On 3rd May all the Borough Council seats in Greater London are up for election, which happens every four years. The Borough I live in is typical and has 18 3-member wards. Each voter votes by putting up to 3 Xs on the ballot paper. In each of these wards the top three candidates in terms of Xs on the ballot win. Hence F3PTP rather than FPTP (First Past The Post).
So what’s wrong with that? Five national parties are contesting the borough election, plus around four parties with Residents’ Association in their name, who are active in their own patches. Usually, a party sees its whole slate of three elected, but sometimes one candidate impacts more on the electorate, positively or negatively, and the result is a ‘split ward’. But I have seen nine candidates from three parties having each around 30% of the vote, but only one party gets the councillor seats. Natural justice suggests that they should have had one councillor each. With three councillors of one party, we KNOW that they were NOT the first choice of 70% of the electorate; at worst, the three victors could be the LEAST favoured candidates of 70% of the voters.
It gets worse. Some parties are so entrenched in certain seats that the others have given up. A friend of mine expressed it as ’If you put up a feather duster for XXXX party in YYYY ward, it would get elected.’ Two national parties contest all 54 seats, but the presence of the parents, spouses and children of local party worthies on the ballot papers gives a strong hint of what they think. The voters in such wards show what they think by not turning up to vote for the council, which, more than any other body, delivers government services to them.
Of course, if London boroughs followed Scotland and Northern Ireland and introduced STV, things would get a lot better. A voter is more likely to have a sympathetic ward councillor. Voters could vote honestly for the candidates they want, and have the safety net of still having a say amongst the other candidates if their favourites didn’t win. The voter wouldn’t need tactical voting, with its risk that he/she guessed the order of the parties completely wrong – always more likely in a local election. The ballot papers could say the same; instead of 3 Xs you vote with 1 to, say, 16. When you no longer care, you stop writing numbers. Diehards of F3PTP only need use 1,2,3. Counting staff will need some retraining, but these are the same people who count GLA elections, which use three other voting systems.
There is a saving. Around 15 years ago the borough underwent re-warding, with a rigid target of 10,000 electors per ward. Many wards have about the same, but two or three are growing towards 13,000. Under STV those could be given a fourth councillor. No expensive re-drawing. Simples.
* Ian joined the Liberal Democrats (then the SLD) in 1989 and has campaigned and attended conferences since 1994. He was Liberal Democrat candidate for Romford in 2015 and 2017 and for Havering and Redbridge in 2016.
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29 Comments
Of course FPTP needs consigning to the dustbin of History; but how do you get Joe Public to support change? Many of us reckon that, following the AV Referendum, the chance for change has probably been scuppered for at least a generation.
My original headline included the term F3PTP which isn’t exactly the same as FPTP – as my article shows, it can be worse.
It’s all very well to in favour of PR when the Lib Dems are on 20% of the vote, but what about when UKIP, or possibly some even further far right party, are riding high in the polls?
Do we really want them to have a 100+ seats in Parliament?
@ John Marriott
I hope that, if those who believe in things that could make things better, explain so time after time, and never give up, the general populace will start to get the point.
I could also go on for hours on the difference between Preferential Voting (AV may be this) and Proportional Representation. STV is both.
London electors already use AV for the mayor and additional member PR for the Assembly. So going to STV for Borough elections is a small step.
@Peter Martin
Natural Justice says that if that is their support in an election, they ought to have the representatives to match.
To take your example, one of the things that has kept UKIP plausible as a party is the fact that most of their elected representatives are in the European Parliament, which is scandalously unreported by the British media – consider what would happen to them if they had MPs scrutinised daily by the press.
In Scotland we have just one vote in multi-member wards. In my ward 4 councillors from 4 different parties got in, each party putting up just one name. That made 5 candidates, so only one didn’t make it.
“They all got in” as someone said.
