Most Liberal Democrats care passionately about electoral reform. Most voters don’t begin to understand what it’s all about. So how do we catch their attention, let alone their support?
Let me make some suggestions about how to gain public attention. First, don’t talk about ‘proportional representation’ or ‘electoral reform’. Say ‘fair votes’, and ‘a more democratic system’. If we mention the choice between STV (the Single Transferable Vote) and the Additional Member System (AMS) eyes will glaze over. Tell them that Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic use more democratic systems. The choice for fairer voting lies between the Irish and the Scottish systems; both are already in use and easy to understand. Putting it this way makes it harder for Conservatives to argue, as ministers did when removing the Supplementary Vote system for electing mayors in the Elections Act in 2022 that even that half-baked form of the Alternative Vote (proportional when there is only one person to be elected) was ’too complicated for voters to understand’. If Scots, Irish and Welsh voters can manage this, it’s absurd to argue that English voters can’t.
Second, link it to the broader issues of Westminster’s toxic culture and popular disillusion with the style of our national politics. Both Sunak and Starmer attacked the close world of the UK’s over-centralised Westminster politics in their conference speeches this year – though neither suggested they were going to do anything much to change it. Ask your Tory and Labour counterparts if they are happy about the way Westminster has worked in recent Parliaments (Sunak said it’s been awful for 30 years) and how they propose to improve the way government and Parliament operate. Changing the way politicians are recruited and elected is central to opening Westminster up.
Third, recognise that changing the way our political leaders are recruited is only a part of the reforms that are needed to open up UK democracy and regain public trust. Tighter controls on party finance, loosening the government’s control of parliamentary business, reinvigorating local democratic authorities, reconstituting the second chamber, would all contribute to transforming British government and politics for the better. The strongest case for electoral reform is as part of a broader programme of constitutional reform, not as a project on its own – as it was presented in the Alternative Vote Referendum in 2012. Not all of those changes can be introduced within a short timescale, of course, nor without carrying a disengaged public with them. If we want electoral reform to last longer than the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act has done (enacted in 2011, repealed in 2022), we need to build a groundswell of public support.
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