. Whether or not these figures are any more credible than the YouGov ones showing the opposite picture, one thing that does seem eminently plausible is the huge number of 'don't knows' at this stage on an issue about which there has been very little publicity so far. The referendum is therefore wide open and out there to be won by either side.

My suspicion is that, with the current toxicity of Nick Clegg's party, the more non-Liberal Democrats become openly associated with the Yes campaign (and do so for their own reasons) the greater the chances of success. It will be fatal for it to be seen as a Lib Dem baby. I also firmly believe it's vital that Yes campaigners don't give in to the temptation to say that AV must be allowed to 'bed in' before any further changes to the electoral system are considered - the danger that supporters of PR will feel uninspired by the prospect of this timid reform far outweighs the need to reassure others who might fear they are voting for the thin end of the wedge. The latter group are scarcely natural Yes voters in any case.

Furthermore, establishing a narrative well in advance of polling day that (whether Clegg and Cameron like it or not) a 'Yes' is a vote for the first small step in a process of electoral reform will make it much easier for PR supporters to build on any victory afterwards. So it's the right strategy twice over.

Why the Bella referendum campaign should focus on the SNP in the first instance

Bella Caledonia were kind enough to send me an email yesterday alerting me to their campaign to turn the AV referendum into an unofficial independence vote, and Eric Falconer also asked for my thoughts about it on a previous thread. I may as well put my cards on the table straight away - I signed up to the 'Yes to Fairer Votes' campaign a few weeks ago, and as things stand I intend to vote Yes in May. I will do so with minimal enthusiasm, because I think AV represents an absolutely trifling improvement on the current system. But I've been a supporter of electoral reform for as long as I've been a supporter of independence (slightly longer, come to think of it), and I've increasingly realised that I'd find it psychologically very difficult to stand on the sidelines in a vote like this, knowing - or at least strongly suspecting - the devastating effect a 'No' would have on hopes for future progress. Make no mistake, the Lib Dems have put us in the trap that ensures a rubbish majoritarian system is certain to "win" this referendum, and it's nothing short of outrageous that they've done so - but that just makes it all the more important that others get stuck into the campaign, and not merely win a Yes vote, but also win the 'battle of the narrative', ie. by defining in the public consciousness what a Yes vote would actually mean. We can't permit it to be said that AV represents - to coin a phrase - the settled will of the electorate. It must instead be clear that many people are consciously voting for a very small first step, which they're impatient to see built on as a matter of urgency.

There is, however, a 'but' here. Plainly independence is a far greater prize, so if I felt there was a chance that the spoilt ballot campign was likely to have a significant impact, I'd support it. The difficulty is that I simply can't think of a single campaign of this sort that has ever worked in the UK - it's almost impossibly difficult to persuade people to 'think outside the box' in sufficient numbers. And to make a serious impact, the numbers would have to be huge. It goes without saying that no mass-circulation newspaper is likely to back the campaign (or even to lend much coverage to it), so it seems to me the only hope is an official endorsement from the SNP. Without that, I think Jeff Breslin has hit the nail on the head in his comment at Bella - the likelihood is that only a tiny percentage of voters will spoil their ballot, and the whole exercise will have been futile. Indeed, even with an SNP endorsement, my guess is that the number of spoilt ballots will still not exceed the number of Yes votes or No votes, although they may well be great enough to claim a moral victory.

So for my money, the overwhelming focus of the campaign for now should be on lobbying MSPs and other leadership figures within the SNP. Without their help, I suspect the considerable enthusiasm the campaign is undoubtedly attracting from online supporters will not be anything like enough.

