Calls for the First-Past-The-Post voting system to be abolished in the UK were given a real kick-start last year after it became clear – thanks to the work of Lib Dem blogger Mark Thompson – that it was MPs with large majorities who were more likely to be implicated in cheating the expenses system.
It’s obvious if you think about it: if you were given life tenure in a safe seat where the Labour/Tory majorities are weighed not counted, how concerned would you be with the irksome business of being transparent and accountable? To put it bluntly – as Nick Clegg did, very much so, last week – First-Past-The-Post and the in-built advantage it gives the Labour and Tory parties tend to make them more prone to corruption.
So far, so familiar. But I was reading Mark Pack’s recent LDV posting, Two new reports into online politics – noting the Hansard Society’s punchily-titled report, ‘A study into how MPs use digital media to communicate with their constituents’ – and this sentence from it leaped out of the page:
… the internet has permeated the culture and day-to-day life of our MPs … [but there are] numerous examples of late or non-adoption. Survey data in fact suggest that adoption relates more to the MP’s majority, length of incumbency and, to some degree, the nature of the constituency (and constituents) than to the party that they belong to. MPs who hold a significant majority are far less likely to use the internet; as are those who have been MPs for a long time.
So there we have it, the MPs least likely to be active dealing with the significant number of their constituents who are internet users are those with the biggest majorities: folk who’ve been around for ages, and know they’re safe from challenge.
Put simply, MPs in safe seats are the laziest. As well as the most corrupt.
The solution? Ah well, that’s an easy one, as any Lib Dem kno’. Fair votes, electoral reform, proportional representation – call it what you will, the effect’s the same: an end to safe seats, and the lazy corruption the First-Past-The-Post system too often breeds.
What we need is for a decent bit of competition to be injected into Parliament, with MPs having to battle for every single vote, rather than simply taking their core ‘heartlands’ for granted.
It is no surprise the Tories are so vigorously opposed to the abolition of First-Past-The-Post: most Tories, nearly always and everywhere, oppose attempts to end entrenched privilege. Their attachment to safe seats is merely the latest example. Competition – rather like taxes – is for other people as far as the Tories are concerned.
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21 Comments
I agree, I think fair representation is the only way to have people engaged in politics.
However, strangely, Boris raises an interesting point regards short lived governments and constant elections http://bit.ly/4VBKVg.
I’d love to hear tour take on this.
Toby, there are a number of inconsistencies and errors in Boris’ speech. The first is the assumption that it’s clearly better to have one political party with absolute power even if it’s not supported by the majority of the electorate. Similarly, the “soverign right of people to kick the rascals out” is virtually nonexistent under FPTP. A preferential (not necessarily proportional) system would make seats less safe, and make it easier for poeple to kick out MPs they don’t like – along with the Lib Dems’ proposed recall powers.
The second is that the BNP were elected in the Euros because of some mystical property of PR. They were elected because people didn’t vote for Labour after the expenses scandal. And again it depends on the kind of PR you use. STV in multi-member constituencies, the method preferred by the Lib Dems, would be very unlikely to elect somebody from the BNP because they’re just not that popular, though plausibly it would benefit UKIP in the Tory heartlands.
Thirdly, the claim that PR entrenches party power through a list system. Not all forms of PR use, or need to use, a list. How parties select their candidates should be a matter for the party, and the voters can reward or punish them at the ballot box accordingly – the Lib Dem lists in Euro elections are decided by a ballot of Lib Dem members rather than imposed by the party. When Boris talks about “PR creates two kinds of MPs” he’s specifically talking about AV+ rather than all forms of PR – and that is a valid criticism of AV+.
Boris assumes that power-sharing deals would be worked out in secret away from the voters. Yet Nick’s made it perfectly clear what the Lib Dems stand for, what the Lib Dems will hope to achieve and what the Lib Dems will insist on other parties adopting if they want our support as a minority government – quite the opposite of what Boris suggests will happen. And if Boris has learned that secrecy is bad, then surely he can no longer continue to support a voting system which entrenches power and encourages corruption?
I could go on, but it’s clear that Boris’ position, while eloquent, relies on false assumptions and fancy rhetoric rather than actual reason.
Good post Stephen and another unsurprising finding regarding MPs with massive majorities and their complacency.
I think it is becoming more and more clear that safe seats breed contempt. We need to keep banging on about this because lord knows the other two main parties aren’t going to.
From Boris Johnson’s speech:
it is that in the 50 years since the war there were 103 elections in Germany, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden
I think most of those countries have done much better than we have in those 50 years.
And that is exactly the kind of chicanery and secrecy that we associate with PR
whereas when FPTP forces lots of people with different views into coalition in one of the two big parties, all that chicanery takes place internally and with even more secrecy inside the parties.
