I was hoping to write this post later in the week as I am unwell at the moment and off work with food poisoning. I am not saying this to engender sympathy, but simply to point out I regard this issue as highly important.
Living in Yorkshire, I am very annoyed I have a BNP MEP. I don't think we should. The BNP polled under 10% in this region and 8% in the North West. A viewer e-mailed Sky News earlier stating how racist the people of the North West and Yorkshire must be. After all they are the only two regions to elect the BNP. I won't dignify that comment with a response.
There is also a slogan doing the rounds on my twitter feed today. 'Proportional Representation = Promoting Racists.' I replied it was a sweeping generalisation. William Hauge has used this result to argue against PR and so have other bloggers. Everyone is missing the point.
The form of PR used to elect members to the European Parliament is a travesty. It gives too much power to the parties. Someone commented on the blog earlier tonight and said.
I disagree with PR, but if you agree with it, I would argue that any party that gets 10% of the vote should get 10% of the seats on offer.How is that not fair?
The reason why it is not fair is because there has to be a cut-off point. If a party polls 10% in a constituency they should not be elected. Parties like this will hold the major parties who have polled more than three times the amount of votes to ransom. This is not in the best interests of democracy.
What is needed in all elections in the UK is preferential voting. It was used successfully in the European Election in Northern Ireland. It is the fairest voting system in the world. The best practical example I can give you is the situation in Hull.
In Hull, Labour and the Liberal Democrats are at war with each other and they have been for years. The city is divided. Currently the Lib Dems run the City Council. I live in a new housing estate and here very few voters want a return to Labour. When I canvass them I get support, but I always hear the same words: 'Although I would vote Conservative, I am not risking voting for you and letting Labour back in again.' I can't win and never will be able to unless there is a huge Conservative renaissance. Under a system of Single Transferable Vote, local people could vote for me and always have the insurance policy of voting Lib Dem as a second choice. They would be voting as they wanted to, knowing they were not letting Labour in through the back door. This is the only way Conservatives can gain any ground in this city. If I still poll a paltry figure; then so be it, but I may not. I may find voters have the confidence to vote with their conscience. This should also increase the turnout and help engage more people in the electoral process. More votes will count. I know this will work for the Conservative Party in Hull and will work against us in other areas, but this is not important. It will not reward fringe and extremist parties, in the same way the current PR system operates in the European Election.
If you are a democrat, how can you justify first past the post? It enables the Labour Party to have a comfortable Commons majority with just over a third of the popular vote. In 1997 it wiped out the Conservatives in Scotland and Wales. Voting reform is needed. Do not let the election of two BNP MEPs close your mind.
4 comments:
You're right that multi-member Single Transferable Vote (STV) - the system favoured by the Electoral Reform Society - would be much less likely to return BNP MPs and MEPs than the system used for the European election. Interestingly, AV+ - the system that was being touted by Alan Johnson a couple of weeks ago and was backed by the commission chaired by Roy Jenkins at the start of the New Labour government - is more likely to give the BNP a chance, as it tops up the constituency results (generated by a preferential system) with non-constituency MPs selected based on parties' share of the overall vote.
Transferable voting systems asume that the non-BNP vote will combine against it. The evidence is, however, that the BNP are not (in the jargon) "transfer repellent". In Mayoral elections they often get a lot of second preferences whilst at the Euros count there were a number of rejected ballot papers with votes for both the BNP and another party. So the BNP would not be reliant on the raw votes.
And that's before we get onto the question of whether it's compulsory to use all preferences (as in Australia) or allowable to stop short (as in Ireland). In the former case voters have no choice and without co-ordinated efforts by parties to "direct" the vote (harder here when on polling day activists will be focused on getting the vote out, not handing out cards at polling stations to those brought out by law) may well give sufficient preferences to the BNP. In the latter transfers could stop short (or "plump") and thus reduce the threshold.
So don't pin hopes of a simple switch to STV making it harder for the BNP to get elected.
The problem is not so much the system of PR used but the number of members elected by each constituency. Ireland uses 3-5 member constituencies whilst this has the problem that the three member seats often require a political earthquake to change the partisan representation it also means that the threshold for getting elected is high.
Instead the UK uses Euro constituencies of between 3 and 10 with highly variable results. The BNP's highest percentage was in Yorkshire & the Humber, but their percentage in the North West was only their fifth highest, beaten by the North East, East Midlands and West Midlands, but because those three regions have 3, 5 and 6 members respectively it wasn't enough to deliver seats there whereas the North West has 8. (Y&H has 6 but their vote is high there. London has 8 and the South East 10 but their vote and organisation is not so strong in either region.)
(One further thought. Most Australian upper houses use multi-member STV with the requirement that voters must express all their preferences. Because of the large number of candidates there is an option for a voter to allocate their vote to a "group voting ticket" order recommended by the party. The mainstream parties have used the GVTs to maximise preferences against the extremist One Nation party and its offshoots.)
Thanks for the comments.
I certainly do not want AV+. This does pander to the minority parties and does not reflect the views of the majority.
There are still single member constituencies in Australia that make up their House of Representatives. I do not agree with compulsory voting and I do not agree with having to list around a dozen names in order. It is not necessary and is too cumbersome. If we did adopt that voting system, I imagine in the vast majority of constituencies there would only be a need to refer to the second preferences. Labour, Conservatives and Lib Dems in England tend to be well ahead of the rest of the pack - with the odd notable exception. Three way marginal seats are also rare. I don't think this will change much under preferential voting, but it will - as I said in my original post - allow people to vote for a candidate who they agree with in conscience and not allow a candidate in who they fear by the back door.
The voting system that was set up by new labour for the scottish parliament was supposed to stop the snp from ever taking power.
The snp even walked out of the hearings disgusted at what was being proposed.What happened next?
The English are bloody minded too, if you try to stiff them, they'll stiff you back.They will sit and watch you get up to all sorts of shenanigans with the voting system and then hammer you.Forget it.
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