How Strictly Come Dancing teaches us that AV would be a mildly good thing

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight fame has written an article for the New York Times about what he sees as the flaws in the voting system used by Dancing with the Stars (the American carbon-copy of Strictly Come Dancing). It's quite an amusing piece for its earnestness and attention to the finest detail, although given my devotion to the Eurovision Song Contest I may not be in the best position to make that observation! But if you've ever wondered how Ann Widdecombe finds it so easy to survive in Strictly despite being placed bottom by the judges week after week, Nate has the answer for you -

"Suppose, for instance, that late in the season, when there are five couples left, four of the five teams receive 9’s across the board from the judges, and the final couple instead receives straight 7’s. In terms of the way the judges normally vote, that is a rather clear verdict: the low-scoring couple has had an inferior performance, and should be eliminated.

But in reality the low-scoring team would need to receive only 24 percent of the votes from the home audience — just barely better than the 20 percent they would get if the audience voted completely at random — to be guaranteed passage into the next round. It doesn’t matter if 24 percent of the audience thought they were the best-performing couple — and the other 76 percent thought they were the worst one! They would still advance to the next episode."

On the latter point, isn't that one of the obvious fatal flaws with any first-past-the-post voting system? Perhaps that irony wouldn't seem so obvious to an American political commentator more used to two-horse races, but it just so happens that is precisely the problem with FPTP that a 'Yes' to AV would remedy, even if it wouldn't address the far greater problem of disproportionality.

Silver goes on to make a series of detailed suggestions about how the voting arrangements on Dancing with the Stars could be improved, such as encouraging the judges to use the full range of possible scores between 1 and 10, rather than clustering most of the contestants between 6 and 10. That's fine in theory, but if the American show is anything like Strictly, the studio audience would probably start a riot if the weakest couples were routinely being given 1s and 2s.

The real problem with the show's voting system has always been the phenonemon of a couple placed in the middle of the leaderboard by the judges finding themselves being abruptly eliminated, simply because the public have a greater incentive to vote for couples at the bottom of the pile who are perceived to be in greater danger. At least this year with the scrapping of the dance-off we've been spared the tedious weekly ritual of the judges sanctimoniously announcing that "it is a travesty that you're in the bottom two, rather than X, Y or Z", neatly ignoring the fact it was partly the said judges' over-the-top criticisms of X, Y and Z that motivated the public to pick up the phone and save them. The obvious solution to this problem is surely to withhold the judges' scores until after the public have voted. I can't see that would detract from the show very much - The X Factor gets by quite happily without the judges scoring each performance out of 10.

But Strictly is just such a peculiar programme. Whatever the horrors of X Factor, at least it's a talent show in the truest sense of people being there on the basis of their talent. The Strictly philosophy is to randomly round up a group of people who for the most part, quite naturally, can't dance - and then get a smug Australian expert to scream abuse at them for weeks on end about their inability to dance. The producers pick contestants for their fame and popularity, not their dancing potential - and then the judges and the show's more humourless devotees work themselves into apoplexy because other people mysteriously treat it as a popularity contest, not as a "serious dancing competition". Bizarre.

UPDATE : Having thought about this some more, I've realised that either the American show must have a slightly different voting system, or else Silver must have misunderstood it. In Strictly, only the judges' rankings of the couples matter, not the raw scores. If anything, that makes it even easier for Widdecombe to survive.

Labour's AV alibi, gift-wrapped by Nick Clegg

Prompted by Andy Burnham's declaration that Labour will be giving next year's AV referendum no priority at all, John Rentoul has written what strikes me as a too-clever-by-half article that 'records the demise' of electoral reform. The most peculiar line is this -

"many Labour supporters have since decided that it is a bad idea by the simple equation: electoral reform means coalitions and Labour does not like this coalition"

Which is then flatly contradicted by this observation just four paragraphs later -

"what AV is not: it is not a proportional system"

Precisely. Which (unfortunately) means that it would not make coalitions any more or less likely than at present. If Labour MPs really are in a mind to rage against literally any system that can throw up the arithmetic for a coalition, then clearly they should be seeking to do away with first-past-the-post forthwith, because it is that, not AV, which has contrived to produce the current government.

