Don't hold your nose on election day. Vote for fair votes.

     When things go wrong in British politics they don’t half go wrong.  The collision near the launch of Labour’s final poster campaign on Friday was a headline-writers gift:  The Car Crash Election.  The final mishap in the worst Labour election campaign since 1983, when the late Michael Foot - a man of great intellect but little popular appeal - led the party to its worst defeat in half a century. Who’d have thought that Gordon Brown, one of Labour’s brightest young stars in 1983, would lead a campaign that compares unfavourably with that? 

   I recall Footie, with his stick and fly away hair, stomping round the country from botched photo-opportunity to heckled speech.  Manfully trying to defend “the longest suicide note in history” as the Labour manifesto was called.  He scarcely seemed to know where he was most of the time, and nor did his aides. But he never lost his dignity.  He might’ve got in a muddle with his microphones, but Footie wouldn’t have dismissed a loyal Labour supporter as a “bigot”, even in private,  and he wouldn’t have testily blamed his staff.    Nor would Foot have abased himself, and demeaned his office, by turning up with the world’s media in tow to beg for Gillian Duffy’s forgiveness.  (One of the explanations for Brown’s “bigot” remark, by the way,  was that he had thought Mrs Duffy had said “f@@king immigrants” not “flocking immigrants” - to which you can only say: that’s a flocking ridiculous excuse.)

    The 1983 general election almost destroyed the Labour Party and the question this week is whether Gordon Brown could finish the job.  I don’t think he will, not least because our unfair electoral system is designed to prevent parties like Labour expiring through natural causes because people stop voting for them.  It props them up like cadavers in a Frankenstein beauty contest of the damned.   In 1983, Labour plunged to 28% of the vote, only 2% ahead of the SDP-Liberal Alliance.  But Labour  ended up with 209 seats in Westminster and the Libdems only 23.  It was a brutal result, which made a nonsense of democracy.    By rights, voters should have taken to the streets, as they did in Eastern European countries where the electoral systems were similarly rigged.   But they didn’t, Neil Kinnock came along, and the rest is history.  

   In 1983, Margaret Thatcher got a parliamentary majority of 144 seats on only 42% of the popular vote -  a spurious mandate which she used to devastate industrial Britain. Thursday looks like being every bit as perverse as 1983, even though David Cameron is never going to win a majority like that. The poll of polls seems to be suggesting a hung parliament with the Conservatives on around 300 or so seats;  Labour coming second with 200 plus;  and the Liberal Democrats having to make do with under a 100 seats, despite winning more votes than Labour.  Any such result will be an outrage.  As someone put it: we can’t go on like this.  I find the alphabet soup of AV, STV, AMS as tedious as the next man - but after this election  something must be done to make this country a democracy. Actually, I suspect that the death knell for the present system tolled mid week when voters realised that that Labour could come third in this election and still win the most seats in parliament.  Never! Never! Never!

     But as the hours and minutes tick away, Labour are telling anyone who’ll listen that the way to achieve democratic change is to vote, not for the party of electoral reform, the Liberal Democrats, but for Labour.  The logic is thus:  If the Tories win, and the Liberal Democrats come second, Nick Clegg will have no choice but to support David Cameron.  It may be a hung parliament but if Labour is third there could be no chance of a Lib-Lab alternative.   A vote for the Libdems, then, is a vote for David Cameron.  Ergo, to give the Nick Clegg a sniff of power, and to halt the Tories in their tracks,  you must hold your nose and vote Labour.  Hasn’t Gordon said that Labour now accepts electoral reform?

    This argument is too clever by half.   For a start, Labour’s promises of electoral reform are generally forgotten the moment they gain power - they promised a referendum, remember, in 1997.  Even if Brown comes second in terms of seats, there is still no chance of a Lib-Lab coalition.  The British people will not accept a party that has been  defeated in an election hanging on to power. Nick Clegg would still have to let David Cameron form a government and, here’s the twist, so would Labour.   Yet, the democratic reality is that Labour and the Liberal Democrats will have an overwhelming majority of the votes cast on Thursday.  In any proportional system Britain would long since have had a stable coalition of the progressive forces of the centre left. 

 And right now, an overwhelming vote for the Liberal Democrats is - in England at least - seems the best way of demonstrating the central point: that Britain cannot be called a democracy so long as the number of seats in parliament bears no relation to the number of votes cast.  

  The time for holding noses is over.  Some Scots will vote  for the SNP to register their discontent on Thursday.  More are likely to vote Liberal Democrat.    This is not 2007, and the issue in this general election is not who governs Scotland, but how to reform Westminster.  Of course,  the vast majority of Scots will continue to vote Labour, as they always have,  especially in the West of Scotland, where hatred of the Tories is the driving force.  I fully respect that.  However, in those seats where it counts, I hope people will at least consider voting tactically for whichever party seems most committed to change. 