PR entrenches the power of the party machines and any kind of list system
Since he mentioned STV previously, he should know that STV is not a list system.
increases the ability of the party cadres to exclude anyone with any independence of spiri
FPTP does this, you can see it doing it when Labour and Conservatuve use their usual line “You must vote for our party candidate any other vote is a wasted vote”. The main point of FPTP – that is just what Boris is arguing about in much of the rest of the speech – is that it FORCES voters to choose between the candidates of one of two parties, because to do anything else risks “splitting the vote”, so gives stable government swapping between a majority for one or the other of these parties.
it also creates two classes of MP with two types of democratic mandate
Only some forms do, not the ones we want (shame our leader didn’t get this right last summer and instead of advocating the system we have always wanted and which deals with the problems raised by the expenses scandal, suggested another which we never wanted and which doesn’t deal with those issues and which is open to the sort of criticism Boris gives here which does not apply to the one we always wanted).
everybody knows the Lib Dem policy on cake is pro-having it and pro-eating it.
Given that Cameron’s policy statements tend to be a mixture of things he says he wants that will cost more and promises to cut tax, promises to reduce government power and promises to introduce new quangoes and government force to impose whatever is flavour of the month with the Tories, this line (hah-hah, though sadly Clegg’s speech-writers are too fond of similar hah-hah lines) applies more to the Tories than to us.
And above all in this by no means exhaustive list of the fatal defects of PR, it is not proportionate
It is more so than FPTP.
as tiny parties are allowed to hold the balance of power:
Like the Ulster Unionists here?
Let us kick out this ludicrous motion as prelude to the ecstatic release that will come when we are finally allowed to kick out this Government.
Yes, I remember the silly grins on people’s faces on May 2nd 1997, and how I spelt out precisely to them why they would in time come to regret those grins.
PR – the system that elected Hitler.
Given that FPTP does not inevitably produce majorities for a single party, and frequently has not in our local government, perhaps Boris should advocate a system that is guaranteed to do so, and therefore would better meet his stated aims of an electoral system. An example would be the one proposed and introduced by Mussolini.
I agree with the point in the link that PR didn’t elect Hitler – they gave him 38% of the vote but he didn’t get a majority. 38% would have given him a majority in the UK’s system!
it is that in the 50 years since the war there were 103 elections in Germany, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden
Of course if you add all the postwar elections in many different countries together they will have had more than we have! How stupid can Boris get? For the record, to my knowledge there has only been ONE election outside of the fixed four-year terms in Sweden. This was in 1958, after the government fell over expanding the state pension: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_general_election,_1958
And there has been little “chicanery” in Swedish politics: governments have almost always been entirely centre-left (Social Democrats with out-of-cabinet support from the Left and the Greens) or centre-right (coalitions of the three-four centre-right parties). People always know what they are voting for, and their votes always count (so long as the 4% threshold is met). More than can be said for FPTP.
More good arguments against Boris, but this time from a Conservative. The title alone makes it worth reading: America today is an example of why we so desperately need electoral reform.
What would be nice is some hard data on what proportion of (say) Swedish MPs change at each election, compared with Britain. Ditto (say) Germany. Are seats less safe, or are there (de facto) large incumbency advantages? We use PR elections internally to select MEP candidates, I think, and I also think that the incumbent has never been voted out. Perhaps they are all brilliant, or perhaps there are incumbency advantages?
Are we jumping to conclusions? What is the actual evidence that changing to STV would make things better?
Can you cite a country that moved to STV and avoided “corruption”?
It is easy to just assume things.
Where are you Chris Huhne and your more evidence-friendly input?
Thankyou all for your input, it’s nice to see the reasoned side of this debate. I was looking for you to pick apart Boris’s rhetoric. I shall be using many of your points next time I am faced with more cries of self preservation from the right!
It is not PR that we voters need, but PV – Preferential voting
Not STV but AV
Not the Single Transferable Vote in Multi-member constituencies – STVM – i.e.”STV” – but the Single Transferable Vote in existing Single member constituencies – STVS – i.e. “AV”.
MPs will not vote for Multi-member constituencies. They could vote for STVS – i.e. “AV” (the Electoral Reform Society’s derogatory Alternative Vote term for STVS) )in existing Single member constituencies.
In Newbury in 1974 we got, roughly, 24,000 votes, Cons got 23,000 votes and Labour got 10,000 votes, twice. With STVS – i.e.”AV” – I would have been elected the 15th Liberal MP and many other Liberals would have been elected. And we could have been chucked out at the next election if voters so wished. No more safe seats! More, but not full, proportional representation! In the highly unlikely event of perversely over representation for Liberals, voters could easily have changed that in the next election.
