Keeping a sense of proportion over genuine electoral reform
Oct 1 2008 Agenda
Electoral reform and first past the post – what’s in it for the Tories? Chris Game launches the debate.
Here’s a quick test, especially for any Conservatives at this week’s conference. Which future Conservative leader, shortly after the turn of the century, delivered the following speech apparently advocating electoral reform?
‘The present system has clearly broken down. The results produced are not fair to any party, nor to any section of the community. All they secure is fluke representation, freak representation, capricious representation.’
No, not Cameron. His Oxford tutor does recall him writing an undergraduate essay arguing the case for proportional representation, but, as the potential victim of this incriminating slur confidently observed, “I’ve got the essays, and he hasn’t”.
There is a clue in the concluding epistrophe ( yes – epistrophe! ) or emphatic repetition, few recent leaders of any party being renowned for their mastery of rhetoric. The century was in fact the 20th, the date 1909, and the future leader that rhetorician supreme, Winston Churchill.
Churchill spoke then as a Liberal.
However, as a recent Conservative Action for Electoral Reform (CAER) newsletter noted, his enthusiasm for electoral reform was genuine, lifelong and principled – to the point of having, as Prime Minister in the 1950s, to be forcefully dissuaded from the policy by his more calculatingly partisan cabinet colleagues.
Being any kind of electoral reformer in this country can be discouraging, but being one in the Conservative Party must resemble the workaholic George Bernard Shaw’s view of a perpetual holiday – a good working definition of hell.
Small wonder that CAER’s fringe meeting at this year’s conference was billed as ‘a light-hearted topical take on elections’. Anything more earnest, even with ‘refreshments available’, could easily see the reformers talking quietly amongst themselves.
Which is a shame, because they’re missing the chance to commemorate an event that might have transformed permanently the whole culture and conduct of UK politics: the publication, almost exactly ten years ago, of the Jenkins Commission report on changing the voting system.
The report stemmed from a 1997 Labour manifesto pledge to appoint an independent commission that would recommend a more proportional alternative to the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system for the House of Commons, which would then compete with FPTP in a national referendum.
The first part of the pledge was fulfilled. The commission was established, chaired by Lord (formerly Roy) Jenkins, then a Liberal Democrat peer. Recognising that its only hope of success lay in producing some compromise system grudgingly acceptable to both pro- and anti-reformers, the commission did precisely that. Its solution was not popular, especially with MPs – unsurprisingly, given that any change would lose many of them their seats. For Labour MPs especially, the FPTP system that had just returned 419 of them suddenly seemed much more attractive than when, just six years earlier, it had delivered their party’s fourth successive General Election defeat.
The referendum part of the pledge, therefore, was first postponed, then abandoned by a Prime Minister careless of the public cynicism induced by such blatantly self-serving duplicity.
The Conservatives, opposed to any reform both in principle and practice, were right behind the Government here. They could hardly be accused, moreover, of self-interest.
After all, Labour had just achieved, at their expense, a record Commons majority of 179 with nearly a million fewer votes than John Major won in struggling to his majority of just 21 in 1992. If you didn’t want to change a system so biased against you that it produced that kind of Churchillian ‘freak representation’, you might be stupid, but hardly self-serving.
To outsiders, that verdict summarises the party’s general attitude to electoral reform. It is six years now since the then party chairman, Theresa May, challenged Conservatives about their being seen as the nasty party. But to electoral reformers, they were and are the stupid party, and I suspect there are plenty of voters who, for their political leaders, would prefer nasty to stoopid.
Chief stupidity must be the party’s opposition to the “additional member” (AM) systems of proportional representation introduced for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, specifically to prevent majority control by a dominant party, which in both regions at the time was Labour.
Under AM systems, electors get two votes: one for a constituency member elected in traditional FPTP style, the other for a party. The so-called additional members are allocated so that the final sizes of the party groups match their share of the party vote.
With the Conservatives in third place, at best, in both Scotland and Wales, assemblies elected solely by the FPTP system that they themselves backed could easily have wiped them out almost as completely as at the 1997 General Election, when they won no seats at all outside England.
Indeed, in the first Scottish Parliament elections in 1999 they didn’t win a single constituency seat. Their very presence in this new national legislature owed everything to the 18 ‘additional’ seats that their 16 per cent of the party vote earned them.
Similarly in Wales: one constituency seat plus eight additional members enabled them, as in Scotland, to become the third largest party at the Lib Dems’ expense – a pattern repeated in the two subsequent sets of elections.
At Westminster too, any more proportional system would greatly have boosted Conservative Scottish and Welsh representation. From Scotland, they might have had up to 10 MPs in 2001 and 2005, rather than one, and perhaps eight from Wales, instead of the current three.
Nationally, though, the Conservatives polled so poorly in all three General Elections from 1997 that no electoral system could greatly have increased their representation.
But next time, things could be very different for the stupid party.
The way FPTP works nowadays is so systemically biased towards Labour that it could easily prevent David Cameron forming a majority government in 2010. Yet most Conservatives are simply in denial, believing or hoping that revising constituency boundaries will have levelled the electoral playing field.
It hasn’t – not remotely.
We know the outcome of the boundary review. It hasn’t reduced the over-representation of Labour-dominated Scotland and Wales by about four and eight seats respectively.
The review’s net political effect in the West Midlands is minimal – one Labour seat (Sparkbrook and Small Heath) abolished, with Lib Dem Solihull having possibly gone Conservative in 2005.
The impact nationally is also minimal. If, in 2005, both main parties had gained exactly the same percentage vote, Labour would have won, on the old boundaries, 114 more seats than the Conservatives.
On the new ‘reformed’ boundaries they would still win 96 more – enough for a small overall Commons majority.
For the Conservatives to gain an equivalent narrow parliamentary majority, they would need to win 10 per cent more votes than Labour.
The fact is that unequal constituency sizes cause far less of the pro-Labour bias than differential turnout – Conservatives and Lib Dems, especially in their safe seats, being much more likely to vote than Labour supporters, and thereby ‘wasting’ far more votes in needlessly large majorities.
This is the imbalance that AM systems redress with their additional members, which is where the Jenkins Commission’s quasi-proportional system should have come in: an AM system with a much smaller fraction of additional members than in Scotland and Wales.
Unlike purer proportional systems, it would not produce constant coalition or minority governments – only when, as in 1974, 1992 or 2005, the electorate itself was fairly evenly split and seemingly undecided. When we voted decisively, as in 1983, 1987, 1997 or 2001, the favoured party would have enough constituency seats to form a government with an effective, but not grossly exaggerated, majority.
In 2010, by contrast, the Conservatives could win, say, a decisive nine per cent more votes than Labour – the exact reverse of the 2001 election – and, instead of winning a Commons majority of 167, like Labour, they might have either to form a minority government or talk to Nick Clegg and his Lib Dems.
The Jenkins Commission’s system would have prevented such a distortion of the popular will. It deserved, and still deserves, more serious consideration – not least from Conservatives.
* Chris Game is lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham.
