An Alternative View

Peter Hitchens writes:

"I’m amazed at the apparent enthusiasm for AV among contributors here. The FPTP system, which I much prefer, produces strong governments which can be turned out in a night if they prove unsatisfactory, and compels parties to make coalitions before the vote, rather than afterwards. The reason it currently works so badly is not because there is anything intrinsically wrong with it, but because it is dominated by dead political parties, kept alive by state subsidy, guaranteed BBC access and dodgy billionaires. AV will do nothing to fix any of this. Our constitution was fine before Labour started mucking it up in 1997, and it is being changed to suit the governors, not the governed."

But, real though all of those problems are, the biggest thing of all keeping those parties going is the First Past The Post Electoral system. Without it, at least one of two patriotic, morally and socially conservative parties, one with Labour roots and the other with Tory roots, would always be in government at any given time. Quite possibly, they both would be.

The one with Labour roots would give a voice to those whose priorities included the Welfare State, workers' rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, traditional structures and methods of education, traditional moral and social values, economic patriotism, balanced migration, a realist foreign policy, an unhysterical approach to climate change, and a base of real property for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.

It would give a voice to those who were aware of, who understood, who valued and who drew on the Radical Liberal, Tory populist, trade union, co-operative, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other roots of the Labour Movement, rejecting cultural Marxism no less comprehensively than they rejected economic Marxism, and vice versa. A voice to those who, with Herbert Morrison, had never seen any conflict "between Labour and what are known as the middle classes", and who, with Aneurin Bevan, denounced class war, calling instead for "a platform broad enough for all to stand upon" and for the making of "war upon a system, not upon a class".

It would recognise that we could not deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we knew how many people there are in this country, unless we controlled immigration properly, and unless we insisted that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level. It would refuse to allow climate change to be used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. It would give a national platform and profile to the alliance of the traditional Right and the traditional Left against the neoconservative war agenda and its assaults on liberty at home, including against any new Cold War with either or both of Russia and China.

And it would therefore co-operate as closely as possible with the forces of provincial, rural, protectionist, church-based, conservative, mind-our-own-business Toryism, forces set free by electoral reform from tendencies variously metropolitan, urban, capitalist, secular, libertarian and make-the-world-anew.