Electoral Reform? - Making Your Vote Count

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We started first by looking at what we have, the outdated and hugely unfair ‘first past the post’ system.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…