PR: good for the country, good for Labour

By Tom Miller

I don’t suppose any of you will be surprised to see a Compass supporter writing in favour of PR. But I’m going to anyway, because I’m predictable like that.

PR is one of those issues which cuts across the party. Luke Akehurst, who I’m sure would be the first to admit that he stands firmly on the right of the party, is, if I remember correctly, in favour. I can point to a few who are on my wing, or to the left of me, who are squarely opposed.

Denis MacShane is one of those declared opposed. There are many reasons to oppose PR. My first would probably be the fear of damage to the local link between representatives and the electors. But under First Past The Post, this is equally true. The bulk of council wards have more than one member already, and a great deal of these are split between parties in the same sense the multi-member ward would be under PR.

The point I’ve just made (and contradicted) is the only serious worry I’ve ever had about supporting PR.

As you will have gathered then, I don’t have much sympathy for what Denis MacShane argues.

The first point I’d make in response to his is that I think his critique of PR depends a bit too heavily on what is right for political parties, though in fairness, I suppose this is to be expected when one has spent a long time as an MP. MacShane should realise that the most important argument in favour of PR is that the votes of electors actually count, whereas in the current system, only the swing between the two most successful parties in constituency X is really of importance. The rest of us are wasted; our political voice is devalued compared to the swingers.

PR, in short, accurately reflects the population (at least, as far as it is possible to do so). The thing speaks for itself.

I can’t work out why the SDP is relevant to the debate about what PR means to Labour today. More to the point, I can’t work out why being the SDP made them wrong. Obviously, at the time the SDP was demanding PR, it was doing so to break the backs of working class areas and further split down Labour. This would have been catastrophic, and, given the times, I think Labour was right to play tactically, and oppose them. But times are different now.

The SDP getting their way over PR would have broken Labour’s core vote. But I’d argue that a sustained period of the current system is producing the same result the SDP were after all those years ago. Our coalition building, which is what MacShane says must be a necessity. I’ll tackle whether this must be a necessity in a moment, but the effects are in any event clear.

Under FPTP, Labour has shed votes from its course for years, and has now shed many from the centre as well. MacShane also makes a big mistake by pointing his article in a direction which proclaims ‘PR is a plan to do Labour over’. Just look at the effects of FPTP on us, and remember that in fact, this happens to all governments under the current system. As you make decisions, your coalition is bound to shrink if it is not successfully renewed, and it can only be renewed if the material interests of the elements involved are relatively similar.

This leads on to my big argument. MacShane cites the importance of parties being forced to reach out beyond their core constituencies. In my view, core blocs of non-activist support form for reasons. People who live in a similar area might have similar concerns about something that has happened locally. People in poorer areas have a scared concern about poverty, while people in richer ones are likely to be more worried by, say, theft or vandalism.

What about situations where we end up with some constituencies concerned about poor pay or poor public services, and others concerned about the relatively high level of tax they pay?

In such situations, it is clear that there are contradictions between their interests as loose groups. Generally, they cluster together, and, generally, they will do so to oppose each other.

MacShane’s approach means that we continue with an electoral system based not on resolving those conflicts, but dragging them out, and maximising embitterment; the fact that parties try to represent both at the same time means that there is no avenue for the problems of either group to be solved. The demands of each will always be exacerbated by the other, even under PR. But FPTP brings this mutual intransigence into the core of politics by making parties fixated on pursuing a swing vote which consists of roughly three quarters of a person, who lives roughly 10-15 miles or so west of Loughborough (by the way, vote for Andy Reed, swing voter!).

It would be idiocy for me to argue that political parties shouldn’t be going for swing votes. Elections are there for swinging.

But I would vastly prefer it if swing voters existed on both flanks of political parties, rather than just on the opposite side of wherever their core is. I think it’s good that the German SDP, for example, has to yield to pressure from left as well as right. What I wouldn’t like is them not having the option to choose, even if that’s what people in the country want.

The real benefit would be that instead of politicians trying desperately to follow what the disproportionately empowered (alleged) middle-wayers think and believe (which in my view is also bad because it is a path to mediocrity), they would have to persuade people of their values and the values of their movement instead. I always thought, alongside learning, that this should be the main aim of becoming active in politics.

Indeed, the whole point of having political parties is that they think something different to the averaged out population as a whole. They represent certain interests and certain ways of looking at things which are distinguishable from the mean view of the general public.

Them persuading people to join their camp rather than following them into indeterminate nothingness can only be a good thing.

The net effect would also be good from a democratic point of view; fewer UK voters would be disenfranchised by the fact that they don’t exist as the average person.

I would like that. Plus, you get an added bonus; not only are people on the whole less neglected in terms of having their politics more accurately represented; they will be more accurately represented per se, given the stripping out of the absurdities that must accompany First Past The Post.

The final objection on this kind of grouding is that coalitions are bad. Look. Coalitions happen in First Past The Post. The reality is that sometimes, coalition is the only thing you can do. The general tendency is towards coalitions with parties who hold similar values. So, while electors in the small majority may rightly feel betrayed that their party has joined a coalition, they have far less reason to feel betrayed because their party has abandoned its own values, or the elector’s intended causes, whether in coalition, or outside of it. Of course, there are exceptions to this argument, Germany being the first (but remember Ramsay MacDonald under First Past The Post), and now Israel, which seems to me to be in a very similar situation to MacDonalds government all those years ago.

The final points I want to make are about the extreme right.

Firstly, I happen to think that if the greater proportion of people want someone elected, then right or wrong, elected they should be. I will fight the BNP with all of my soul, but if people want the BNP, we shouldn’t hide behind First Past The Post as a way of keeping the population from expressing itself. If people want the BNP, God forbid, then the BNP is what they should have.

Secondly, in response to Denis MacShane’s point about the far right, another option to allowing them to simply be elected would be what Germans called ‘die Fünf-Prozent-Hürde’ – that is, the five per cent hurdle. This would mean that the far right would seldom get into parliament, and if they did, their presence would be likely to be short lived.

Thirdly, as Jon Cruddas points out, it is precisely the excessive ‘stretching out’ of electoral reach that Denis MacShane advocates and First Past The Post demands that results in feelings of disillusion on the margins of society, far away from the sociological centre where the parties traditionally try to pitch their narrow tents. In First Past The Post, fascism rears its ugly head to fill gaps left behind by the real life effects of a politics obsessed with the centre. In decent PR systems, there are no gaps to fill.