Pushing for STVM – or STV – just delays STVS – or AV. I blame the Electoral Reform Society.
Liberals should push for STVS or “AV”.
I want to point out that the previous post has got its election systems all muddled. AV is another name for IRV, which is a degenerate form of STV. It is no more proportional than FPTP when used for elections.
Newbury 1974 elections: 24.5k votes Tory, 23k votes Liberal, 10k votes Labour. Under an AV system, the outcome cannot be determined here, because those 10k Labour votes would have been transferred. Certainly if those people had all voted for the Liberals as their second choice then it would have been a Liberal win, but this is a fairly bold assumption. It seems more likely that those 10k votes would have been split between the two parties, and there is a very real possibility that it would still have been a Tory win.
Regardless of the outcome, roughly 50% of the voters in the district would have been disenfranchised: they voted for a candidate who did not win, and hence they have nobody in Parliament who is representing their views. This is the reason why liberals (and even more so, democrats) object to IRV. It’s not proportional in any sense.
Let’s consider instead what would have happened in a proper STV system like the Lib Dems have been pushing for. Suppose there were five seats up for election. The expected result would have been one seat to Labour, two seats to the Tories, and two seats to the Liberals. Now almost every voter in the constituency has somebody in Parliament who is representing them – only about 0.3% of the population is left disenfranchised. This is the reason why liberals think STV is a good idea. Anybody who voted Lib Dem but found themselves living in a Labour constituency should understand why this is important.
For those who prefer power to principles, rough projections indicate that today STV would double the proportion of Lib Dem seats in Parliament, while AV is harder to predict but seems likely to reduce Lib Dem seats slightly.
Andrew Suffield,
STVS, or AV, is indeed sometimes called IRV, for Instant Runoff Vote, and it is indeed a form of the Single Transferable Vote, but in existing Single Member Constituencies – STVS. The other form is the same Single Transferable Vote, but in Multi-member constituencies – STVM.
Both STVS and STVM are alternative ways of using the Single Transferable Vote, which is voting preferentially, 1,2,3.., whether in existing single member constituencies or in multi-member constituencies. Enthusiasts for multi-member constituencies have caused confusion by unfairly and muddlingly snaffling the initials “STV” for their STVM preference and landed STVS with “AV”.
There is no muddle in preferring Preferential Voting to Proportional Representation.
I can tell you, as could any political commentator, that in Newbury in 1974 the vast majority of Labour voters would have put Liberal as their second choice in what had been for many years a safe Conservative seat. I stood on a platform of greater equality of opportunity in education, health and the inheritance of wealth. Look at the politics of the time.
Many more Liberals would have been elected, and that would have made the result far more proportional than the total of 14 Liberal MPs elected on a national vote of about 20%. People would not have wanted a multi-member constituency. They wanted an MP for Newbury supported by a majority of voters, with every vote counting, no wasted votes and no more safe seats.
You are not disenfranchised if you do not have an MP of your first preference party in Parliament. You are disenfranchised if your vote makes no difference to the choice between the eventual two front runners.
And never mind what STVS – or AV – or IRV – would do to Liberal Democrat representation as compared with STVM – or STV. Both would be better than X Voting and First Past the Post.
In any case, from my point of view these days, the fewer EU-fanatic, Lisbon Treaty denying, Liberal Democrats there are in the next Parliament the better! They would only vote to join the Euro and convert our country into a dozen regions in a country called Europe. Perish the thought!
I should have said “Lisbon Treaty referendum denying”. LIberal Democrats. Neither LIberal – because of subjecting our country to a Brussels bureaucracy – nor Democratic – because of not supporting a referendum on the issue. What has become of the party I knew?
Actually Dane, I am disenfranchised if my vote doesn’t elect someone to represent my views.
I doubt if the voters in newbury in 1974 were particularly giving you a personal endorsement, let alone voting for you on the basis of a detailed knowledge of your views and policies.
I think the Party you knew has stopped being such a breeding ground for odd balls, cranks and crackpots with incoherent and incompatible views.
While I would support a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, opposition to a referendum is an entirely legitimate view point. To be honest, most people haven’t read it, have little understanding of it and simply aren’t in the slightest bit bothered about it.
Your Euro-phobia is funny, if not exactly Liberal.
“Mouse”
What you say is utter nonsense. Think again! You are not disenfranchised if you can vote and your vote counts in the result of the election of an MP in your constituency. With the Single Transferable Vote in existing Single-member constituencies – STVS, also known as AV – Alternative Vote or IRV – Instant Run off Vote, every vote would count in the result. No one would be disenfranchised.
