Out of the blue, four constituents emailed me to ask for a meeting with me at Westminster because they were attending a rally, in favour of electoral reform: they wanted an electoral system which awarded seats in proportion to the votes cast for each political party, typically known as ‘proportional representation’ (PR).
I agreed to meet all four of them in Parliament at the same time. We had a perfectly civil conversation but, alas, no meeting of minds. We were proof however, that you can agree to disagree about important matters without any unpleasantness whatsoever.
Typically, I get half a dozen letters or so, each year on this subject. We did, readers may recall, have a referendum on the question back in 2011 (it was the price demanded by the Liberal democrats for entering a Coalition government with the Conservatives). We voted by 70% to 30% to keep our existing electoral system. I remain of the view that it settled the matter for a generation. I am not inclined to reopen the question in what is a crowded political agenda.
There is no perfect voting system. Each methodology has advantages and disadvantages. The principal weakness of our current system is that it often disproportionately rewards the winner, granting them a numerical majority in Parliament despite only getting more votes than other parties, but not a majority of all the votes cast. Equally, I would argue that this is its principal strength: It ensures that, more often than not, the party that got more votes than any other, forms the Government.
The difficulty with more proportional systems is that they tend to lead to permanent coalitions which hand disproportionate power to small parties that supply the governing party with a majority. Israel would be a good example: there the largest party invariably needs to gain the support of minority religious parties to cobble together a coalition. This has led to a whole raft of religious legislation, including sabbath day observance, of which a majority of Israeli citizens disapprove and for which only a small minority vote.
The discipline imposed by our own system is that a party needs a very broad base of support to secure any parliamentary representation whatsoever: they have to be ‘broad churches’ that form a coalition before any election. Continental PR systems however, which strictly reward parties according to the total of votes cast for them, give them the freedom to be more ideologically focussed and exclusive. The focus of coalition building then takes place after an election where parties come together to thrash out an agenda for government that was never put to the voters at all.
With the plethora of complex voting systems where some votes are counted multiple times, formulae are applied, and out comes a result from the ‘sausage machine’ that is difficult to understand, we have, on the contrary, a refreshing simplicity: the candidate with the most votes wins.