Leaving aside the oddly-Stalinist sounding "Democratic Renewal Council" (you can just imagine them calling for "one person, one vote" before revealing that the person with the vote will be Gordon Brown), a weaker approach is hard to imagine."BBC political editor Nick Robinson said the prime minister's statement will not endorse a change of voting system nor any particular system but it will call for a debate on whether the electoral system should be changed and which new system could be adopted. It will not set out a timetable for any change.
Our correspondent said Mr Brown chaired a meeting of the new Democratic Renewal Council - a group of ministers - which agreed to consider moving towards the so-called alternative vote or AV system in which voters could list their preferences rather than simply voting for one candidate as now."
The Alternative Vote is not a proportional system. It's sole benefit is that it may confer some additional legitimacy on the winner of each seat. (In Alternative Vote, the winner must be judged to not be the worst candidate by over 50% of voters).
It does not get rid of safe seats. It does not empower voters. It does not allow voters to continue to support their party whilst rejecting a specific candidate. It does not result in a parliament that reflects the wishes of the people.
If that wasn't bad enough, Brown isn't even proposing a timetable (that nice Mr Clegg has one he could easily use). With substantial proportions of both Labour and Tory parties opposed to any sort of electoral reform, no timetable is an excellent way to ensure the debate drifts on until everyone gets bored, we have a General Election and Cameron drops the whole thing.
All sounds like typical Brown, doesn't it: come up with a solution that totally fails to fix the problem, then go about implementing it in a completely half-arsed way.
More on this from just about everyone but, for starters, how about Wouldn't it be scarier, Mark Reckons, Jennie Rigg, Liberal Vision, Anthony Hook, Duncan Borrowman.
2 comments:
At any other time I would agree, and yet after the BNP success this is the worst time to bring up PR. Never mind that they wouldn't get in under STV, that subtlety is lost on nearly everyone.
AV also has the advantage that it requires no changes to boundaries, and could therefore be implemented in time for the next general election.
The issue with AV you didn't mention, it's often forgotten but it's what led me to support PR in the first place, is geographical imbalances.
FPTP is argued to give a roughly fair two-party system, skewed to the larger party but plenty for the smaller one. Well, so it does in the UK because of the way the votes are distributed - it doesn't always elsewhere.
But here it grossly distorted the way the two parties were represented. Roughly - inner city and the north, all Labour, rural outer suburban and the south, all Conservative. Rural and southern Labour voters went almost without representation, so did inner city Conservatives. The distinctive position of being one of these sort of people, quite different from being a Labour-voting sort of person in a Labour-majority area, or a Conservative-voting person in Conservative-majority area was lost.
AV doesn't win it back. If I live on a council estate in a supposedly true blue area party of the south where all the MPs around for miles are Tories, no I don't feel I'm adequately represented by the over-representation of Labour MPs in the inner cities and industrial north - they don't know and can't speak for the particular problems I face. Nor do I think "my MP" is someone I value and can trtust tyo speak for me in the way those who stress the individual constituency link of FPTP and AV say. This is where I came in, that's my background.
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