Its been a while since I managed to marshal a sufficiently coherent and in-depth response to a political, cultural, economic or other event to justify committing thought to virtual paper. However, with the recent local elections shoving UKIP into the spotlight as the current boat-rocking-phenomena, now seemed a reasonable time to poke holes in our electoral system.
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Britain operators on a 'first past the post' (FPTP) system for the majority of its elections. This is a relatively simple system, you break the country down into districts, everyone votes, and the person with the most votes in each district wins. There are various alternatives, the most commonly touted of which is some form of Proportional Representation (PR). In a simple PR system everyone would vote, and then parliamentary seats are divided up on the basis of what percentage of the vote each group achieved. Before diving in to the advantages and disadvantages of each system, I want to take a step back and suggest the potential lineage and intentions of the two systems.
First Past the Post is clearly all about local representation. It is designed for a Parliamentary system where Members (MPs) are there to represent the interests and views of specific geographic locations. Although Party-Politics has wrapped its tendrils around our elections, the local nature of British elections still allows for Independents, 'single issue' local candidates and exceptional local representatives to cross party and ideological boundaries to secure electoral victories. Anecdotal evidence wise I quite happily voted for a local Labour MP who spent a considerable amount of time in and around the constituency on the strength of his local commitment, despite loathing the direction the central New Labour government was heading in.
On the other hand PR systems are designed with national party politics in mind. It aims to ensure that communities and groups that are not geographically concentrated are not marginalized or ignored. In a Parliament such as Britain (650 seats) a party would need only around 0.154% of the national vote to get a seat, more than enough to ensure that all manner of 'minor' parties can make their views and ideas known. Possibly as an intentional side-effect PR systems are also much less likely to deliver overall majorities, leading to coalition governments. Ultimately this limits the power of party leaders and mandarins (by forcing compromise) but also limits the dynamism and purpose with which a government can pursue its policies.
I'm going to take a slight detour now, and bring in my current pet-dislike; Political Parties.
Over the decades and centuries of British political life the flow of opinions, convictions and ideas has reversed, at some point it may have looked something like this;
Local franchised community > Member of Parliament > Political Party
The MPs took their cues (and got elected) on their empathy with, and ability to defend or promote, the ideas and interests of their constituency. MPs with similar agendas then banded together to form proto-political parties, with the support of various interest groups and noted individuals who shared similar ideas. The important thing here is that the Party itself is a function of people sharing the same ideas - not the origin of those ideas.
In today's world we have the exact opposite:
Party ""Think-tank/Policy Committee"" > Political Party Whip > Members of Parliament > Public
In effect the role of MP has changed, they are no longer there to take our opinions and run with them, they are there to sell the views of the party intelligentsia to the public. These think-tanks are in turn tiny, isolated, ideologically motivated groups, largely populated with upper class graduates, who have very little in common with a representative cross section of society.
This, combined with the nearly unassailable position our FPTP system has allowed the established political parties to form, means that one of the most horrendous cliches of our time really does seem to be true - the political class has hijacked our political system. For all intents and purposes democracy in western states with strong political party structures is dead.
To illustrate this point I'm going to introduce a bit of basic electoral maths.
At the local elections UKIP gained around 23% of the vote. Lets say they build on that, and at the next election they get 25% of the total vote. Let's also assume, for the sake of ease, that the Lib Dems continue to implode as a political force. UKIP isn't a geographically concentrated movement though, its pretty spread out across England (not so much in Wales and Scotland). So, let's say they get 25% of the vote in every single constituency.
In any given area either Labour or the Conservatives will be the dominant force, or, at worst, they will be closely tied (Safe and Marginal seats respectively). So each seat will play out something like this:
Randoms, independents, Lib Dems and Monster Raving Loonies: 10%
UKIP: 25%
Labour: 30%
Conservatives: 35%
The conservative and Labour votes will bounce around (50% or more in very safe seats at the expense of the other) but the stronger of the two will always come out ahead of UKIPs 25%. That means, at the end of the day, that UKIP will fail to get a single MP elected, despite 25% of people voting for them. In a worst case scenario you can actually get this number up to 49% of people voting for them, and still no representatives (every single seat is split 49/51 with the 51s shared out between Labour and Conservatives). [On reflection this is actually even worse than it looks on the surface of it, the national vote would be 25.5% each to Conservative and Labour, vs 49% for UKIP - who still get no seats!]