And, for what it's worth, I think the rumours Rentoul is spreading of the death of the patient are greatly exaggerated in any case. There are any number of examples that demonstrate the far greater volatility of the electorate when faced with a referendum question - the Common Market vote in 1975 is the best-known example, but the more recent Northeast of England Assembly referendum produced an equally startling turnaround in the final stages. With YouGov showing an eleven-point lead for the No side, let's say I'm 'cautious pessimistic' about the outcome - but the arguments haven't even begun to be seriously put before the electorate yet. To pronounce the result a foregone conclusion at this stage is risible.

What is fair to say, however, is that not only was Clegg's desire to hold the vote on the same day as the devolved elections a cynical and disrespectful tactical manoeuvre, it's also proving to be spectacularly counter-productive - as Burnham's comment demonstrates, it's delivered to Labour a gift-wrapped alibi for not engaging in the campaign.

The Harris paradox revisited

For the second night in a row, a post from Tom Harris that vividly (and unwittingly) illustrates the extent of his muddled thinking on the underlying principles of electoral reform -

"RENEWAL of Trident was supported by the 65 per cent of the electorate who voted either Labour or Tory in May.

Ah, but you see, that was before the era of The New Politics of democracy, accountability and transparency...

This isn’t about the rights and wrongs of nuclear weapons, or the cost of Trident. It’s about democracy, or rather, the lack of such in the era of coalition government."

Now, wait just a cotton-pickin' minute here. "Democracy" demands that Trident must be immediately renewed, because the combined vote for two parties that backed the policy was greater than 50%? That is - no ifs, no buts - the logic of proportional representation. Indeed, it's indistinguishable from the argument that it would have been perfectly democratic for Labour and the Liberal Democrats to form a government in May, on the grounds that they had more than 50% of the popular vote between them. And yet Tom had a rather severe problem with that view, as I recall.

Someone needs to urgently take Tom by the hand and remind him how this first-past-the-post malarkey that he's so keen on actually works - the minority is supposed to get its way at all times. I think perhaps he misunderstood the rules, and imagined that they only apply when the minority policy being advanced is right-wing, illiberal or militarist. To be fair to him, that's usually how it pans out, so the confusion is probably understandable.

Catching up...

I've just arrived back from two weeks out of the country, and quite literally the only fragment of information I've had about UK politics over that period was the tantalisingly brief sight of a headline in a British newspaper reading "Shock poll gives Ed Miliband the lead".  Having finally caught up with the figures, my gut feeling is still that David Miliband will win (on name recognition as much as anything), but could there just be a glimmer of hope that Labour is finally ready to move on from Blairism and rediscover a little of its soul?

The other snippet of news I heard overnight was the outcome of the Swedish election.  It's a supreme irony that the success of the far-right could move the administration to the left by forcing Fredrik Reinfeldt to include the Greens or the Social Democrats in his governing coalition, but of course almost the exact reverse has happened in Germany's recent past - in 2005 the left won a natural majority, but the unwillingness of the Social Democrats to work with the ex-communists necessitated a grand coalition of right and left.  I suppose some will predictably leap on results like this as an argument against PR, but the solution to extremist politics can never be to rig the ballot system - it has to be to defeat the arguments, such as they are.

Why supporters of PR should probably hold their noses and campaign for a Yes to AV

Political Betting has begun a debate on the AV voting system, with two of the site's regular posters taking up each side of the argument. As I've mentioned before, I've gradually come round to the idea that I will probably vote Yes in the referendum, although if I do so it will be with absolutely no enthusiasm. And something may yet come along to change my mind - for instance, if I started to feel that there was a greater than 50% chance that a No would break the Con/Lib Dem coalition, that would give me considerable pause for thought. The democratic improvements offered by AV are so minor that they'd scarcely be worth passing up such a golden opportunity for. However, I don't find any of the arguments that 'Dyed in Some Wool' puts forward for a No vote at PB especially convincing. Perhaps that's because he merely focuses on trying to demolish the main reasons for thinking a Yes vote will make the voting system significantly better, and for the most part neglects to explain why a vote to retain first-past-the-post (which is exactly what a No vote will be) is in any way preferable. Let's take the points in turn :

"I want a more proportional system
AV is not proportional and will not lead to parliament reflecting the national vote..."

