The chatterers do not hold the key to electoral success

By Tom Harris MP / @TomHarrisMP

Can Labour win under the current electoral system? Well, given that we have won three times in the past 12 years, I would hazard a guess at “yes”.

If some of Labour’s parliamentary candidates reckon we can’t win unless we promise a referendum on the alternative vote on the same day as the general election, maybe they should be examining their own so-called “democratic credentials”.

The ambition of the 34 candidates is truly soaring: “hundreds” of LibDems throughout the country would switch to Labour if we were to hold a referendum on the same day. Phew! That many, eh? Nearly enough to affect the result in … well, a seat, probably.

They propose a “government Bill” to facilitate such a referendum. The only problem there is that such a Bill is very unlikely to succeed. Apart from those Labour MPs who would oppose it (including Yours Truly), the Libdems would be likely to campaign against it on the basis that it’s not precisely the exact system that would most benefit them be most democratic.

And can we please stop all this nonsense about the 1997 manifesto commitment? That was a promise of a referendum, not on AV but on AV+, a version of AV which would be even more calamitous than straightforward AV, with “assisted places scheme” MPs (like those in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly) being “elected”. We have never made a manifesto commitment to a referendum on AV.

You have to wonder why Labour candidates are so keen to get into Parliament if all they want to do is bargain away power to the LibDems. “Ah,” they will argue, “but the Tories were in government for most of the 20th century and we must make the 21st century the century of progressive politics.”

Yeah, okay, I’ll sign up to that. But you know the best way of electing a Labour government? Not through messy, sordid little deals with the minor parties, but by winning more votes than the Tories. That’s how they stayed in power for most of the last century – by beating us in elections; by offering the electorate policies that were more popular than ours.

By carping on about voting systems, we simply reinforce the notion – and I hope and believe it’s a wrong notion – that we have nothing to offer the voters but electoral calculations.