    

   We have one chance:  to end of this rotten, corrupt and unfair electoral system, which has deformed our political culture. Which has allowed leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, with inflated majorities in parliament on 43%  or 42% of the popular vote, to push through policies like the Iraq war and the poll tax that the majority of British voters never wanted.  Voters have an opportunity to make themselves heard on Thursday:  Let’s open our mouths and scream. 

Give MPs a proper job.

   Why have members of parliament lost their sense of purpose and self-respect?  Why do so many of them apparently see elected office as a means of enriching themselves rather than improving the lives of their constituents?  The reason is that ordinary MPs in Westminster have very little power: they are in a very real sense a waste of space, superfluous, lobby fodder. Many  have become self-centred careerists, happy to do the bidding of the party whips, provided they get to put their snouts in the trough. 

   We need to make give MPs a proper job, with real responsibility.  There is a fundamental deficiency at the heart of our democratic system which is the source of much of what is wrong in Westminster: the unfair electoral system. We do not have democracy in this country, but elective dictatorship by prime ministers given inflated majorities by a fundamentally unsound and unrepresentative method of voting in general elections.  This allows the executive to ride roughshod over parliament and ignore the will of the people. 

  

  To revive parliamentary democracy we must first of all make parliament democratic.   In 2005, Labour won an overall majority of 66 seats on just 35.2% of the vote. No government in history has rested on a flimsier base of popular support.  In England, the Conservatives won a majority of the votes but Labour won 92 more seats in parliament than the Tories.  I don’t know what you call this exactly, but it isn’t democracy. 

   It’s not just Labour governments that have benefited from artificially inflated majorities.  In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher brought near revolutionary change to Britain - destroying the power of trades unions, privatising state assets, selling council homes - yet she never won more than 43% of the vote.  In Labour’s largest landslide in 1997, Tony Blair won a 179 seat majority on the basis of only 43% of the vote.  And it was very much a personal victory for Tony Blair, who proceeded to run the most centralised and personalised administration in modern times, ignoring parliament - he rarely turned up apart from Prime Minister’s Question Time - and ruling through a cabal of trusted advisers from his sofa in the den of Number Ten. 

   The electoral system is not an abstract issue but a very real cause of bad government.  Consider Iraq, when a million people demonstrated against the invasion and the government faced the two greatest backbench rebellions in Labour history.  Because of his artificial majority, Tony Blair was able to ignore  parliament and the people and launch an illegal  war without a second UN resolution.   Tens of thousands of lives lost, billions wasted simply on the whim of a Prime Minister who seemed to believe that his judgement was based on divine inspiration.  Yet the war would never have happened had the composition of the legislature in Westminster reflected the votes cast in the country at the 1997 and 2001 elections. Tony Blair would not have had a majority for the war because he would have needed the support of the Liberal Democrats and his own backbench to govern.  He would have had to come to parliament and argue his case, as in the Scottish Parliament where votes are finely balanced. 

   Critics of electoral reform say that PR leads to instability.  But we have seen in the Scottish case that a minority government elected on a proportional system can govern very effectively, and above all responsibly.  Alex Salmond has had to bend to the will of parliament on issues like local income tax - an SNP election manifesto pledge which the Scottish government has abandoned because it could not win the support of the house.  That is surely better than a system in which the First Minister had been given unlimited power to get his way.  If the Holyrood had been elected under the Westminster system, Alex Salmond might have delivered a unilateral declaration of independence by now,  even though a majority of Scots oppose separation.  I don’t see how that can be seen as more stable than the balanced and  

  But this isn’t just about Prime Ministers.  Consider the position of MSPs in Holyrood.  In almost every significant vote, they have to examine their consciences and study the issue at hand before they vote.  This is because every one of them  in the governing party knows that their votes matter, and that they could bring down the government.  Similarly, opposition MSPs in Holyrood realise that they can’t simply indulge in for opposition for opposition’s sake.  If they vote against the government they have to accept the possibility that the government might fall and that they might have to step up to the plate. This gives MSPs a clear existential purpose, a profound sense of responsibility as stakeholders in a truly democratic assembly where they and not the executive hold the ultimate power.  

   Westminster will only be reformed when it grasps the nettle of electoral reform.  Tony Blair promised a referendum on the electoral system in 1997,  but after he won a landslide majority he conveniently forgot about it. The two party duopoly is underpinned by the electoral system which locks out minor parties.  The entire focus of politics becomes the need to win the support of some 800,000 swing voters in key marginal constituencies.    Hundreds of MPs in safe seats get a job for life and forget about their constituents. Voters stop voting because their votes don’t seem to count for anything.

    No one can be in any doubt now that our parliamentary system requires urgent reform.  We need openness and transparency at Westminster so that the public can see how public money is spent.  We need more powerful select committees and a reduction of the power of the party whips.  The unelected House of Lords needs to be reformed following scandals there, and the power to set the date of the general election needs to be taken out of the hands of the prime minister of the day.   But before any of these changes can work the balance of power in Westminster must shift fundamentally and irrevocably to parliament and away from the executive.  Only fair voting can achieve this, and spark the revival of democratic culture that Britain desperately needs.

