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Electoral Reform: A Significant Change?
One of the flagship policies of the Liberal Democrats going into the recent election has been electoral reform, favouring proportional representation (P.R.), in which the number of votes for a party is directly reflected in political power. Not only a requirement of the highly democratic values of the Lib-Dems, this would effectively double Liberal seats in parliament. The current voting system in Britain is a ‘first past the post’ arrangement where the party which can secure 326 seats in the House of Commons can pass legislation with a majority of MP’s votes. The unelected House of Lords then chooses to amend or pass on this legislation to the Crown for rubber stamp approval.
After the hung parliament result, Nick Clegg negotiated electoral reform as an integral part of a coalition government with the Conservative party. This took the form of ‘Alternative Vote’ (A.V), and a democratically elected House of Lords. If this legislation is passed, the next time you fill out a ballot paper you will have to give a numerical preference to all MP candidates standing in your area. As far as government is concerned, A.V. will make very little difference to the constitutional running of the House of Commons. There will still be constituency MPs and governments will still only be formed when they pass the 326 post. Proportional representation it is not.
If A.V. is implemented the largest difference it will make will be political. The Conservative and Labour parties will suffer, largely to the benefit of the Liberal Democrats, who would usually be the second choice for supporters of both the other major parties. Reforming the House of Lords into an elected body has been raised as an issue again, but since this has been a political agenda for many parties over the past century and has yet to be implemented means that this is one of the more idealistic reforms. The House of Lords is meant to represent a body of unelected professionals that can debate free from political point scoring and corruption, acting as an important component in legislative oversight. As democratic as a P.R. House of Lords may be, this quintessential part of British politics could be lost under current government plans.
There is no real measure of how A.V. would have affected the recent election results because, in our current ‘single vote’ system, the second and third preferences of voters are not recorded. So, though far from proportional representation, at least A.V. is an easy to swallow move for the better representation of British voters. It does not necessitate any drastic reform to the constitution or running of government, retains the stability of the ‘first past the post’ system preventing fringe groups from seizing power in a landslide, and dilutes the mono-representative centralization of power inherent to our current ‘single vote’ system. Great.