A VERY BAD START

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 18 February 2011

Something tells me that the campaign in the run-up to the referendum on the voting system on 5 May is going to be rather less than riveting.

It’s not just that the issue itself – whether or not to drop the first past the post system for Westminster elections and replace it with the alternative vote – is technical and not at the front of most voters’ minds. Even campaigners for the “yes” and “no” camps appear to lack all conviction.

Last week, the “yes” camp plumbed the depths of desperation when one of its official spokespeople tried to appropriate the forthcoming royal wedding for the AV cause. “We will put all the arguments, but around the wedding it will be a coming-into-summer, more optimistic, more of a yes mood,” a “campaign source” told the Guardian (which for some reason thought this risible banality warranted a front-page story).

This week, the “no” camp sank even deeper, with an official launch at which its key argument (picked up by the Sun) seemed to be that AV would cost a shocking £250 million, mainly because councils would have to buy expensive vote-counting machines. The press conference subsequently degenerated into a catty exchange about whether “yes” or “no” had the hotter celebrity endorsements.

The real problem is that very few people even among the campaigners for “yes” and “no” are for or against the alternative vote as a matter of principle.

There are a few in the “yes” camp, among them the journalist John Rentoul and the Labour MP Peter Hain, who think that AV is a good thing in itself because it would ensure that every MP received more than 50 per cent of the vote. (AV retains single-member constituencies from first past the post but voters mark their ballot papers "1, 2, 3, 4 ..." in order of preference instead of placing an “X” next to the name of their favoured candidate. If no candidate wins more than 50 per cent of first preferences, the second preferences of supporters of the last-placed candidate are distributed, and so on until one candidate has more than 50 per cent of votes.)

But most supporters of the “yes” campaign are there either for reasons of political self-interest – most analysts believe that the Liberal Democrats would win more seats under AV than under FPTP – or because they see AV as a step towards a more proportional system of representation.

AV itself is not PR. Indeed, it could, and probably would, yield results even more disproportionate than first past the post – and no serious supporter of PR argues otherwise. But AV can be used, in conjunction with regional top-up seats, in a PR system, which is what the late Lord Jenkins advocated – he called it “AV-plus”— in the report of his Independent Commission on the Voting System in 1998. Many in the “yes” campaign, among them the constitutional campaigner Anthony Barnett and the Guardian newspaper, think that a vote to change to AV would open the door to further changes.

I really don’t buy this argument: I can’t see any reason whatsoever to expect that we won’t be stuck with AV for the long term if we vote for it in the referendum – and so, as a supporter of PR who thinks that AV is in many respects even worse than first past the post, I’m going to be voting “no” on 5 May.

Not that I’m happy with my bedfellows. The “no” camp is dominated by self-interested Tory and Labour big-wigs who back first past the post on the grounds that they believe AV would damage their parties’ prospects and that a “no” vote on 5 May will damage Nick Clegg. Hardly anyone in the official No to AV campaign is prepared to make the best principled argument against AV – that it is not proportional – for the simple reason that hardly anyone in No to AV supports PR.

Hence the hogwash at the No to AV launch about how expensive AV would be – which will no doubt be followed by groaning about how complicated AV is, how it would spoil the fun of election night and sundry other irrelevancies.

All of which is a crying shame, because how we vote in elections actually matters – and the referendum will determine whether we are saddled with a system even worse than the one we’ve got now. I'm hoping that the cretinous exchanges of the past week will prove an aberration. But I'm not putting money on it.

Cross-posted from Gauche.

WE'RE ON!

The House of Commons has thrown out all the Lords' amendments to the bill on the AV referendum, so it looks like 5 May is a date for the diary. My thoughts on yesterday's official launch of the No to AV campaign to come here shortly.

UPDATE WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON The Lords has now reinstated the clause to make it necessary for a "yes" vote in the referendum to win 40 per cent of voters to succeed. A similar threshhold scuppered devolution to Scotland and Wales in 1979 ... so this could be serious if the to-ing and fro-ing between the upper and lower houses isn't successfully resolved in the next 24 hours.

UPDATE THURSDAY MORNING Oh well, so much for all that. We're now back on track for a 5 May referendum.

CELEBS GET LOST

Nick Cohen is suitably withering about the launch of the pro-AV campaign on the Spectator blog:

I once vowed never again to mock celebrities who endorse political campaigns as if they were advertising two-for-the-price-of-one offers in supermarkets. But today’s announcement that the Yes to AV campaign has recruited Helena Bonham Carter and Colin Firth is testing my resolve.

It is not that I believe that celebrities should keep away from politics. They have as much right as journalists to express an opinion – indeed, when they argue for artistic freedom or libel reform they are more committed and more knowledgeable than most reporters are. But the Yes campaigners decision to propel Bonham Carter and Firth forward, along with Tony Robinson, Richard Wilson, Eddie Izzard, Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, John Cleese, Billy Bragg and Martin Bell is not an attempt to use thought-thorough expertise for a good cause, but a transparent manoeuvre to avoid debate.
 
The first calculation is that the public are fools. Glamour sways the plebs' minds and determines their votes. Let us hope they are wrong on that.

