photo credit: amanky

Shortly after U.S. President Barack Obama was elected, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel gave the following advice: “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.” He was referring to the global economic meltdown, but he may as well have been talking about the current crisis in the UK surrounding MPs expenses. With Parliament in a state of disarray unseen since the time of Cromwell and the public demanding sweeping change, it looks like the door has finally been opened to the kind of major constitutional reforms that have been talked about for years but never acted on.

Chief among the major reforms now being seriously discussed by Parliament is electoral reform – specifically embracing a system of proportional representation. Ever since Labour swept into power twelve years ago, they’ve been promising to change the way we vote.  However, these promises have never materialised; changing the electoral system is a lot less appealing when you’re sitting on a nice big Parliamentary majority. But now that everything’s on the table bar the kitchen sink, (which some MP has already claimed for, boom boom) it looks like the death knell might finally be sounding for our much maligned first-past-the-post system.

It isn’t surprising that Britain’s current system should be facing extinction, since first past the post is, in terms of representing the will of the votes, awful. It allows MPs and governments to be elected with minority support – support that is often no more than a third of votes cast. It leads to swathes of safe seats, where those who vote against their MP do so knowing their party has no chance of winning. In summary, it renders millions of voters powerless and allows the winning party to make a healthy, powerful parliamentary majority from a minority of votes. But is P.R. any better? And what kind of P.R should we have? The answers to these questions may determine Britain’s political landscape for decades to come…

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For a prime example of why this opportunity to ditch first-past-the-post has to be taken, we need look no further than the results of the UK’s 2005 general election, courtesy of a damning report by the Electoral Reform Society. In that election  Labour won a mere 35% of the vote, but secured 55% of the seats and entered the new Parliament with an extremely healthy overall majority of 66. In England, the Conservatives won more votes than Labour but received 92 fewer seats. The Green party won nearly 260, ooo votes. That’s the population of Newcastle. But they got no seats. The UK Independence party won just over 600,000 votes. That’s well over the population of Glasgow. But they got no seats. Of the entire of Europe, the UK government’s share of the vote was the third lowest, beaten only by the mighty nations of Estonia and Lithuania. But then, the UK is the only European country to use first-past-the-post.

Of total eligible voters, 39% didn’t bother to turn up to the voting booth. That’s almost twice as many as the 22% who voted Labour. I think it’s fair to say that such apathy was fuelled in no small part by residents of safe seats realising that there was no point in voting, combined with a recognition on the part of the general population that Labour were going to run away with it. A poor electoral system breeds a disinterested populace.

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But is the question of whether the makeup of Parliament accurately reflects the votes of the people the only consideration behind choosing an electoral system? Sceptics of PR would say no – and a number of reasons could be put forward in their defence. First, there is the common claim that PR almost always results in weak coalition governments that can’t do anything. There are two lies in that sentence, and one truth. The true statement is that PR almost always results in a coalition government. But they’re not always weak, and it’s not true that that they never get anything done. To show why this is, I need only point out that every other European country, aside from France, uses some form of PR. And you know what? I’m fairly sure that there are at least a couple of countries in Europe that aren’t caught in the kind of nightmarish gridlock scenario that PR critics choose to imagine. Take the Scandinavian countries, for example. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland: all use the most proportional and therefore theoretically most weakening model – party list PR.  Yet they are frequently able to form fairly strong two party coalitions and judging by their superiority over the UK  in almost every socio-economic statistic going, I’m assuming that they manage to get quite a lot of stuff done.

Moreover, the UK is not America. If the United States adopted PR, then chances are you would probably see a screeching halt to any legislation coming from Congress . This is because there are vast ideological extremes between the Republicans and the Democrats. Moreover, both parties are viciously partisan. A PR system for the House of Representatives, for example, might well result in extreme gridlock. But the same isn’t true for England. A Labour-Liberal coalition, for example, would not agree on everything but would still share a lot of common ground. Even a Tory-Liberal Coalition would find some-thing to agree on, even if that something began and ended with a mutual dist ate for ID cards.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in the weak/gridlock/coalition argument lies in its distaste for democracy. Supporters of this criticism are essentially saying: “If  representing the will of the voters more accurately will lead to a weak, gridlocked government, then we must make sure that the voters aren’t more accurately represented”. In other words, strength of government is taken to be an equal consideration, at least, to respecting voters’ wishes. This is really problematic for a democracy. I mean, the word democracy literally means “rule of the people”. If strength of government is your main concern, then by all means start vouching for a system of governance other than democracy – Plato’s philosopher king has always been a favourite of mine  – but don’t expect to get away with making this argument in the context of fair democratic representation.

Another criticism of PR is that it leads to parties doing shady backroom deals in order to form a government coalition. The most prominent supporter of this argument in recent days has been Conservative leader David Cameron, who justified his party’s opposition to electoral reforms on the following grounds:

Proportional representation takes power away from the man and woman in the street and hands it to the political elites. Instead of voters choosing their government on the basis of the manifestos put before them in an election, party managers would choose a government on the basis of secret backroom deals

Now it’s true that PR does, to some extent, take power away from the people. But only to the extent that you can never realistically have a government that involves every single party. If you compare PR to first-past-the-post, however, you soon see that Cameron’s talking cobblers. For example, imagine the following electoral scenario: three parties each gain 30% of the vote. Under PR, this might well result in two of those parties doing a shady “backroom deal” to form a government, leaving the third in the dark. In this scenario, 60% of the voters wishes have been satisfied, but 30% have had power “taken away from them”. This is arguably not an ideal situation, but it’s a lot more ideal than first-past-the-post, which, as you will recall, gave us a government in 2005 who’d only won 35% of the vote.

Moreover, it’s not like the third party in my scenario completely lost out. They still would have received seats in Parliament in rough proportion to the 30% they won, as opposed to first-past-the-post where many of their votes may well have been lost to the  injustice of “winner takes all”. So when David Cameron talks about PR “taking away power from the man and women in the street”, it’s impossible not to laugh at the irony of his defense of a system that does more to nullify the choice of your average voter than any other model in existence.

A final criticism of PR which you don’t often hear put forward – but is, ironically, the one that has the most going for it -is that it often involves ridiculously complicated voting methods that leave the electorate bemused and confused. Again, this really depends on which system of PR you’re talking about. Some are simplicity itself, some require a little more thought, and some defy an easy explanation. This criticism, however, is perhaps the only one aimed at PR which has real weight. The fact is, a democracy isn’t worth its name if the electorate don’t know what their vote means. If you know who you want to vote for but have no clue how your vote will be weighed, are you really legitimately exercising your right to vote in the first place?  Controversial, perhaps, but worth thinking about, at least when it comes to a comparison of competing PR systems.

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Proportional representation is not without its flaws. But the fact remains that many of its critics are making arguments that either fail to stand up to scrutiny or else vastly underrate a crucial aspect of any electoral system worth its salt: that it represents the will of the voters. At the end of the day, there are two irrefutable facts. One is that first-past-the post is an appalling system whose continued survival in the UK for so long is genuinely shocking. The other is that PR, for all its alleged faults, is a vast improvement on it. This by itself is enough to justify some kind of electoral reform. However, some PR systems are less flawed than others. Thus, a general discussion of PR can only get you so far; at some point you need to engage in the fun task of comparing the systems in existence and what they bring to the table. And that’s exactly what I’ll do in part 2.