So, (I hear you cry) why don't we use proportional representation! All our woes will be cured! On that basis (and using my numbers above), we'd end up with something like 228 Conservative MPs, 195 Labour MPs, 162 UKIP MPs and 65 randoms. A coalition would need to reach 326 seats for a majority, suggesting the possibility of a UKIP/Conservative alliance, or even a minority government with UKIP agreeing to support on domestic policies. This is a very different position to the one we are likely to get given FPTP, and one which may seem to better represent the views and opinions of the voting community.
However... (no surprises here),
PR has one, fundamental, problem which I consider crippling; it puts even more power in to the hands of the political parties. In most forms of PR the various parties submit a list of candidates, and as the party gains votes it gets seats for the people on the list. Unfortunately the ordering of that list is then down to the party itself. So guess what? All the party apparatchiks and leaders are at the top of the list. At this point it becomes virtually impossible to shift the top echelons of the political parties. Even with only 1% of the vote (about 330,000) a party would still get 6-7 seats, and these would inevitably go to the party leadership. It also undermines the likelihood of a link between an elected representative and a given constituency or area. If elected officials are chosen on the basis of national proportions, there is no real link between a candidate and area of which they are eventually dubbed the 'representative'.
(I'm going to make a passing point here about Single Transferable Vote - this looks good on the face of it, but 'preference ranking' is often a disguised form of voting for a party.)
Just to make matters worse for the local representative, lets say you apply to be a local independent in a PR system. Your thinking goes - if I get a huge majority of people in my area to vote for me that should be enough right? Well.. not really assuming a 65% voter turn out, and a total voting population of 46 million, you would need 70,840 votes to each 0.154%, the threshold for 1 seat. Lets say your really... REALLY good. So good in fact that every single person in the geographical area which used to be your 'constituency' under FPTP votes for you (bucking the trend of a 65% turnout). Unfortunately that still may not be enough; because of the population imbalances throughout the country only 313 of the 650 constituencies have enough electors to get a local candidate up to the threshold for 1 seat. If the 65% turnout is assumed across all constituencies than no single area is big enough to get someone elected. (The largest bloc is the Isle of Wight with around 110,000 voters).
Solutions?
I'm going to present only one possible (and as usual fairly radical) solution to this mess in any detail; abolish the overlap between central government and local representation.
In the current system a MP is meant to be both local representative and through his party affiliations a salesman/supporter for the current ruling clique (also known as the Cabinet). Aside from the obvious conflicts of interest that are likely to arise from being responsible for both national policy and local interests, this focus on supporting and belonging to a party only reinforces the flow of ideas and control outlined above.
If, instead, MPs were elected to the House of Commons as local representatives, and Cabinet Ministers were elected entirely independently of this (i.e. you can't be both an MP and a Minister), then some of this tension would be dissolved. The electorate would then pick both its local representatives (as in the current system), and its ministers in presidential style elections. The Prime Minister would lose his ability to reshuffle Cabinet (and with it a hefty chunk of power), and cabinet would lose its ability to run rough-shod over the House of Commons (since MPs would stand a better chance of being elected on local issues).
There is even the chance this would lead to a more ideologically diverse Cabinet. For example the public could elect a "Conservative" Foreign secretary and Chancellor but a liberal or Labour Home Secretary and Pensions Secretary. With Ministers ensured a five year term in office they would be freer to pursue long-term (and potentially painful in the short term) policies, without the risk of being ditched for political reasons, and without the ability to simply be reshuffled into another role their survival as a politician would depend on being able to convince the country, at the end of five years, to put you back into the same role for another five years.
The back-up plan, if all else fails, is to demolish political parties altogether.
> Remove party logo's on ballot papers (you get your name, that's it).
> Ban the publication of party/candidate lists
> Ban the use of party logo's, symbols or slogans on candidate's election materials and websites.
> Ban the whip in any way shape or form.
In effect a candidate can say what policies they support, they can even (if they want) copy the manifesto of a political body like the Labour party. But an elector will actually have to engage with that candidate and their election materials to find out who, and what, they support. No more just ticking the box next to the right logo!
Happy Trails
/Z
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