The second calculation is that when presented with a star, most journalist will go weak at the knees and forget to ask hard questions. If you doubt that I am right on that, try to imagine John Humprhys demanding to know of Stephen Fry or Joanna Lumley why they thought that AV would deliver “fair votes” when Lord Jenkins’ commission on electoral reform found that AV could lead to even more unrepresentative parliaments than we have now. Or Jeremy Paxman pounding Colin Firth to a pulp as he asks again and again why voters should trust him, when he all but apologised for urging them to vote Liberal Democrat at the last election?

The worst of it is that the Yes campaigners are offering us actors because they dare not present Nick Clegg to the electorate. AV is what the Deputy Prime Minister wants. The referendum is the great concession he received from David Cameron to justify his misbegotten alliance with the Conservatives. But he has become so unpopular as a result of that alliance, he will not appear in plain view and argue for his beliefs like an honest man.

TOSH IN THE GUARDIAN ON VOTE REFORM

It was hardly a surprise that the Guardian came out for the alternative vote on Friday –

The alternative vote is only a small and, arguably, imperfect advance … but it is also a development of huge political significance that is indispensable if the creaking and tainted system of Westminster politics is to be reinvigorated. It offers the chance of change to voters who are crying out for it…

– it has made pretty much the same point before (just as unconvincingly) several times over the past few months.

Rather more surprising was the way it reported the latest on the referendum campaign. On one hand, its second story on its front page was the pro-AV campaign’s frankly asinine attempt to portray the referendum as somehow connected to the royal wedding:

"We will put all the arguments, but around the wedding it will be a coming-into-summer, more optimistic, more of a yes mood," a campaign source said.

You what?

On the other hand, on the inside spread devoted to the campaign it repeated just about every bit of hype the “yes” campaign has been trying to spread about itself while portraying the opponents of AV as old-fashioned, reactionary stick-in-the-mud squares.

Thus the “yes” campaign’s operation was described as

“’Anarcho syndicalist’ – it is fissiparous and proud that, just as it has few politicians as its public faces, it has 17 regional offices, 50 phone banks and 150,000-odd activists, it says, and will be closer to the electorate than the establishment. It is thought to have around £2m in funds which has enabled it to hire digital campaigning experts … and a marketing agency.”

By contrast, the “no” campaign was portrayed as

“based in London with a core team of 20 full-time staff and then more regional organisers … They are not as resourced as the yes campaign , nor will they have so many celebrities, and you can expect green campaigners to focus on their chair, Rodney Leach, who … is a climate change sceptic.”

OK, this tosh was only in the sidebar to the main piece (and doesn’t appear to be online) – but surely the Guardian can do better than this?

CLEGG SHOULD LIE DOGGO ON AV – DENHAM

The Guardian has a spread on the alternative vote today, on which more over the weekend. For now, some choice quotes from shadow business secretary John Denham in an interview for the paper's website by Andrew Sparrow, also published today:

Denham suggested Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems should take a low profile in the alternative vote campaign to avoid damaging its chances.

"There is a real issue of judgment about whether some people's image is so bad it would actually damage the AV campaign," said Denham, a strong supporter of electoral reform.

"Too close an association between the AV campaign and one single political party, the Liberal Democrats, won't help the overall campaign," he said.

RIGHT DOWN TO THE WIRE

The redoubtable Mark D'Arcy is keeping track as we sleep on the progress of the voting referendum bill through the House of Lords.

The bill – which includes controversial proposals for reducing the number of MPs in the House of Commons – must be passed next week if the referendum is to take place on time, so opposition peers are attempting to extract last-minute concessions. According to D'Arcy:

Labour's price for agreeing a timetable could well be further concessions. Perhaps on reviewing the number of MPs in the Commons, perhaps on the permissible variation in the size of constituencies – or perhaps on other matters, like cutting the number of ministers in proportion to the cut in the size of the Commons.

WHY WE SHOULD VOTE DOWN AV

Antony Brown, Thomas Lundberg, John Cox and Brian Wilson have a pithy letter in today's Independent:

The alternative vote will not solve our democratic problems. Electoral reformers should vote against AV in the forthcoming referendum.

AV is not proportional and can exaggerate landslide elections. In 1997, for example, it is probable that Blair would have had a majority of over 200 with AV. It exaggerates the tendency of our current system to direct voters into a two-sided competition. Smaller parties, such as the Greens, are no more likely to be elected than today.

AV is likely to derail reform. If AV proves durable, another disproportional system will be entrenched for decades, as it has been in Australia. If it does not, then the next step is far more likely to be back to the familiarity of first past the post than forward to a proportional system. Where there's a cultural tradition of FPTP the political reflex is to gravitate back to it. Two western provinces of Canada re-implemented FPTP after using AV. To believe that AV must be supported to sustain the momentum of reform appears misguided.

AV gives minority parties greater electoral leverage but without democratic accountability. A minority party can barter with larger parties, urging its supporters to give the larger party their second preferences in return for policy concessions. Smaller parties should be heard, but transparently and after receiving a mandate.

Let's not fall foul of this referendum's false dilemma. The question on the ballot reads: should AV be used instead of FPTP Most reformers would say: "No, PR should."