Written by Dan Rafiqi | 01 June 2011
Posted in Comment - Britain

AV posters side-by-side. Photography: Clive Darr

The emphatic win for the 'no' camp in the Alternative Vote referendum has led to die-hard first-past-the-post defenders gleefully sounding the death knell for electoral reform. It is perhaps little surprise that Tory chiefs with a significant vested interest in maintaining the status quo have tried to paint the defeat of the alternative vote system as a wider stinging blow to the entire cause of electoral reform. It is much more disparaging and shocking to see 'old guard' members of the allegedly 'progressive' Labour party such as John Reid and David Blunkett make similarly bewildering and intentionally facetious statements. Let me be clear, there was no 'proportional representation' box on the referendum voting slip handed out to members of the British electorate around the country, this was a explicitly a referendum on the alternative vote, not the wider issue of electoral reform.

With the benefit of hindsight the offering of the referendum to Liberal Democrats appears to be a shrewd, calculated decision on the part of David Cameron. It could be argued by reasoning that a Labour party which had always been split over electoral reform would not come down one way or the other on the vote, assured victory in the referendum would ensure the destruction of the core Lib Dem vote in the South-East to the Tories' gain. Such an argument perhaps does too great a service to Mr Cameron: the overwhelmingly anti-AV results of the referendum should really be attributed to another factor. The alternative vote crashed and burned when wheeled out in front of the electorate because the 'yes' campaign utterly failed to engage in any kind of meaningful debate over the specific benefits of the voting system itself. There seemed to be little effort to highlight the significant defects of the current first -past-the-post voting system, which alone presents a compelling argument for change.

Focusing on the extent to which first past the post very poorly represents the actual wishes of the wider electorate - and the way in which the system stifles political innovation -  by  disproportionally distorting voting patterns so as to maintain a two party 'monopoly' on politics would have presented a very compelling argument for change to the British electorate. Instead the 'yes' camp's only really enduring message was a bland 'Yes for a change to politics'. They dismally failed to explain to the wider electorate the specific ways in which instituting alternative vote might actually change this. They made little mention of the fact that alternative vote would, more often than not, ensure that MPs required a majority of voters to endorse them in order to be elected, something which is a rarity under the current system in which most MPs are elected with less than 50% of the vote.

The 'no' campaign also completely failed to engage the electorate in a genuine debate over the specifics of how the current voting system could be seen as better. Rather than talk about the actual merits of the first-past-the-post system, the no campaign shamelessly paraded its 'one person, one vote' mantra, a completely false distortion of the facts that suggested that under the Alternative Vote a person's vote is somehow represented more than once in the makeup of parliament. Even more shamefully, a cynical de facto Tory-led 'no' campaign tried to urge flagging Liberal Democrats to punish Nick Clegg for subscribing to the very government policies that the Conservative party has largely been responsible for enacting whilst in government. But worst of all were the downright lies spouted by the 'no' campaign, the suggestion that the alternative vote system would cost in excess of £ 250 000 was complete fallacy and was even denounced by anti-AV campaigner David Blunkett as ludicrous on the very day of voting itself.

Then there were the seemingly contradictory claims put forward by the 'no' campaign, which argued that the voting system used in the UK was an irrelevant issue an that the the money used to fund it would be spent better elsewhere while also highlighting how the alternative vote posed a menacing, overarching threat to 'British' democracy as we know it. Electoral reform is clearly a subject that matters, the issues as stake when discussing electoral reform pertain to our very understanding of what constitutes democracy- election of government by a majority of people. The Conservatives know this and are aware that under a system more representative of the British people they would lose seats. They therefore poured tens of thousands of pounds into a campaign to encourage people to maintain the status quo. The utter failure of the 'yes' campaign to engage in the specifics of why alternative vote was in some significant ways more representative of what people actually voted for than first past the post meant that electorate was not really given any tangible reasoning to vote in favour of the reforms.

Don't let the forces of conservatism paint this as a defeat for the wider cause of electoral reform. The real issues, the respective merits of first-past-the-post and proportional voting systems, have not even begun to be debated. Contrary to the absurd claims of 'no' campaigners, more representative voting systems aren't somehow 'un-British', propensity to democratic reform is an ingrained and irrepressible current which had long preoccupied the inhabitants of these islands. A case in point is the little known fact that Parliament has in fact already passed a bill advocating reform to first-past-the-post. In 1917 democratically elected sovereign Parliament of the UK decreed the use standard transferable vote and alternative vote systems for elections to the Commons. Attempts at constitutional reform were only dropped after a House of Lords stuffed with heredity peers rejected the will of the peoples' representatives five consecutive times in a row.

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