So out of 646 seats about 15% changed hands, leaving us with no idea who’ll govern us and the possibility that there’ll be another election before too long. In the meantime the main political parties, especially the LibDems, are running round telling us that a hung parliament is a terrible thing and the only solution is electoral reform to replace our current system with something that will ensure all future governments require the same sort of deals that are such a terrible thing in the event of a hung parliament but would be fine under the new scheme. Meanwhile we’re being governed by the same lot as before the election including several “ministers” who are no longer elected MPs but are carrying on governing us anyway.
As James Cleverly observes “PR isn’t better it’s just different”, and he’s not wrong. So far most of the forms of PR that have been touted and for which people are demonstrating ensure that whilst the “national” share of votes is reflected in the number of seats they at the same time make it impossible for independent candidates to ever get in, so no more Martin Bells or “save Kiddiminster hospital” candidates. Very small parties will also be no more as they won’t be able to campaign just a single seat and get a toe hold that way, but will need to be able to campaign in numerous places with the hope of getting enough votes over all to maybe scrape a seat. In the meantime slightly larger parties that can do that, such as the BNP or Greens, will at least have a voice and potentially quite a powerful one depending on how those national percentages work out. So depending on how you look at it a mixed bag, either quite poor or very poor. Meanwhile of course we may have some sort of permanent coalition of a couple of large parties ruling over us for ever, terribly democratic that.
The bigger issue to my mind is almost every form of PR breaks the link between the electorate and their representative, you would no longer have an MP representing your area directly and you’ll have no way to get rid of a corrupt MP. the reason being that most forms of PR work on party lists so the party chooses who’ll represent you and their place in the house isn’t dependent on representing you, as you just vote for a party, but in working for their party so as to stay high up on the list of people to fill the party seats. Of course the parties will notionally have to keep to their promises and such so as to keep their share of the vote, or you know they could just tell us how bad the others are and try to scare us into voting against the other guy. In either case the people at the top of the party lists are utterly safe, and the people at the bottom of the lists will be more worried about moving up the list than trying to represent us, as there’s no link between how we vote and if a particular MP gets in or not.
So if you think political parties are the best thing since sliced bread, and really don’t care about having independent candidates or small parties being able to make changes PR is the way to go. If on the other hand you’d rather have some say in who your representative is as an individual you might perhaps want to think about the matter a bit more carefully. There are many forms of “PR” some of which preserve the link, but will we be given that choice and all forms of PR make the larger incumbent parties safer over all and thus more disconnected from the electorate.
As a concrete example consider this the BBC report that nationally “others” (so all the independents and tiny parties) got 1.1% of the vote and one actual seat – in a PR systems that award seats according to percentage of vote those “others” should have 7 seats, but how would we pick which 7 small party/independent candidates got those seats? Lottery? Highest vote in their area or would it be a case that each independents percentage of the vote is counted and so we never have independent candidates again – only candidates beholden to the party machines.
I should also point you towards Charles Crawfords article on the a href=”http://charlescrawford.biz/blog/the-psychology-of-coalitions”>”The Psychology Of Coalitions” where he discusses the likely effects of the horse trading coalitions demands on a political class already obsessed with getting back into power the next time before they even make a decision as to how to run the country this time.
In the interest of fairness it does seem that the STV (Single transferable vote) does address many of my concerns, but that still leaves the problem on some constituencies having more power than others on a per capita basis and as observed by Burning our money none of the options being discussed so far address the fact that unlike the other members of the United Kingdom England alone doesn’t have any devolved representation.
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