Why I will vote Yes to AV

Why on earth am I intending to vote Yes in the AV referendum?

I ask myself this because on electoral reform I have not always been what you might call a usual suspect. Rather the reverse. I’ve spent the whole of my adult life – as a campaigner, a councillor, and a party hack – working out how to win with first-past-the-post (FPTP). As a system, I like it. It’s nice and simple. You turn out more of your vote than anyone else does and you win. Er, that’s it.

It has other advantages, too You only need to concentrate on very small numbers of people to make it work, which means an economy of resource. It keeps things simple for the electorate; all they need to do is put a cross next to the person they want to vote for. By ensuring that there are always a certain number of ‘safe’ seats for each party it helps to maintain a certain continuity in parliamentary personnel. It delivers stable government, it excludes extremes and the lunatic fringe, and everyone knows pretty much where they are with it. Don’t they?

This was more or less my view for many years, and I only changed it very gradually as a result of thinking about other (related) issues. Investigating the representation of women in legislatures worldwide, for instance, led me to find that a great many countries were using proportional representation (PR) in one form or another without sliding into extremism or instability, and that their electorates appeared to be more than capable of  understanding what they were doing when they voted.

But there was also the apparent contradiction of defending one system inside the Party and another outside it. Labour parliamentary candidates are effectively selected using the alternative vote (yes, I know AV is not proper PR, I’ll get onto that in a minute). After a while I began to wonder why I was constantly explaining to constituency parties that this selection system meant that the outcome would be more of a consensus whilst insisting that the wider electorate should stick with a method which ensured that in the majority of cases the winner was supported by only a minority of those participating.

And the more I thought seriously about the nature of democracy the more I came to think that perhaps some uncomfortable changes needed to be made. One of the things about democracy is that, even in its most conservative forms, it constantly changes and develops. The Athenians would not understand what we do now as bearing any relation to their democracy, yet we identify with them far more than with, say, the absolutism of the Persians. A hundred years ago all women and most working people were excluded from the franchise, yet now an 18-year-old manual worker has the same voting rights as her employer. Democracy is never finished. It’s always reasserting and reinventing itself to meet new challenges and expectations.

And democracy in the UK is still very young. The franchise was only extended to 18-21 year olds in 1969, and in Northern Ireland universal suffrage at all elections was not finally achieved until 1973. What’s more, FPTP is not in itself an historic part of our democratic identity, and the only elections for which we now use it are the English and Welsh local elections and the Westminster parliament. For everything else – Scottish and Welsh parliaments, European elections, Scottish local elections, mayoral elections, the London Assembly and all elections in Northern Ireland – we use some form of PR, despite the fact that there still seems to be a view that the electorate would find it too complex to cope with.

Yet people understand and deal with much harder things all the time. They fill in the most fiendishly complicated forms if they think there is some benefit to them at the end of it. They play complex games for fun, and argue endlessly about the finer points of popular issues. Some of us (though not, obviously, all match officials) even understand the offside rule. Why, therefore, do we imagine that people who are perfectly capable of  voting tactically on X-Factor or Strictly are too dim-witted to write the number 2 next to their second choice of politician?

Democrats need to learn to trust people. Democracy in the UK has not developed from the bottom up – it has been conceded, inch by grudging inch, by an establishment which has seen each slow and painful extension of the franchise as threatening in one way or another. Now we need to move the debate on from who should vote to how they should do it. Certainly FPTP has merits, but are they the merits we need for the 21^st century? And should we hang on to it simply because it’s what we’ve always had, or because we believe it benefits us in some way?

I think not, and therefore AV must be a step forwards. It isn’t PR, but it does allow people more accurately to express their views. It isn’t revolutionary, but it does recognise that perhaps a participatory democracy is about more than just a cross on a ballot paper. I don’t pretend that it is a cure-all for our democratic ills – it won’t for instance, do much to improve the diversity of our public representatives – but it is at least a start in some respects.

Of course I fully understand why many Labour members will be voting No next year. As I said at the beginning, I share their affection for first-past-the-post, and its familiarity makes it hard to ditch. But affection and familiarity cannot be the principal determinants of an electoral system, and if I can see that change would enhance the electoral process and start us on the next stage of our democratic journey I ought not to cling to the status quo simply for my own comfort. So I shall be voting Yes on 5 May.