Friday 1 May 2015

A Sense of Proportion

"If we’re going to end up with hung parliaments whatever happens, we might as well have representative hung parliaments."

If Tories read Owen Jones's Guardian column, then they might vote Labour as the only party that just about might win an overall majority, thereby preserving First Past The Post. Perhaps they should?

Any system other than First Past The Post would be the death of the Lib Dems, so there is at least that. Their Holy Grail of multimember STV was introduced for Scottish local elections, and their number of councillors went down.

They are entirely a product of First Past The Post, a way of voting against the Conservatives without voting Labour and of voting against Labour without voting Conservative, defined by who and what they are not rather than by who or what they are.

Beyond that, there is no reason to assume that the existing parties would dissolve into the constituent parts that academics assume to exist merely because they do so under the different electoral systems on the Continent.

Most Tories are just Tories, and most Labour people are just Labour people. They would reject the suggestion that they belonged to any wing or faction.

Even those wings and factions could not and would not be separate parties. Ask them. They would be offended at the very suggestion.

And they really do loathe supposedly more similar elements of each other's parties even more they than loathe anything in their own. At the end of the day, your family is always your family.

Both main parties would survive any electoral reform intact, each with vastly more seats than all smaller parties, and the Leader of one or the other of Labour and the Conservatives would still always be Prime Minister. Not worth changing, in that case.

The option of voting for Far Left parties has existed for longer than the option of voting Labour. People do not do it, purely and simply because they do not want to do it.

Some of the Scottish local government wards now cover areas larger than Luxembourg. How is any system other than First Past The Post supposed to represent areas other than the most urban?

Since the transition to unitary local government, we have enough trouble here in County Durham, much of which is not all that rural (although much of it is), with unitary county wards covering what were once three district wards for three villages a mile or two apart, or for three distinct parts of the same town.

The idea of the whole county's functioning as a single unit returning half a dozen MPs by PR is mind-boggling. But compared to our neighbours, we are relatively compact here. Not to mention solidly Labour, which we would not be under PR.

Apart from making the Lib Dems go away, PR wouldn't change a thing in England. It wouldn't change much in Wales or Northern Ireland, either. And it would cut the SNP down to size, which, like making the Lib Dems go away, might be something in its favour, anyway.

Most Labour MPs and activists, all Conservative MPs and activists, big business, and the unions, are totally opposed to any change in the system for electing the House of Commons. For good or ill, that is a fact.

Even if the preservation of First Past The Post necessitated a Grand Coalition. Business and the unions would insist on it, quite possibly by joint action.

But then, there is a certain equality to First Past The Post: one vote, counted once, the candidate with the most votes wins, and every constituent is then the responsibility of the MP, regardless of how they voted.

Proponents of change need to address that.

No comments:

Post a Comment