@Peter Martin
I totally agree with Ian. There is one way of preventing the kind of multi party representation as occurs in Israel and was the feature of the Reichstag in Weimar Germany and that is to introduce, as the West Germans did for the 1953 elections for the Bundestag, the so called “Fünf Prozent Sperrklausel”, which meant that a party needed to get at least 5% of the popular vote to get any seats at all. Unfortunately the FDP, which is the nearest the Germans have to a Liberal Party, has in the past fallen victim to this rule!
Not just London Boroughs but all English local elections. We need proportional representation for local government and this should be one of several red lines for Liberal Democrats before supporting or participating in a future government.
Adrian, isn’t the key thing about your vote in Scotland is that it is transferable to give a proportional result? The parties can put up full slates of candidates. I didn’t know people were only putting up single candidates. They don’t do that in Ireland or most other territories that use STV.
Ian, Nick and our negotiating team blew the one chance we had to get PR in 2010. Probably not for the HoC, but for local councils. It was the chance for one more step on the way, but they went for broke and lost it all.
Now we are back to where we were 50 years ago.
In Northern Ireland Assembly elections parties would tend to put as many candidates as they hope to get elected plus one or two more. Rarely a full slate.
It can be galling for party that puts up just one candidate for a constituency and after the fact realises that if they had had two, both could have been elected.
@Antony Hook
Of course you are right in the long term. I advocated it for Greater London because:
1) I live there
2) It’s easier to do there than in many parts of England.
3) Greater London already uses several different forms of elections.
4) When it works in Greater London, it will undercut the arguments against it in other parts of England.
Antony
I am afraid they do put up much smaller numbers than their entitlement, even if single candidates are less common.
Please – when we get the chance – put forward a strong clear argument! Most significantly, with a transferable vote, to reject a candidate you vote for any of the others – you can even vote for the Party you support! (Not for the one that you guess would be second). One who gets 51% still wins of course.
With FPTP (Once you have more that 2 candidates) the candidate that is most disliked by the voter can win. With only 3 candidates: 40%, 30%, 30% – among the 60% who did not vote for “the winner” there could well be 50% voting for them to lose. With more candidates it gets crazier.
@Peter, I agree with Ian. If UKIP had ever managed to get themselves an MP, they’d have struggled to maintain any sense of credibility. I actually think that it helped Farage to permanently snipe from the side-lines without having to be held accountable. He could get away with not turning up to committee’s in Brussels, because there was little media interest, and his core support could interpret that as rightful disdain for a corrupt organisation, blah, blah, blah … He’d have been subject to much more criticism if he’d tried to behave that way in Westminster.
I’d say it makes sense to spearhead the campaign for STV in local authorities in London, as they are already used to different voting systems, and with multi-member wards already in place, there’s less for them to get their heads around. I hope that those campaigning in the local elections will use it as an opportunity to explain the system, and how much easier it would be for the community to have their honest voice heard. And it helps that the London Assembly made a point of voting to keep their own form of PR and not revert to FPTP as May wanted.
My experience of Scottish local elections is that most wards have at least double the candidates as there are seats, with the more confident parties putting forward two or three representatives.
Fiona, UKIP have actually had two Westminster MPs, fairly short term. But they were former Tory MPs and not typical of those they send to the European Parliament.
True Ian, but they were always treated as Tory MPs gone rogue, so like most other people, I tend to forget about them! However, the point stands, that if UKIP had somehow got MPs in proportion with their vote, their vote would have collapsed a lot sooner. I remain convinced that not becoming an MP gave Farage far more freedom to sabre rattle and ultimately influence Government than he’d have managed if he’d been elected.
But of course if the public really do want UKIP MPs, then the public deserve UKIP MPs. To say otherwise, is to say you are against democracy.
Poole Council Lib Dem group are seeking PR elections to the new authority for Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch in May 2019.
I hope the London regional party will take up this excellent initiative.
A number of thoughts come to mind:-
Although the concept of change to a fairer voting system enjoys majority support when people are asked in opinion polls, they mostly don’t see it as a priority or appreciate the extent to which FPTP impoverishes our political system. Probably the issue is perceived in party political terms or to put it crudely Liberal Democrats whinging. It must be made clear that electoral reform is a matter of principle i.e. transcending party interest. This raises the strange prospect of a progressive-regressive alliance for reform.
