A legitimate alternative?

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This week, after nearly 13 years of feet-dragging, the Labour government will give MPs the chance to back plans for electoral reform.

Their choice, to be made on Tuesday, is between the long-established first-past-the post (FPTP) system, and the prime minister’s proposed model of an alternative vote (AV). Should AV win favour, then Labour has promised to hold a referendum should it win the next general election.

First-past-the-post is much maligned in some quarters, and the government has been heavily criticised for failing to act on its pre-1997 promise of votes on electoral reform. However, FPTP’s potential successor, the alternative vote system, hardly seems to have enthused MPs, with opposition parties suspicious of a late-in-the-day attempt by Gordon Brown to cosy up to reform-hungry Lib Dem voters.

“A deathbed conversion,” dismisses Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg. An attempt to “fiddle the election system”, says David Cameron. And for the prime minister, credibility as a champion of electoral reform is hard to claim as he unleashes his grand plans just months before a general election. His case has hardly been persuasively made. At last week’s liaison committee session he left Tony Wright, a keen constitutionalist, looking less-than-convinced as he argued that a new electoral system was a way of repairing the “discredited old system” of hereditary peers and rotten expenses.

Why, then, would any MP consider supporting the move to AV? Those in favour of a shift in the electoral system settle on one word: legitimacy. AV requires a candidate to secure 50 per cent of the vote before they can add the letters MP to their name. They can claim, without contention, that they have been elected by the majority of their constituents. At present, over half of the 646 seats in Parliament are occupied by MPs who do not command majority support in their constituency, which is hardly a good basis to demand the status and standing that they would hope to take to Westminster. Indeed, a number of MPs speak up for their constituents with the backing of sometimes a third or even less of their constituents.

“MPs tend to over-glamorise the relationship with their constituency, giving it an almost mystical significance that isn’t there,” argues Professor Patrick Dunleavy, chairman of the LSE’s Public Policy Group. “AV goes some way towards that. It is a potentially revolutionary way forward in giving legitimacy to MPs.”

For candidates, this would represent a change to their campaigning strategy. The need to secure a vote, either first or second choice, from over half your would-be constituents, presents a new challenge to those hoping to represent them at Westminster. No longer could an MP rally their immovable tribal vote – instead a little more care will have to be paid to the minority parties also standing for election.

“Under first-past-the-post a ‘marmite’ candidate can still be elected even if they don’t secure half of the votes in their constituency,” explains Martin Linton, a Labour MP and a member of the all-party group on electoral reform. You couldn’t afford to be a love-me-or-hate-me candidate under AV, he says. “It’s a different discipline – you would have to appeal to over half of the voters in your constituency.”

Candidates will have to pay more attention to what the other parties are saying. Take a look at the recent mayoral elections in London where a supplementary vote system was operated. While Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone were both unlikely to break into the other’s core voting bloc, both made repeated proclamations of their environmental credential in an effort to win over the second choices of would-be Green Party voters. No longer can an aspiring politician discard a voter for being a dyed-in-the-wool Green or UKIP voter – the opportunity to win a significant number of second preference votes could not be missed. “Politicians will have to pay attention more, taking on less of a tribal but more of a rainbow approach – they will essentially be trying to unite people,” says Linton.

The use of the word ‘rainbow’ will have the AV-haters, who say that AV favours the least offensive candidate, grinding teeth. “It penalises the independent-minded, and boosts the centrists, the dullards, the mediocrities, the lobby fodder,” wrote the outspoken Conservative MP Dan Hannan last week.

Lewis Baston, director of research at the Electoral Reform Society, disagrees. “AV requires more proactive candidates who would listen to more people,” he argues. “To take an example, not all people would agree with Ann Widdecombe’s politics, but they would respect her independence more than they would the views of an indentikit or inoffensive MP who was in a safe seat.”

Professor Dunleavy shares Baston’s view. “AV will breed the type of candidate who wants to win a majority of votes rather than a sectarian vote. Candidates can no longer just say ‘well my tribe is bigger than yours’, but instead will have to show that they have the ability to pull coalitions together – rather than just sabotage and attack their opponents,” he argues. “AV will very quickly see the tribal candidate taking on someone with real star quality and broad appeal – someone like Ken or Boris – and this will make all candidates shake up their act.”

Critics worry that the preference list could lead to the ‘donkey vote’, where a disinterested voter lists the top three names on the ballot paper. Australia, which has an AV system, has experienced this problem, but it should not be forgotten that Australians are legally bound to vote.

Lord Rennard, who in his former capacity as chief executive of the Lib Dems is considered the strategic brain behind the party’s election gains in the 1990s and 2000s, told The House Magazine that AV would “undoubtedly bring about a change in constituency campaigning methodologies, which for many years rarely changed, as the Lab-Con swingometer made famous by Bob MacKenzie showed how ‘uniform national swing’ largely determined how vote-share changes resulted in changes in seats between the Labour and Conservative parties”.

So how would this change in methodology affect the electorate? Firstly, AV would inevitably spell the death of tactical voting. “The campaign tactics based on bar charts illustrating hypothetical levels of party support, target letters to potential tactical voters, identifying and publicising named tactical voters would be largely redundant,” Rennard explains.

There could be more coalition-building between two parties on the ballot paper, but no more could a party urge someone to vote for them just to defeat someone they didn’t like.

“Many by-election campaigns have been dominated by arguments about ‘which two horses are in the race’. This would no longer matter,” Rennard continues. “Parties would have to campaign on the relative merits of their candidates rather than simply emphasising who the contest is between. The two parties most in contention in a seat would have to appeal to supporters of other parties by more than simply ‘you can’t win’ arguments.”

In turn, say the AV supporters, this would bring a more positive aspect to the poll. If the electorate knew that their second choice would make an eventual difference, they would be less inclined to believe their vote is wasted – and don’t forget that relentlessly popular TV shows like ITV’s X Factor have given them plenty of training in the art of AV voting.

“Labour supporters in Somerset could put number one by the name of their Labour candidate and number two by their second preference,” explains Lord Rennard. “Similarly Conservatives in Newcastle could show their support for the party of their first choice without ‘wasting their votes’.”

Of course, Rennard also knows that in both cases that second choice could well be Lib Dem, and despite the third party’s professed disappointment at Brown’s late conversion, there is also an acceptance that AV is a step in the right direction.

But would the Lib Dems really be the chief beneficiaries? Certainly wooing their vote would be key for the other parties. For example, in 1992 roughly two-thirds of Lib Dem sympathisers switched their votes to the Tories compared to one-third to Labour, a statistic reversed in 1997. What these results show is that those incumbent MPs fearing a huge shift in the make-up of Parliament should keep calm.

The need to win the Lib Dem second choice vote may be crucial, but AV is still very much two-party dominated. It is not impossible that, on occasion, the Lib Dems could start from third and end up securing a seat on second preferences. But by and large the mathematics at Parliament are unlikely to change dramatically – another reason why those against AV argue that it is an essentially pointless shift.

Winning 50 per cent of the vote will require more work from a candidate as they seek to reach out further than their natural supporters. If it seems that the immediate benefits go to the voter, that, surely, should be the target of a Parliament in disrepair. .