Following
an e-mail invitation from the Green Party, I headed along to a public
talk at the deceptively enormous St Marys Church in Kemptown, for an
evening titled: "Electoral Reform; Making Your Vote Count".
The speaker was Dan Jelinek, who was discussing the themes covered in
his new book "People Power", a sort of beginners guide to democracy in
the UK.
We started first by looking at what we have, the outdated and
hugely unfair ‘first past the post’ system. The table below shows how
disproportionate the current system was during the May Election:
For the SNP to get 2,426,795 fewer votes than UKIP, but get 55 more seats,
is obviously bananas. And of course Im not saying that I want more UKIP
voices in parliament, this just highlights that first past the post
leaves us with a very unbalanced
distribution of seats.
So what are the other options?
There are many different systems and variations and hybrids that
are used successfully around the world, but I really don’t have space to
go through them now. However, here is a small list of some of the
better ideas and the countries that use them:
- Direct Democracy (Switzerland)
- Single Transferable Vote (Northern Ireland)
- Party List System (European Elections)
- Party List Propertional Representation (Holland)
Although implementing one of these systems in the UK is all well and good in theory,
actually instigating such a drastic change is another matter entirely.
Especially when the only people that can propose such changes are those
in power, and why
would they want to move the goalposts? The rest of the evenings
discussion was focussed on this dilemma.
Electoral change was possible of course back in 2009, when the UK
held a referendum on whether to adopt the ‘Alternative Vote’, an
initiative spearheaded by the Liberal Democrats. Unfortunately, the
Alternative Vote idea isn’t a very good one, and so the
suggestion was wholeheartedly rejected by a huge majority of the British
public.
So what can be done to bring about change? We decided that having
the media behind the idea is integral, as newspapers, tv, and radio not
only shape public discussion but decide what is on the table for
discussion in the first place. Unfortunately, most
of the major media outlets are owned by a small cartel of (Tory
supporting) wealthy and influential magnates, who have no desire to open
up this debate.
I suggested that there has to be a cap on the amount that
individuals and organizations can donate to a political party. With such
a gargantuan disparity in party funding, elections will never be even
close to fair. Not only are David Cameron and many
Tory MPs millionaires, but they receive monstrous sums from donors in
the City, such as hedge managers funds and private equity firms and so
on, which can buy advertising, public relations, strategy experts, think
tanks, etc. For an indication of how money
begets dominance we need look no further than the Premier League.
Councillor Alex Phillips made the point that another electoral
disparity that needs to be addressed is that of gender and ethnic
inequality. Our current intake of MPs are, as usual, mostly white
wealthy men, which is not representative at all of the needs
and wants and concerns of the UK population at large. But how can the
likes of you and me ever hope to break into the impenetrable ‘old boys
club’? We’ve had universal suffrage for over 100 years, and yet the same
old elites still populate the corridors of
Westminster.
The more we hold it up to scrutiny, the less our democracy seems
real. And while tonight’s debate was excellent and thought provoking, I
left with little hope and few tangible answers…
