With their most impeccably Sir-Humphrey like condescension, the resident experts on Parliamentary procedure and Whitehall wonkery at UCL's Constitution Unit have decreed that the public are to be denied the right to change the political system. Despite the fact that we were first promised a referendum in the manifesto of a government we elected on a landslide twelve years ago, we need to understand that these things take time. There might be an overwhelming sense that Westminster is in crisis - that the political system is fundamentally lacking legitimacy and accountability - but still, opening the doors to change is the very last thing that the system is geared up to do. To try to change things would mean introducing measures that might be - how awful! -"controversial" for the unelected upper House or - shock horror! - "strongly contested" by their lordships.
But nowhere in their latest press release do the academics explain why the government could not, if the political will was there, introduce legislation allowing for a referendum on a more proportional electoral system to coincide with a May General Election. Apparently, there is insufficient time for a "public education campaign", despite the fact that explanations of the Alternative Vote Plus proposals of the Jenkins Commission have been in the public domain for eleven years! Nowhere do Professor Robert Hazell and colleagues recognise the depth of public awareness that the present system is fundamentally broken in requiring urgent change. Voters who find that the majority of a miscreant MP is virtually impregnable under First Past the Post are only too well "aware" that the system is in urgent need of reform.
In absolute contrast to the spirit of enthusiasm, optimism and activism that gripped US civic society with Obama's rallying cry of "change", the Constitution Unit are responding in an incredibly British way, in all the wrong senses. The situation is such that we cannot simply rely on the "usual channels" to concoct a pragmatic political fix. Such inertia and resistance to change has led to Westminster's present crisis. This is why figures from Mark Thomas to Stephen Fry, or Polly Toynbee to Hilary Wainwright are backing a campaign to give the voters a say on electoral reform on the same day as the next General Election. Watch out for the launch in Sunday's Observer and sign up to the web-site at http://www.voteforachange.co.uk/ when it goes live next week.
Comments
Michael Calderbank's frustration is understandable But the Constitution Unit is half right - people do not understand the choices that are available - ye gods, not even the journalists who are writing about 'electoral reform' get it right. There should be a referendum at the general election in which people can vote for a fixed-term period for debate after which people will be given another referendum to choose between systems. During the fixed-term period, a large and representative convention cd be established to examine all the options and to make recommendations
It strikes me as a rather odd suggestion that a referendum on PR should be held concurrently with a general election under First Past the Post. If there were majority support for PR - which is likely - then you'd potentially have a majority (Conservative) government elected under a system that the voters had rejected, and which could stay in power for the next five years - so that we might not actually get an election under the new system till 2015! That's madness, isn't it? Hardly a way to restore confidence in the legitimacy of Parliament.
Surely, if the system is broke, the time before the next election is the time to (begin to) fix it. Stuart Weir's suggestion above is not a bad alternative. Another might be to offer an additional choice - alongside the PR question - about whether new elections should be held (say, one year later) under the new system, if the majority opted for it. Or again, you could even potentially hold an election based both on both FPTP and AV+ running concurrently, although you'd have to reduce the number of constituency MPs first. Then, depending on what the result of the PR referendum was, you could take the results under the voting system that was chosen. That would be a neat way also to bring home to people how ludicrously unfair FPTP is; e.g. under FPTP, you might have a large Tory majority but under AV+ no party would be remotely near to an overall majority. This latter solution wouldn't of course work under the ERS's preferred option of multi-member STV, though.
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