Warning: what follows is an inevitably biased and—hopefully—entertaining chunk of information about the upcoming UK electoral referendum. Although I’m clearly pro-AV, my main argument to you would be to vote on Thursday, whichever system you believe in. But do so on the basis of investigating each system yourself and don’t make this the UK’s most expensive ‘Nick Clegg approval rating’ generator—he doesn’t matter and this isn’t about him. Note: if you’re unsure about what AV entails, CGPGrey explains using jungle animals.
There’s a lot of misinformation out there regarding the upcoming voting system referendum. The anti-Alternate Vote (AV) lobby suggests scrapping First Past The Post (FPTP) will be the end of the UK as we know it, leading to dead soldiers and babies and roughly fifty billion new immigrants PER DAY. Meanwhile, the pro-AV bloc seems set on telling everyone that it’s the solution to all the UK’s ills and the Best Thing Ever. Both viewpoints are bollocks, since FPTP is a crap voting system and AV is also a crap voting system.
But hang on. FPTP must be OK, because we’ve used it for years. Surely the UK would be utterly stupid to use a system that’s utterly rubbish?
To be fair to FPTP, it works brilliantly when you need a clear winner for something and only have two candidates. It’s also simple: whoever gets the most votes wins. Yay! The problem occurs when you’ve more than two candidates, as is usually the case in modern party politics. You could feasibly have three candidates in a four-way race get 24.9% of the vote each and the winner take-all with the backing of a tiny fraction of more than a quarter of the voters. Run that scenario nationwide in an election and you have a parliament that doesn’t remotely resemble what the voters voted for. (In 2005, Labour got a working majority in the Commons with 35.2% of the vote. And the same’s just happened in Canada, with the right securing a working majority with 39.6% of the vote.) You also have millions of ‘wasted’ votes in areas where a strongish candidate is always going to win, regardless of whether the second-place candidate polls pretty highly. Now multiply that across, say, an entire county, and you could have a party taking every seat, despite a third or more of the constituents voting for a sole other party.
The imbalance in the UK’s 2010 election wasn’t this severe, but it was also pretty clear that what you voted for and what you got were very different indeed.
Democracy, UK-style. (View larger)
Of the major parties, the Lib Dems were hit incredibly hard by FPTP, actually losing seats in the Commons despite gaining in terms of overall vote-share. That, frankly, is bonkers.
But the Liberal Democrats have turned out to be arseholes, and so more of them would have been awful. PHEW! FPTP SAVED US!
Not so fast. 149 Lib Dems plus 188 Labour MPs would have made for a stable and very different (possibly progressive) coalition government to what we have now. While the Lib-Dems might still have sided with the Tories, they’d have felt far less pressured into doing so, since the Conservative lead wasn’t nearly as strong as it was via FPTP. It’s likely more of the party’s liberal ideas would have come through, rather than merely taking the slightest edge off of a Thatcherite Tory government. And even if the coalition would have been the same (i.e. Conservative senior/Lib-Dem junior—something more likely with AV numbers, although under AV Labour would have secured almost as many seats as the Conservatives, making brokering a deal with the Lib-Dems possible), the balance would have been totally different. It would have been conservative in nature, but not Conservative, and it would have been far more liberal.
Ha ha! But I’m a rabid right-winger, and I want to smack liberals in the face with my fists. I WIN!
Ah, no. See, UKIP should have got about 20 seats and ended up with none at all, since none of its candidates came first in any constituency. Even the BNP, on the basis of its vote share, should have had a dozen seats in the Commons in 2010. The election in 2010 didn’t screw the left or right (or the authoritarians or liberals)—it just screwed all the small parties, as elections always do in the UK.
Yeah, but the BNP are real nutters, so, again, PHEW! FPTP SAVED US! YAY!
One man’s scum is another man’s love-juice. Personally, I trust UKIP about as far as I can throw it, but I know plenty of people in the UK think otherwise—after all, a million people or thereabouts voted for the party. As for the BNP, I’d be happy if they all quit tomorrow and ironically emigrated to sunnier climes, but I’d still fight for the BNP’s voters to have the right to representation, because that’s the fundamental basis of democracy. It’s insane that over 550,000 voted for the BNP, but there’s no representation in the Commons. (By contrast, the Greens got one MP from 285,000 votes; the SNP got six MPs from 491,000 votes, and the DUP got eight MPs from 168,000 votes.) Also, I imagine after five years of BNPs doing piss-all in the Commons, their candidates wouldn’t do so well five years later—politics has a tendency to right itself when it comes to major extremism.
Righto. So AV will fix all this, yeah?