No, it won't. Nor will FPTP magically start to do so if we retain it by voting No in the referendum. As far as proportionality is concerned, neither FPTP or AV are even at the races - and honest Yes campaigners should be brave enough to admit that, and instead try to sell AV on the basis of its own modest virtues, not on a false prospectus of greater proportionality. But at the absolute most this is an argument for abstaining, not for actively voting to retain FPTP.

"Will democracy be better served by parties campaigning locally on ‘How To Ensure xxxx Does Not Get In?’"

But they already do exactly that. AV may not prevent Labour continuing to lie through their teeth in future about how 'only a vote for them can keep the Tories out', but what it will do is allow the long-suffering voter to point out to canvassers on the doorstep that the new voting system has at a stroke resolved all of those dilemmas - everyone will be free to vote honestly by giving their first preference to their favoured party, while still maximising the chances of keeping the Tories (or any other party) out by means of their lower preferences.

"My vote is a wasted vote
Under AV, anyone will have the ability to state secondary preferences, but if the party or candidate you wish to win does not secure 50% of the vote, then your vote is wasted in any case, if your secondary choice also fails to win then again your vote remains wasted."

This is all true, but the operative words are "does not secure 50%". Under FPTP, candidates often don't require anything like 50% to be elected, so by definition there will be significantly fewer wasted votes under AV than at present. It'll certainly fall far short of perfection on that score, but it's silly to pretend it doesn't represent an improvement.

"I hate the notion of the safe seat/I want to punish the individual MP
AV will not address this problem."

No, it won't. Neither will the retention of FPTP. Another argument for, at most, an abstention in the referendum. In fact, as far as punishing individual MPs is concerned, AV will at least increase the range of options available to the voters - as previously noted, they'll be able to simultaneously reward their favourite candidate and penalise their least favourite, whereas in many circumstances under FPTP they have to choose which is the greater priority.

"It is a step in the right direction
We should be wary here. If the referendum passes, the yes supporters will have nailed their colours to the mast and it is unlikely a further change to the system will be offered (and indeed should not be) until the electorate has seen and experienced AV for a few elections."

At last we get to the nub of the issue, and I have indeed been very concerned that AV will prove to be a cul-de-sac rather than a stepping-stone. The introduction of AV several decades ago certainly didn't pave the way for proportional representation in Australia - the system instead became utterly entrenched. However, we also have to look at this from the other way round - what will be the psychological impact of a No vote on the movement for any sort of electoral reform? Hard to say, but it could be a significant setback. So there are dangers for supporters of PR in either a Yes or a No vote, but ultimately we'll have to jump one way or the other (I presume nearly all of us would regard abstaining as a cop-out) without the assistance of a reliable crystal ball. I think the trick here is that reluctant supporters of AV in this referendum must push themselves to the forefront of the campaign, emphasise at every turn that they're campaigning for the least worst option on the ballot paper, and repeatedly make clear that they will regard a Yes vote as a mandate to seek further reform at the earliest opportunity.

The worst things of all that could happen are for PR supporters to absent themselves from the campaign altogether, or to participate in the campaign without emphasising the central importance of the ultimate aspiration of PR. Either course would allow supporters of majoritarian voting systems (whether AV or FPTP) to claim literally any outcome as a victory for their cause over PR. Indeed, I seem to recall certain unionist politicians (most notably Roy Hattersley) cynically trying to pull off exactly that trick after the 1997 devolution referendum. If a Yes vote was a "vote against independence", Roy, what exactly would a No vote have been?