Though Cowards Flinch

What reform and how can we achieve it? These are questions which have been asked on this blog repeatedly when it comes to demands for changing the means of electing our representatives. So what impact will be had by Gordon Brown’s announcement that Labour intend to pursue primary legislation before the General Election ensuring a referendum on the Additional Vote system?

Short term electoral advantage seems to be the order of the day, with a sop to the Lib-Dems and a potential wedge between a Tory minority government and a potential Lib-Dem coalition.

Overall, like Sunny, I doubt it will have much effect, though for different reasons. There are good and bad things to be said about most of the proposed systems, but no application of any of them anywhere in the world has been shown to make politicians less corrupt, more inclined to listen to people, less accessible to a business and political elite etc.

It is naive, in my view, to believe that AV will re-establish faith in the current system. It is routinely cited by pressure groups and columnists that the last Labour government was handed a massive majority with only 36% of the vote, but I don’t really see how playing with numbers until someone in each constituency has more than 50% makes the result any more legitimate.

One would think the whole concept of having a first preference will mean that this is the person you want elected; if he or she is not elected, then are you not going to be disappointed? In any case, each MP having 50%+1 of the vote doesn’t increase engagement by the millions who don’t vote, and it won’t increase the legitimacy of governments that act to harm the interests even of those who elected them.

Is anyone saying, for example, that under AV we might not have gone to war in Iraq? The most egregious acts of British democracy are often committed with the full support or tacit acceptance of the Opposition. Will it protect our civil liberties? Not if the Australian SIO Act 2002 is anything to by; despite John Howard’s tight (AV based) majority, this legislation was arguably more punitive than UK law.

So what is the point of the kerfuffle about electoral reform? It is more representative of those who have voted (and in some countries, where it is tied to compulsory voting, more tied to the entire country) but, in that a majority voted for what’s on offer. It doesn’t challenge, however, the processes which shape what is on offer, and as I’ve consistently argued, that is the key to a real democracy. Nor, incidentally, will it change some other side issues like safe seats (touted as correlating to outrageous expenses claims) – there will still be plenty of those.

Many, most recently Ben Bradshaw, have made a great deal out of the ‘crisis of legitimacy’ of British parliamentary politics. The call for electoral reform is usually tacked on somewhere in here, but I think this is a distraction.

Populist issues like individual corruption (or, for that matter, ceding power to the European Union or to quangos) aren’t the core of our undermined democratic legitimacy. It’s because the most important decisions – the ones that have an impact on jobs, healthcare, education, housing, transport and pretty much every other fundamental public issue – are taken on the basis of other considerations inimical to the well-being of the British people.

Policy is at fault here, not the meta-issue of British parliamentary mechanisms.

For the British Labour Party, despite a huge reserve of political capital, and the ever-present aid of an Tory opposition still stigmatized by the arrogance of its eighteen-year rule, policies at odds with what people perceived as its mandate have gradually eroded popular support. As this tide goes out, it exposes a deeply disconnected Labour. This creates a crisis of legitimacy for parliamentary democracy because the illusion of a party, any party, that will stand up for jobs, working people and spotted dick pudding, is shattered.

Faltering Conservative poll leads as their actual policies are discussed should give us pause for thought. Suddenly people realise that no party likely to form a government really speaks for them. Thus arises talk about PR and the majoritarian tyranny of FPTP. Without question, however, this problem will not be fixed by any variation on proportional representation.

The right policies, of redistribution, of intervention in the economy, or reinforcing the social welfare system, might restore the illusion, but the real fault is the inability of the Left to secure structural accountability of politicians to the members of their parties (the sort of thing which might encourage political engagement on the part of the average joe), or of parties to their delegate conferences, and of policy to the mass movement which would lend its life and weight to these things.

Meanwhile, a lack of accountability and the resultant turn towards the establishment-friendly centre attracts exactly the sort of chancers who can accommodate themselves to whatever politics are in fashion, with a side-helping of house-flipping thank you very much.

Barack Obama’s continuing dismal performance surely proves my wider argument, since his presidential campaign managed to whip up a huge movement, only for the realisation to spread that the movement existed on Obama’s terms and not vice versa. American disillusionment has resulted in falling opinion polls, defeats in formerly safe Democratic states and the looming threat of a new Republican Revolution this November, just as continuing disillusionment threatens a Tory victory by default here in the UK.

I’m encouraged, however, that some amongst the Parliamentary Labour Party have begun to take an active interest in the problem. It may be too little too late, but the world doesn’t end with a Tory election victory. Labour in opposition must be stiffened and transformed. I suspect, with a democratic, accountable party and a combative style capable of gathering and sustaining a mass movement to defend our ideas, the legitimacy of our electoral system will return to being an academic question.

(For an alternative, class-based, critique, see Liam’s, “Stay Awake! Electoral Reform is important!”).

Disclaimer. Reading back over this article, I seem pretty down on the idea of electoral reform. I’m not. What really irks me is when electoral form is proposed as some catch-all cure for the problems which people are rebelling against when they dismiss politicians as all the same, all corrupt and end up voting for groups like the BNP, which have a whole army of their own problems when it comes to things like actually showing up to perform the duties of their elected positions.

The only things I specifically have grievances against are Party Lists, of any description, and Open Primaries, for reasons I’ve explained on this blog before. In case anyone thinks I’m being unfair by attacking AV before nailing my colours to the mast, I quite like the Irish Additional Member system, and would favour an expanded, unicameral British parliament that employed this method. But I contend that our problems with the legitimacy of the democratic process is that it is circumscribed by the power of certain groups to challenge the fabric not just of how we think but of the material we use to think with.