MPs expenses: Electoral reform is the answer.

Why have members of parliament lost their sense of purpose and self-respect? Why do so many of them apparently see elected office as a means of enriching themselves rather than improving the lives of their constituents? The reason is that ordinary MPs in Westminster have very little power: they are in a very real sense a waste of space, superfluous, lobby fodder. Many have become self-centred careerists, happy to do the bidding of the party whips, provided they get to put their snouts in the trough.

We need to make give MPs a proper job, with real responsibility. There is a fundamental deficiency at the heart of our democratic system which is the source of much of what is wrong in Westminster: the unfair electoral system. We do not have democracy in this country, but elective dictatorship by prime ministers given inflated majorities by a fundamentally unsound and unrepresentative method of voting in general elections. This allows the executive to ride roughshod over parliament and ignore the will of the people.

To revive parliamentary democracy we must first of all make parliament democratic. In 2005, Labour won an overall majority of 66 seats on just 35.2% of the vote. No government in history has rested on a flimsier base of popular support. In England, the Conservatives won a majority of the votes but Labour won 92 more seats in parliament than the Tories. I don’t know what you call this exactly, but it isn’t democracy.

It’s not just Labour governments that have benefited from artificially inflated majorities. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher brought near revolutionary change to Britain - destroying the power of trades unions, privatising state assets, selling council homes - yet she never won more than 43% of the vote. In Labour’s largest landslide in 1997, Tony Blair won a 179 seat majority on the basis of only 43% of the vote. And it was very much a personal victory for Tony Blair, who proceeded to run the most centralised and personalised administration in modern times, ignoring parliament - he rarely turned up apart from Prime Minister’s Question Time - and ruling through a cabal of trusted advisers from his sofa in the den of Number Ten.

The electoral system is not an abstract issue but a very real cause of bad government. Consider Iraq, when a million people demonstrated against the invasion and the government faced the two greatest backbench rebellions in Labour history. Because of his artificial majority, Tony Blair was able to ignore parliament and the people and launch an illegal war without a second UN resolution. Tens of thousands of lives lost, billions wasted simply on the whim of a Prime Minister who seemed to believe that his judgement was based on divine inspiration. Yet the war would never have happened had the composition of the legislature in Westminster reflected the votes cast in the country at the 1997 and 2001 elections. Tony Blair would not have had a majority for the war because he would have needed the support of the Liberal Democrats and his own backbench to govern. He would have had to come to parliament and argue his case, as in the Scottish Parliament where votes are finely balanced.

Critics of electoral reform say that PR leads to instability. But we have seen in the Scottish case that a minority government elected on a proportional system can govern very effectively, and above all responsibly. Alex Salmond has had to bend to the will of parliament on issues like local income tax - an SNP election manifesto pledge which the Scottish government has abandoned because it could not win the support of the house. That is surely better than a system in which the First Minister had been given unlimited power to get his way. If the Holyrood had been elected under the Westminster system, Alex Salmond might have delivered a unilateral declaration of independence by now, even though a majority of Scots oppose separation. I don’t see how that can be seen as more stable than the balanced and

But this isn’t just about Prime Ministers. Consider the position of MSPs in Holyrood. In almost every significant vote, they have to examine their consciences and study the issue at hand before they vote. This is because every one of them in the governing party knows that their votes matter, and that they could bring down the government. Similarly, opposition MSPs in Holyrood realise that they can’t simply indulge in for opposition for opposition’s sake. If they vote against the government they have to accept the possibility that the government might fall and that they might have to step up to the plate. This gives MSPs a clear existential purpose, a profound sense of responsibility as stakeholders in a truly democratic assembly where they and not the executive hold the ultimate power.

Westminster will only be reformed when it grasps the nettle of electoral reform. Tony Blair promised a referendum on the electoral system in 1997, but after he won a landslide majority he conveniently forgot about it. The two party duopoly is underpinned by the electoral system which locks out minor parties. The entire focus of politics becomes the need to win the support of some 800,000 swing voters in key marginal constituencies. Hundreds of MPs in safe seats get a job for life and forget about their constituents. Voters stop voting because their votes don’t seem to count for anything.

No one can be in any doubt now that our parliamentary system requires urgent reform. We need openness and transparency at Westminster so that the public can see how public money is spent. We need more powerful select committees and a reduction of the power of the party whips. The unelected House of Lords needs to be reformed following scandals there, and the power to set the date of the general election needs to be taken out of the hands of the prime minister of the day. But before any of these changes can work the balance of power in Westminster must shift fundamentally and irrevocably to parliament and away from the executive. Only fair voting can achieve this, and spark the revival of democratic culture that Britain desperately needs.