Why we need electoral reform

After posting yesterday’s musings it occurred to me that a little bit of explanation might be necessary about why I think our current electoral process needs a makeover.

We currently use the First Past The Post, winner takes all system. Sounds good doesn’t it? A clear distinction between a winner and the losers, a bit like the Grand National. In practice however it is, more often than not, a very unfair system.

Let’s take the 1997 Election for example, when Blair got a whopping majority. In ‘97 it took circa 32,000 votes to elect a Labour MP. I arrived at this figure by taking the total number of votes cast for Labour, namely 13,518,167, and dividing it by the total number of MPs elected, namely 418. By way of comparison it took, 58,187 votes to elect a Conservative MP.

But the real disparity comes with the Liberal Democrats for whom it took a whopping 113,976 votes to get one of their MPs elected. The Liberals took 16 per cent of the popular vote across the country (5.25 million voters) but got less than 7 per cent of the seats. A fair division of the seats based on the popular vote would have given the Liberals approximately 105 seats. By way of comparison, the Labour Party got 43.2 per cent of the popular vote which delivered 63 per cent of the seats available.

Why such a disparity? Because First Past The Post rewards the winner with nothing for those who come in second. What the Liberals do is rack up a huge number of second place finishes across the whole country. For example, in the North of England with its traditional Labour stronghold seats, the Liberals come in second behind Labour because the Conservative Party is regarded in many areas as a bunch of toffs. Equally, however, they also come in second in traditional Tory stronghold areas, like the Shire counties, where Labour is still regarded as a bunch of trade union dominated revolutionaries.

So what I hear you cry, there’s nothing in life for losers! Except that we have a huge block of moderate centrist voters who diligently cast their vote in constituencies across the country and are totally unrepresented. What’s more, many voters are put off voting Liberal because they know that under the current system they have no chance of forming a Government (the two major parties are always quick to point this one out, “it’s a wasted vote”). The question is, what would the Liberal vote be like if they actually had a chance?

The current system is directly responsible for much of our national cynicism about politics. It produces two entrenched camps who squabble and swap power between them oblivious to the need for national consensus. It led indirectly to some of the most controversial policies of the last thirty years like the Poll Tax and the Iraq War. With huge majorities and the whipping system there was nothing to stop either Thatcher or Blair committing to both.

I worry about a hung Parliament in the short term, particularly in terms of its affect on the economy. However, it might just prod either of the two major parties to do what, deep down, they know they should do anyway. Get rid of this outdated and unfair system.

ObamaCare highlights the gridlock in Washington

Much has been written already about the Democratic victory in the House of Representatives on Sunday night over healthcare in America, but I thought one statistic neatly encapsulated the problem that America has with its political system at the moment. All 178 members of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives voted against the Bill.

The American political system is much more fluid than here in the UK. The political parties are little more than loose coalitions which meet once every four years. Politics in the States has therefore always been about building coalitions across the aisle on specific pieces of legislation, which can happen when there is no whipping system as we have here in the UK. For example, it was an alliance of Northern Republicans and Western Democrats, led by Hubert Humphrey, which managed to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction at the end of the Civil War, which granted the vote to African Americans.

But, in America today, the Republican Party is using a form of ‘whipping’ to keep its representatives in line, namely the threat that Conservative Repulblican candidates will be put up against incumbent Republican Congressmen and Senators in primary (one party) elections. The result is that Congressmen and Senators dare not ‘cross the aisle’ to support legislation even if it is in the interest of their constituents. The result all too often is gridlock and pitched battles for votes as seen on Sunday.

The Healthcare Bill is not perfect, but approximately 30 million more Americans have access to healthcare today. Michael Moore the documentary filmmaker (his film Sicko is a hilarious ‘must see’ on this subject) said on Channel 4 News last night that this is only a partial victory, due to the dropping of the publicly funded option (the new system will still be privately administered by insurance companies) describing the Conservative Republican stance as little more than “we’re American, we’ll heal ourselves”.

Despite its flaws this is an extraordinary victory for Obama. It must be remembered that in one stroke he has done what great political fixers like Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the 32nd President) and Lyndon Baines Johnson (the 36th President) couldn’t.