The Prime Minister has put a change in the voting system to some form of proportional representation, squarely on the political agenda.
This may be down to a principled support for electoral reform, or it may be just an early bid for the support of the Lib Dems, nationalists and the Green Party in the next ‘hung’ Parliament, where current polling indicates that Labour will be without a majority. Either way, this will be a divisive debate within the Labour Party where a significant number of MPs are viscerally opposed to change, not least the Chancellor of The Exchequer.
All voting systems have advantages and disadvantages. Our Ango-Saxon voting system (I call it that because, overwhelmingly, it is the system used in the English-speaking nations) has served us well. Delivering, for the most part, majority governments for the last century.
The demand for reform is a matter of great importance, but to a very small number of people.
When we last tested the matter in a referendum in 2011, the result was 70% for keeping the current system, as against only 30% for changing it.
Critics complain that this result was secured on a relatively low turnout of only 42% of the electorate. This reenforces my point: it just isn’t a matter of importance to most voters in their busy lives.
The second criticism is that we weren’t really offered a ‘proper’ PR alternative in the 2011 referendum. We were only given the choice of sticking with the current system or adopting the Australian variant, where you register a second choice, which will only be counted if the winning candidate when first preferences are counted, secures less than 50% of the votes cast.
The problem is that there is any number of PR systems of mind-boggling complexity. The joy our Anglo-Saxon system is that everyone understands it: the candidate who got the most votes, wins.
In proportional systems the votes go into a ‘sausage machine’ to be crunched by the d’Hondt formula (and that is the simplest of the schemes) and out comes a result which nobody quite understands.
The notion that we might have an informed debate in which voters might choose a new system, defies credulity.
The principal criticism of our Anglo-Saxon voting system is that it disproportionately rewards the winning party, at the expense of losing parties, particularly the smaller ones. The converse is that proportional systems do the exact opposite: The winning party finds itself short of a majority and has to negotiate coalitions with the smaller ones. That support comes at the price of policy concessions to the smaller parties, for which few votes were had. A typical example of this is Israel, where a largely secular electorate is governed by an administration that always contains ministers from the extreme religious parties, because they are always necessary for the winning party to secure coalition partners in order to command a parliamentary majority.
The process of forming a coalition after an election can take months. And when the policy programme of the new administration has been negotiated and published, it isn’t a manifesto on which any of the voters cast their ballot.
My advice is stick with what you know.