Archive for September, 2009

I was asked how this differs from the Additional Member System used for the London and Welsh Assemblies. Firstly, it is very similar, and this is partly why I hope the system will be more acceptable to the establishment. The use of the d’Hondt system combined with regional top-up members is the same, and we know that it works in Britain.

However, the Regional Top-Up system proposed is simpler and doesn’t require voters to, confusingly, vote for a constituency MP and a party separately. The London and Welsh elections maintain the FPTP system for constituency elections, which means that voters are forced into voting for one of the main two local candidates, or waste their vote.

The AMS also still uses the dreaded party lists system which only ensures that the party favourites are elected, rather than the candidates most popular with the public.

So while the AMS is a definite improvement over the FPTP system, it also brings some distinct disadvantages with it which Regional Top-Up does not.

Sick of the ‘Don’t waste your vote’ messages? Fed up of being told that it is a two-horse race in your constituency? Not convinced by leaflets claiming that only they can stop the Labour/BNP/Tory candidate?

So are many other people, but this is what much of our electioneering has become, with policy relegated to a back seat.

Let’s help our politicians get back to real politics instead of trying to coerce people into voting for them by virtue of not being the incumbent party!

Because Regional Top-Up uses every vote for the regional allocation of seats, all of those leaflets become worthless. Let’s make it happen.

Another complaint that is frequently raised about systems that use Proportional Representation is that they tend to result in hung Parliaments, or, more accurately, they result in coalition governments.

Given that, at the time of writing, the Conservatives have approached the Lib Dems to discuss a coalition against the Labour party in the case of a hung Parliament, it is hardly fair to suggest that our current First-Past-The-Post system is very different. Hung Parliaments are only less likely under FPTP because the electorate are forced into voting for parties they don’t necessarily support, with a single party getting a disproportionate number of MPs.

In fact, complaints about coalition governments are really complaints that the views of the public are diverse. It is a complaint against the concept of democracy itself, and support for rule by the minority.

Coalitions are how grown-up governments work. Politicians have to work with each other, compromise and take into account the views of the majority of the public.

Compare that to our current system where the Labour Government, despite having just 35.3% of the vote, has 55% of the MPs and has pushed through many unpopular pieces of legislation without needing any kind of consensus from the opposition MPs who represent the other 64.7% of the population.

Someone asked me the very good question: “Do smaller parties deserve MPs?”

In other words, is it a good idea to let those parties scoring just a few percent of the vote have access to Westminster? Aren’t they just a bunch of cranks and fringe politicians?

It is not the job of the electoral system to judge who is suitable or deserving to become an MP; that is the job of the electorate. A system that deliberately impedes the popular choice is anti-democratic.

The purpose of a representative democracy is to represent the political wishes of the voting public. Our current system is broken and does not, by any stretch of reasoning, provide an accurate snapshot of the public wishes for our country.

The only reason that some of the smaller parties, such as the Greens, don’t have MPs is because of geography. They certainly have enough voters out there to secure many MPs, but because they are widespread, rather than living in a few concentrated constituencies, the party loses out. If they could persuade all of their supporters to move to a dozen locations, they would probably have a dozen MPs. They are losing out solely because of a flaw in our electoral system. Regional Top-Up fixes that.

Lastly, part of the reason our smaller parties are often seen as amateurish is because they don’t have access to the resources that the bigger parties do. Most of them are run by part-time volunteers and survive on donations. Given enough public support and some elected officials, those parties would quickly transform into more professional organisations, giving the voting public a greater choice of credible alternatives at election time.

It is very interesting to compare the results from the Westminster elections with those of the European Elections. Despite the theoretical differences, many people still vote on national issues in the EU elections. However, because the EU elections are PR based, the electorate tend to vote for the party they would like, rather than voting tactically as so many do in General Elections.

In the 2005 General Election, the big three parties combined received 89.7% of the vote. However, compare that to the 2009 European elections, where the big three took a combined vote share of just 57.1%, and we get a different picture.

43% of people in the UK voted for a party other than the ‘big three’ in 2009. That’s an astonishing amount and suggests that, given the option in a General Election, many voters would switch their votes if they knew that their vote would count.

Even within the votes for the big three parties, there is still a gross distortion in the distribution of seats. The Labour party, with 35.5% of the vote took 356 seats. The Liberal Democrats, with 22.1% received just 62 seats.

The conclusion is simply that Westminster no longer properly represents the political views of a very large section of the voting public.

On top of that we don’t know how many people choose not to vote at all because their votes won’t count – their views aren’t represented in Westminster either. Switching to a new system like Regional Top-Up would allow everyone to vote for the party they support, increasing turn-out and improving representation.

One of the biggest problems with the first-past-the-post system that we use now is the wastage of votes. Unless people vote for the winning candidate, their votes are essentially wasted. In 2005, according to Make My Vote Count, over 70% of votes went to losing candidates or were surplus to the winners’ requirements to be elected.

This not only means that over 70% of voters are unrepresented in Parliament, it also has the knock-on effect of discouraging many more people from voting at all. Why vote if you know that your choice of candidate or party has no chance of winning a seat?

The Regional Top-Up system ends this problem by using nearly every vote for the allocation of the Regional MPs.

One of my ‘beta’ testers raised the excellent question of why the system uses the same regions as we use for the European elections, rather than, for instance, counties.

The fundamental aim of PR is to provide as many voters as possible with representation. The smaller the number of seats allocated, the less representative the results are. For example, if we allocate 10 seats, then a party will generally require 10% of the vote to win a seat. If we allocate 100 seats, each party needs only 1% of the vote for an MP.

The logical conclusion is to maximise the area over which we allocate the top-up seats. In theory we could do this at a national level, but this has two significant negative impacts. Firstly, it distorts the effect of regional parties such as Plaid Cymru who do very well within Wales, but have no presence outside. Secondly, national level MPs would have no real local connection at all; a common complaint with PR systems.

If we move in the opposite direction and reduce the size of the allocation area to counties instead, we will only be allocating a handful of seats per area, making the minimum percentage a party needs to earn a seat too high. All that would happen is a slight redistribution of seats amongst the big parties, which is no longer desirable in an era when the smaller parties are achieving an ever increasing share of the vote.

Therefore, the regions present themselves as a good balance; they are large enough so that parties need between 1.4% and 4% to win a seat, and small enough so that MPs will still have an area that they are responsible for.

It also means that the Scottish and Welsh (and voters in each region) are able to vote purely for local candidates, knowing that their votes won’t be used to elect someone from the other end of Britain.

Finally, the public are already used to the concept of regional voting through the European elections.