It is not helpful to pontificate about the 1974 General Election results in Newbury when you clearly know little, if anything, about the progress of the Liberal Party in Newbury in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Nor is it helpful to resort to insult instead of argument, as I am sure many Liberal Democrats, as well as Liberals, would agree.
The only gleam of democratic light in the encircling gloom of your post is that you would support a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, but that is dimmed by your declaration that most people are not in the slightest bit bothered by it. You may find out otherwise when the General Election comes. Thank goodness Liberal Democrats had no influence in the last Parliament over joining the Euro and so overvaluing the pound in the present difficulties. Let us hope their genuflecting and toadying to the EU bureaucracy has equally little influence in the next Parliament!
Actually, that’s not correct.
* 80 people vote: A, C, B
* 50 people vote: B, C, A
* 35 people vote: C, B, A
IRV eliminates C (as it has the fewest first-place votes) and elects B. It does so by ignoring 80 voters preferences for C over B, also known as a failure of the Condorcet criterion.
Brad Beattie,
Thank you for spelling that out. I have often heard about it but never looked into it carefully. Here goes!
Assume A is Left, e.g. Labour, B is Centre, e.g. Liberal and C is Right, e.g. Conservative
So on your hypothesis:
80 people swing in preference from Lab to Con to Lib
– against compromise
50 people swing in preference from Lib to Con to Lab
– for compromise and then Con preferred to Lab
35 people swing in preference from Con to Lib to Lab
– for Con then compromise preferred to Lab
So:
80 against compromise and prefer Lab to Con
50 for compromise and prefer Con to Lab
35 for Con and then compromise rather than Lab
So:
80 Labour supporters prefer Conservative to compromise Liberal – odd
50 Liberal compromise supporters prefer Conservative to Labour – OK
35 Conservative supporters prefer compromise to Labour – OK
So:
80 are for Labour and prefer Conservative to compromise – odd
85 prefer compromise to Labour – OK
So:
Compromise Liberal wins. Not a bad result, given that compromise is a good thing politically. So the failure of the Condorcet criterion is a good thing in this case.
If the compromise turns out badly, people can polarise and produce a different result next time. The problem would be if STVS/AV/IRV led to an extreme, e.g. National Socialists in Germany, winning against the wishes of those who wished for compromise. But it doesn’t. So there will be a next time, and voters can vote differently if they wish.
I stick with STVS – AV – IRV -as the best way of electing my MP, giving me a chance to vote for my first preference and have a say in the eventual result , whether directly or in favour of compromise rather than extremism, to give more proportional representation unless it does not benefit compromise rather than extremism and also ensuring no more safe seats. Also I know that MPs are very much more likely to vote for keeping their existing Single Member Constituencies than to merge them with others. And I prefer to have one MP rather than a number of them in a multi-member constituency..
How’s that?!
Dane, as a Canadian I’m a bit confused by your example. 😉
I have a calculator that can show the scenario you’re talking about: http://elections.cognitivesandbox.com/?systems=Plurality,InstantRunoff,RankedPairs#ignored (just click on the titles to rename them). Using that calculator, I see that the only way for Demographic A (the 80 people) to get their second choice (Liberal) under IRV is to insincerely decrease their preference for the Left. By doing so, we now have this situation:
* Demographic A, 80 people vote: Left, Liberal, Centre (but tactically expressed as Liberal, Left, Centre)
* Demographic B, 50 people vote: Centre, Liberal, Left
* Demographic C, 35 people vote: Liberal, Centre, Left
My concern here is that it IRV requires a certain amount of tactical awareness. By focusing on how others will vote instead of what the candidates and issues are… well, it’s more navel gazing if anything, y’know? Alternatively, try using the calculator to swing the vote in Ranked Pairs (a Condorcet method)
* win for the left by changing Demographic A’s vote
* win for the centre by changing Demographic B’s vote
It’s not doable, which suggests a certain resistance to strategy. Certainly, Condorcet systems aren’t immune to strategy, but that only occurs when there’s no clear Condorcet winner, which is statistically rare in real-world elections.
How are safe seats any different to the names at the top of party lists?
Maybe the top Politician could remove them but how often does this happen vis FPTP? It also makes politicianc accountable to other politicians rather than to the people who they are supposed to serve, this isn’t Democracy but the inflating of egos and power of those who appear more and more desperate to avoid accountabilty. It takes responsibility away from the people and gives it to the shiftless wretchess in Parliament, who being on closer terms with each other, and understanding the mechanics of government are more easily pursuaded that it isn’t their fault. And they would be right, it would be the fault of the people if they swallowed the guff about this wretched system.
With a HOUSE FULL OF liars, embezzlers, warmongers and various other neer do wells do you really want to hand them more power and decision making?
This is an example of how ‘safe’ seat MPs behave >>> http://bit.ly/cS9NHK