No. The Alternate Vote is not a form of proportional representation—it doesn’t assign seats in the Commons that relate to the vote share. Instead, it has you rank candidates you’re interested in, in order of preference. If a candidate has a majority, they win the seat. If not, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are reassigned to the remaining candidates, according to ballot preferences. This keeps going until there’s a winner. This ensures that candidates have to fight for a wider remit than just the core vote and it also means parties that tend to be people’s second choice have a shot at winning the odd seat they otherwise wouldn’t.
That sounds complicated.
Can you count to four or five?
Yes.
Can you rank things in order? Say, if you were given an apple, a chocolate bar, a chicken sandwich and a live squirrel, could you place them in order of preference regarding what you want to eat right now?
Yes. I’m not stupid.
Quite. In which case, you’ll be able to deal with AV should it win in the referendum. If you only care about one candidate, you can still use a cross; if you care about more than one, rank them in order. There’s more complexity behind the scenes, in terms of figuring out who’s won a seat, but that’s not your problem.
OK. That sounds good to me, but my MP told me that AV is worse than the spawn of Satan and Piers Morgan.
Is your MP a Tory?
Yup.
Tories hate AV (YouTube), for a number of reasons, but primarily because it may slightly reduce the number of Tory seats (the same for Labour, too—AV generally affects larger parties in this way), will increase the likelihood of coalition government, and because it’s not in common use worldwide on a national level.
And the UK doesn’t use it!
Well, apart from House of Lords elections (for hereditary peers), by-elections in Scotland and Northern Ireland, mayoral elections, and the majority of political party leadership battles. Even the Conservative leadership election is a multi-round ballot reminiscent of AV, which David Davis won the first round of. With a direct FPTP election, David Cameron might not be the leader of the Conservative party right now. (Frankly, that, if anything, is one of the best arguments for FPTP, but it’d make Cameron look stupid if he yelled “I SHOULD NOT BE HERE!”) Also, as this chap notes (YouTube), just because a system isn’t in widespread use, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing.
But if it will increase the likelihood of coalition governments, I’m out. This coalition is awful.
But that doesn’t mean coalition in and of itself is bad. Coalition is essentially a means of getting more voices heard, of compromise. Interestingly, we for the first time in a long time have a government backed by more than half of voters, although, clearly, they didn’t specifically vote for coalition. Still, the potential for talk and cross-party ideas rather than reactionary politics (do the opposite of what the other guys say) is a mature, grown-up means of dealing with politics and democracy in general. Coalition in many countries that, frankly, do a lot better than the UK politically, can also lead to a degree of continuity, since one of the partners stays in power after an election but a new partner comes in. This greatly reduces the kind of thing that happens in the UK, where the Conservatives spend a term or two reshaping the country to their ideals, only to be swept from power by Labour, who spend a term or two reshaping the country to their ideals, only to be swept from power by the Conservatives… and so on.
What are you, some kind of liberal?
Yes.
Oh. But even so, you must admit the coalition is AWFUL, even for you, Mr. Liberal-face. I heard it on the television, so it must be true.
*sigh* OK, what did you think of the last government?
That was awful too.
What about the one before that? And the last pre-Labour government—Major’s one?
Oh, I hated them. All awful.
And they were all elected by FPTP and were majority governments rather than coalitions. Therefore, that we have a poor coalition now doesn’t make AV bad any more than a poor government in previous years would make FPTP bad.
OK, so voting AV would annoy the big parties. I’m up for that!
Not quite.
Eh?
Labour’s (mostly) pro-AV.
But I thought you said Labour would get a reduced number of seats? Why are Labour pro-AV?
Two reasons. First, Labour’s now in opposition, playing reactionary politics—the party has a tendency to say the opposite of whatever the Tories say. (Labour had over a decade to implement electoral reform, remember—indeed, it was a pledge and a promise to the Lib-Dems before Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 made the entire idea of coalition redundant to Labour.) Secondly, Labour knows AV in and of itself will make little difference to the chances of a Labour victory in 2015—it will hurt the Conservatives way more than it will hurt Labour, and the Lib-Dems will be lucky to secure half the number of votes the party got in 2010. If AV does win, watch Labour suddenly become very silent on the prospect of further reform of the voting system that would negatively impact the party to a much greater degree (such as proportional representation).
So if AV won’t make any odds to the Tories and Labour, why should I vote for it?
Because it’s a first step. You have two choices in the upcoming referendum:
- Retain the status-quo (First Past The Post), and kill the argument for electoral reform stone-dead for at least a generation.
- Vote for a change (AV) that might keep the argument for electoral reform alive, leaving open the chance of something better in the future.
So you’re asking me to vote for something I don’t really care about, for a wooly chance that something better might happen at some point in the future, which would make voting fairer in the UK and mean my vote would actually count for something?
That’s it in a nutshell, yes.
