As I come to the end of my six years as President of the Party in South East England I have been reflecting on lessons to be learnt from a time that has been particularly significant both for our Country and our Party. When I began we were in Government and as I leave the final arrangements for departing the EU are being confirmed. We have had four leaders during this period.
It has been a tumultuous time dominated by our relationship with the EU. As a committed European I now realise that people like me have to take a lot of responsibility for how the referendum turned out as I adopted the approach like many others of keeping my head down, not offering the strong reasons for remaining and hoping that the issue would go away. It is though worth noting that as the Supreme Court ruled the referendum result was non-binding and twenty nine million people either voted to remain or did not express an opinion. It would nevertheless, because of the way the referendum was presented, have been very difficult immediately after the vote for parliamentarians to reject the outcome.
The time moved on though and people felt that they could be more brave about trying to reverse the decision. We like Labour, who probably had more excuses, did of course handle the opportunity for remaining ineptly. Even so the 2019 General Election produced an absolute majority of votes for parties that either advocated remaining or having a second referendum.
This brings me to the issue that has increasingly become the key factor for me in all of this and that is the continuance of an electoral system where there is little correlation between the votes cast in Westminster elections and the seats gained. In South East England in 2019 we got 18% of the vote and one seat out of the 84. If the votes cast had been reflected in the number of seats taken we would have ended up with 15 in this Region alone.
We should not necessarily adopt the same approach as the citizens of Belarus in relation to ‘rigged’ elections, although you have to admire them for it; but if we are to have real success in pursuing our liberal values we must make electoral reform and indeed devolution major planks of our policy and political aims. It is after all an issue of fairness.
* Jamie Sharpley is the outgoing President of the South East England Liberal Democrats.
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2 Comments
I voted to remain in the EEC in 1975 (first ever vote after my 18th birthday) and I campaigned for and voted for Remain in 2016. Yet I cannot sign up to the almost Trumpian attitude to elections that claims we somehow won the Referendum ‘because with all those who didn’t vote there was a majority against Leave.’ It could just as easily be claimed and with equal disregard for reality, that by adding all the the non voters to the Leave votes then the Leave voters won ‘Bigly’. The reality is that Leave won, narrowly yes but with over 50% of votes cast. Whatever the Supreme Court later said it also a fact that the Government, at the time, wrote to every household stating that whatever the result of the Referendum it would be implemented. No vote since then, in or out of Parliament, has over turned the 2016 result.
As for PR I agree with you. It was a disaster that Clegg decided, before the 2010 election, that PR was no longer a deal breaker for any coalition negotiations. The rest, including the destruction of our hard won credibility and electoral success, is history.
It is easy to appreciate the discontent of Jamie and Paul at the wicked nature of our voting system of FPTP and what we are doing about it. An Election with 18% of the vote and 1 seat out 84 is wicked and Disaster Clegg never made FPTP an absolute condition of support for a Minority Tory Government. In my case, I have been voting steadily for 65 years, including for myself, and never elected a single Liberal Democrat to anything.
I admit that I am dissatisfied that the Party keeps working on much less important targets, when it should be making a consistent attack on our nemesis FPTP, as the root cause of all our present problems, at every possible opportunity. At present, we are seen as a middle class party and unlikely to win a majority in the Commons, so the Party must work persistently, by any means, for some other way to find a majority in Parliament to abolish FPTP.