On 10-11th May a minority of Labour MPs fought fiercely to scupper a possible Lib-Lab alliance and - lest we should forget - to scupper PR based on ‘AV plus'. They succeeded.

Perhaps it would have happened anyway, but their actions helped to force a Conservative-led alliance on Britain. Clegg's collaboration with the Tories quite possibly will so erode his party's popular support that a PR Referendum, even if held, might be lost. As Ed Balls has made clear, Britain doesn't do PR.

This makes it all the more urgent today that we build a broad alliance of political support for constitutional reform. The old first-past-the-post (FPTP) system is dead. In 2005, a Labour majority of 55 seats was secured with the backing of only 35% of voters. In 2010, the LibDems won 23% of the votes but less than 9% of seats.

More than a decade ago, Roy Jenkins was wise enough to see the need for some form of Proportional Representation (PR) as the electoral basis for a long-term centre-left alliance. Of course, PR is not the end of the story---Britain's over-centralised political and economic governance system needs far deeper surgery---but PR is a good place to start.

Types of PR

Besides multi-round elections (as in France), there are many types of systems which are more proportional than FPTP. Some are based on a single (open or closed) national list, others multi-member constituencies, and still others single member constituencies with ‘alternative voting'; ie, a form of voting in which voters rank candidates and, when a single candidate fails to achieve an absolute majority, the ‘preference' votes are counted.

These different systems produce different amounts of proportionality: for example, a single national list gets quite close to ‘ideal' proportionality, but has the disadvantage of encouraging the formation of many small parties, sometimes giving the small parties ‘kingmaker' status in forming the governing alliance (eg, The Netherlands, Israel). That is why under many PR systems a ‘threshold' (say 5% of the total vote) is imposed before a party can send representatives to Parliament.

Equally, where the list is ‘closed' (ie, the order in which candidates appear on the list is determined by the party leadership), while the result will be proportional, voters may not get to pick their favoured candidates. In Ireland, which has operated a single transferable vote system using 3-4 member constituencies, the results have not always been very proportionate. In the extreme case, an ‘alternative vote' (AV) system based entirely on single-member constituencies can produce nearly as unrepresentative a Parliament as under FPTP.

AV Plus and Jenkins

For historical reasons, Jenkins favoured retaining the single-member constituency with voters able to rank candidates according to the principle of the AV. At the same time, he recognised that if greater proportionality were to obtain, a proportion of candidates would need to be selected on a list basis. So he proposed what he called ‘AV top up', which is better known today as ‘AV plus'. Under this system, 80-85% of MPs would continue to be elected for the current set of constituencies, although using AV rather than FPTP. The remainder would be selected for ‘top up' seats (specific to a country, a region or a metropolitan area) by means of a second vote given to all voters. In the words of the Report:

The Commission recommends that the second vote determining the allocation of Top-up members should allow the voter the choice of either a vote for a party or for an individual candidate from the lists put forward by parties. They should therefore be what are commonly called open rather than closed lists.

In short, the system of limited top-up Jenkins proposed would not produce full proportionality, but it would be ‘fairer' than either FPTP or AV while maintaining the single-member constituency. Equally important, he proposed an ‘open list' system; ie, the ‘extra' MPs would be chosen by the voters, not by the Party machines.

... and Labour Tribalism

As we know, although Blair initially supported Jenkins, Labour's large 1997 majority reduced the pressure for voting reform. Opposition came from sections of the Labour Party (including cabinet members such as Jack Straw, John Prescott, Gordon Brown and Margaret Beckett), while the Tories strongly opposed any such reform. Although Gordon Brown very late in the day came to favour a referendum on AV (rather than AV-plus as recommended by Jenkins), one must be sceptical about the chances of achieving a favourable referendum result if it is opposed both by the Tories and by Labour ‘tribalists'.

A new politics

What are the implications of failing to reform the system? There are two key points here. First, there is some evidence that FPTP has favoured right-wing politics---in the sense of forcing Labour to aim at winning centre ground constituencies, the home of Mondeo man. Secondly, the politics of single-party majorities is dying.

For many years, it has been clear that electing a Labour (or even a Tory) majority is becoming more difficult. As the accompanying figure makes clear, the trend share of the total vote in general elections won by Labour since 1945 has been falling. Why? For one thing, as Eric Hobsbawm first signalled in 1978, the decline of the industrial working class agency slowed the ‘forward march' of Labour. For another, Thatcher's subsequent assault on the trade union movement in combination with her deliberate promotion of financial over industrial interests irrevocably changed the political landscape.

Nor have successive Labour governments necessarily brought genuine political change; if anything, successive Labour governments have been less radical, succumbing to the centrist imperative of FPTP. Today, there is no lack of issues for progressives ----climate change, fighting poverty, minority rights, a fairer income distribution, to name but a few---but the left is no longer to be found in a single party, and in some cases it is more engaged in grass-roots movements.

A new politics is needed, a politics of coalition building between the different parties, organisation and campaigns across the spectrum of the left. An essential ingredient of such politics is a change in the voting system, a new constitutional settlement which breaks with the smug insularity of those who argue for the unique virtue of age-old British institutions and character. Clegg and his camp followers will be discredited, just as Labour's tribalists have been. Theirs is the language of Thatcher and Sons, a language which must finally be abandoned if progressive politics is to thrive again in Britain.

George Irvin