First Past the Post is Pants

Times of TW.

End This Unfair Voting System.

By Kent Barker

            Now the dust has settled on May’s general election, analysts are beginning to question just how it ended up the most disproportionate result in British election history.

            If, for example, you were one of the 12.6% of people who voted UKIP you might be righteously indignant that you got just 0.2% of the seats.   Likewise the 3.8% of the population who voted Green but also got only one seat.  The Lib Dems got 7.9% of the votes, but just 1.2% of MPs while, conversely, the Scots Nats polled just 4.7% at the ballot box but got a whopping 8.6% of MPs.  Compared with 2010, Labour got a higher percentage of the vote, but fewer seats.

            Overall the party that formed the government was only supported by 36.9% of people.  Which means that nearly two out of every three people DIDN’T vote for a Conservative government but got one anyway.  What a mess.

            So it’s unsurprising that there’s growing pressure to make the voting system fairer and more proportional.  But I’d argue that you can do that by reforming the way we elect the upper chamber rather than the Commons.

            It’s a while since I sat in the press gallery looking down on the cosy red leather benches of the House of Lords.  But I doubt if anything has changed. In fact I don’t think much has altered since Edward III - and he died in 1377.  It was in his reign that parliament divided into the two chambers.

            Today we are the only western industrialised country (except Canada) with a wholly unelected upper chamber.  And we call ourselves a democracy!

Mind you it could be worse. And it was. Until only a few decades ago members of the upper house were there only because they were born into the aristocracy. The first reform came in 1909 when the Conservative majority in the Lords voted down the Liberal Government’s ‘People’s Budget’.  So Asquith curtailed their Lordships’ powers the following year making it impossible to veto Commons legislation, just delay it.

It was actually the Conservatives who made the most radical change by introducing life peers in 1958. Tony Blair had a go at getting rid of the hereditary ones and bottled it, leaving a rump of 92 (why on earth 92?).  Then, in 2008, the commons amazingly backed a wholly elected upper chamber.  A week later the Lords responded by backing a wholly appointed one. So Labour simply dropped the hot potato.

Finally, three years ago Conservative back-benchers actually voted against their own government’s reform bill and so that was abandoned.

What a shambles. Members of your 21^st century upper chamber are appointed by political patronage, cronyism or – it’s widely believed – hefty payments to party coffers.    Everyone appears to agree that reform is required. Most seem to want an elected upper chamber.  No one apparently has the guts to push it through.

So will David Cameron now grasp the nettle and have another go at reform?  If he does this I think is what he should be proposing:

An upper chamber wholly elected by proportional representation on the popular vote / party list system.

            This is how it would work: our upper chamber - of say a manageable 400 members – would be elected according to the percentage vote each party got at the general election.  You could have 100 elected from each of the regions so Scottish, Northern Ireland and Welsh parties would be properly represented.

OK, so how do you choose who is elected?  Well, you take them from a party list.  Labour proposes up to 400 names in descending order. In May they got 30.4%, of the vote so the first 121 people on their list (30.4% x 4) would be  elected. The Greens would end up with fifteen seats instead of their one in the Commons.  Yes, you might get a few members of the far right in too.  But then that’s democracy.

There’s another reform I’d propose.  Secret voting.  Abolish the whipping system for the upper chamber. Let your elected representatives decide issues according to their conscience. I know it a pretty radical idea, but it’s one we adhere to for OUR vote at the ballot box.  Why not for our parliamentarians?

The argument usually made against an elected upper chamber is that it would give them too much legitimacy and they would demand increased powers.  Well, frankly, so what?  For the moment leave their powers exactly as they are: primarily a revising chamber that can delay but not veto bills from the Commons.  Additional powers can be decided later.

Of course there’s one possible problem. Once you have a proper democratically elected parliament, how much longer will you be able to justify a head of state who is there solely by dint of their aristocratic birth?