The Alternative Vote - July 2010

The publication of the Government’s Constitutional Reform Bill has reignited the debate.  I have already dealt with the issue of fixed term parliaments in an earlier column, so I now turn to the other two principal measures contained in the bill. First, the redrawing of electoral boundaries to ensure that each parliamentary constituency has broadly the same number of voters.

Electoral boundaries have to be redrawn anyway in order to redeem the election pledge to reduce the size of parliament by cutting the number of MPs. It would be foolish, therefore to miss the opportunity to make the system fairer by equalising the constituency sizes at the same time. The current unequal sizes result in it taking many fewer votes to elect a  Labour MP than a  Conservative MP because there are many more smaller Labour constituencies. Indeed, had the vote shares been reversed at the election Labour would now have a majority over 100.

What makes this transparently fair exercise controversial is that, in order to achieve equal numbers of voters, the Boundary Commission will have to cross county boundaries and take less account of geographical features or settlements. I think this is a price worth paying for a fairer voting system. After all, I have never heard anyone express any concern or affection for a particular parliamentary division. I don’t know anyone ever being worried about the constituency that their address fell within.

The second element of the bill is to enable a referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) electoral system next May. AV is the system used in Australia where voters, instead of placing an X next to their chosen candidate, rank them in numerical order to express a preference. If no candidate achieves more than 50% of the first preferences then the candidate with fewest votes is eliminated and the second preference s of voters who voted for that candidate are redistributed to the other candidates, this procedure continues until a candidate gets more than 50% of the preferences.

This referendum is the price secured by the Liberal Democrats for the coalition agreement, and for that reason it must be honoured.  I will campaign for a no vote in the referendum. I think AV is daft. It replaces a transparently simple system where the candidate with the most votes wins, with a system that gives those that voted for the most unpopular candidate a second vote. I just do not understand why somebody who chose to vote, say, BNP, or UKIP, should get their votes counted twice. It is manifestly unfair.