London probably has the most diverse variety of large and small minority groups who are presently grossly under represented on borough councils. Therefore, a wide spectrum of potential allies exists.
The arguments for STV are irrefutable and the usual tactic deployed by the opposition is to ignore and marginalise any debate on the topic. The standard nonsense trotted out by proponents of FPTP in the national context, when they can’t avoid comment, is that it results in strong government. A patently absurd view of the last two GEs and irrelevant because the primary purpose of democratic elections is to select representative bodies.
The best vehicle for a successful London wide campaign would be a non-party group. The history of previous umbrella groups is uninspiring, to put it politely, because they were diverted away from STV in favour of compromise solutions that were not really PR at all.
Timing is important. Is now, post the full borough elections, the results of which in each borough will throw up examples of the travesty of democracy produced by the current rules, the optimum time for a major campaign on this? Probably not unless the ground work has been going on quietly in the background and the competition for attention with halting of EU exit.
How was such a crap system ever designed? I can see why the 2 major parties would support it. Our country has such a disastrously undemocratic system!
PR voting is not AV. PR is the key reform that would unlock other reforms and transform the country.
UKIP was and is a fractious, dishonorable mess and was never sustainable. All the neofascist parties bicker among themselves and split, as is their nature. UKIP are down to 1.8%, roughly where they were before the BBC gave a gutter level party , coverage equal to the established parties of government and opposition.
People should have the confidence that PR will encourage moderation and proper representation. Instead we have hard right nationalism in government, but also a weak government, or the main opposition from the far left.
PR would usually produce a centrist coalition that was inclusive and business friendly.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/22/founded-ukip-national-joke-disappear-henry-bolton-alan-sked
How was such a system ever designed ?
Basically by successive Liberal Prime Ministers before the Liberal Party became a minor party.
David Raw, it worked when there were just two parties, which was the case before 1900. I don’t think it ever was designed as such. At one time your MP was just your representative in parliament (if you were one of the tiny minority with a vote), the party system developed later.
@ Peter Martin
None of the European nations with PR have produced a majority for a far right party. I suspect many of the votes for UKIP were protest votes than may never have been cast had the voters thought there was a real chance of them gaining power, but if I’m wrong I’m still not sure we should be hanging on to an outdated system just to prevent UKIP or their ilk getting more seats.
Teresa. The Conservative party was founded in 1834 and theLiberal party in 1859.
PR could have been introduced in 1918 by Lloyd George. It wasn’t.
No one’s interested in PR or what the LIb Dems have to say. You’re not even a protest party any more. Dream on.
Trust me. I used to vote for you.
Jay:
By commenting here, you contradict yourself.
First let me thank everyone who commented on my article. Up to May 3rd, I was rather busy.
Secondly, I am not in agreement with those who say that we missed our chance on this in the coalition, we should stop trying. If we think it would make for better elections and more voter engagement, we should continue to push it.
Thirdly, the mention of ‘strong government’ only occurred once. Advocates of FPTP have the image, that in Westminster it produces one-party united governments with adequate majorities, even if they are not supported by a majority of the votes. This last happened in 2005. David Cameron’s and Theresa May’s problems are that even with a nominal majority, they can’t be sure that their party will follow them.
In local government, the position is even less so. Many councils operate with administrations of more than one party. Where I live the council is 53 years old, but for about half that time it is recorded as No Overall Control.
I thank John Payne for his hope that London Region should take this up. This article is a one man initiative at present. I was interested when Lawrence Fullick said that Poole Council Lib Dem group are seeking PR elections to the new authority for Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch in May 2019.
Lastly, on 7th May the post on the interaction between LibDem and Green candidates on Richmond-on-Thames makes me wonder how that would have played out with STV.
https://www.libdemvoice.org/richmond-shows-progressive-alliances-do-work-57429.html#utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email