Fixing Britain’s Broken Democracy
We are told that part of the reason Leave won the referendum is that many people, especially those at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, felt that their views were being ignored or dismissed by those in Westminster. Brexit was their attempt to say “hey! Our views matter too. Take us seriously”.
If you want to know why people felt this way look no further than our utterly iniquitous electoral system. First-Past-the-Post is probably the worst form of democracy available. By ensuring that minority parties have almost zero chance of winning in any constituency, it entrenches two party politics, producing a result that bears no resemblance to the way the nation voted as a whole. 2015 was a particularly gratuitous example. 3.8 million votes for UKIP yielded just 1 MP, while 1.5 million SNP votes produced 56 MPs. No wonder people feel their views are being ignored.
So what to do about it? Caroline Lucas argues that we should embrace proportional representation (‘PR’), where the number of representatives a party has is proportional to the percentage of the vote it receives. This option is intuitive but it comes with two substantial drawbacks. First, PR requires the abolition of the constituency system, which most people appreciate as it gives them access to an MP who understands their local community. And secondly, it makes it difficult to un-elect specific individuals, especially when they are high up their party list. This cuts away at accountability. In my view therefore, a system based solely on PR would not be a good alternative.
These issues (and many others) were considered between 1997 and 1998 by the Jenkins Commission, a group led by former SDP leader Roy Jenkins tasked specifically with selecting the best electoral arrangement for Britain. The solution they came up with, which is called AV+, remains, in my view, the most attractive proposal so far.
The ‘AV’ in AV+ stands for ‘Alternative Vote’. Under this system, instead of being asked to select just one candidate (which encourages tactical voting) citizens are asked to rank candidates in order of preference. At the count, the candidate with the fewest first preferences is removed and his supporters’ votes recast in accordance with their second preferences. This process is repeated until one candidate has more than 50% of the vote. The great advantage of this system is that people don’t feel the pressure to ignore minority parties which they might otherwise prefer for fear of helping a disliked candidate (e.g. “a vote for UKIP is a vote for Labour”). This matters. The current political parties are like monopolies operating within a closed market. They have little incentive to reform. Removing the bias against minority parties would be like injecting some fresh new start-ups into this market. They might succeed, they might fail, but either way, the increase in competition would ensure that standards rose across the board.
The ‘+’ element of AV+ is where the proportionality comes in. MPs selected by AV make up just one part of the chamber (say 70–80%). The rest of the chamber would be populated with MPs selected by proportional representation using voters’ first preferences. In this way, the final make-up of the House of Commons would more accurately reflect the politics of the population as a whole. Might this lead to more coalitions? Yes, but is that necessarily a bad thing? I would argue that the Lib-Con example suggests not.
It is important to note that this is not the system which was put to the public in the 2011 referendum. That was AV only. Had the proportionality element been included, the result might have been very different.
With all of this in mind, if we want to respond to the resentment that contributed to Brexit, re-engaging with the question of electoral reform would seem like a good place to start.
As ever, I like to leave you with a quote:
“If we looked back to our history, we should find that the brightest periods of its glory and triumph were those in which the House of Commons had the most complete confidence in their Ministers, and the people of England the most complete confidence in the House of Commons. The purity of representation was the only true and permanent source of such confidence.” William Pitt ‘the Younger’
