Yesterday Ed Miliband and the usually equally reliable shadow Justice Secretary, Sadiq Khan, demanded that the prime minister should sack Ken Clarke, the Justice Secretary, over his remarks about rape and his proposals for changes in sentencing policy (not just in rape cases). This was an unpardonable example of cheap party point-scoring at the expense of the public interest, and a serious error of judgement on both their parts.
The charge against Clarke by such authorities on social policy as the Sun newspaper and the right-wing Tory cave-dwellers is that by acknowledging the obvious truth that some rape cases are more serious than others, he implied that some rapes are not serious at all. In fact he implied nothing of the sort, and if he initially expressed himself clumsily, he made ample amends subsequently by stressing, as anyone of sound mind must, that rape is serious in any circumstances. The proposition that all rapes are equally serious is however plainly ridiculous.
On his policy suggestions (which is all they are at this stage), Ken Clarke made it amply clear that the purpose of increasing the sentence discount for pleading guilty at the first stage of a rape charge would be to give an incentive to defendants to plead guilty and thus spare victims the added trauma of questioning and cross-examination both during the investigations and often eventually in court. Whether the increase in the discount from one-third to a half, where the guilty plea is entered at the earliest stage, is too great is a subjective matter on which decent people may legitimately disagree. But it’s clearly not an idea whose airing could possibly justify dismissing the relevant minister.
By attacking Clarke and calling for his dismissal, Sadiq Khan and Ed Miliband made several significant errors. They gave the impression that they thought Clarke had said things about rape which he had neither said nor implied. They themselves gave the impression of opposing a possible policy change, designed to spare rape victims unnecessary further trauma, without even considering its possible benefits, purely to curry favour with the most reactionary of the feral tabloids and to score points against the government. They denounced Clarke for seeking to reduce the numbers of people in prison by increasing the sentencing discount for pleading guilty, thereby strongly implying that Labour is against any reduction in the shamefully excessive prison population, and thus putting the party once again at odds with all right-minded people with a social conscience, with every authority on penal policy and with every civil rights organisation. And they accused Clarke of being motivated purely by a desire to save public money by sending fewer people to prison — as if saving public money by a patently desirable liberalisation of prison policy was a crime. This is a charge that Labour needs to abandon once and for all.
But worst of all, Messrs Miliband and Khan have failed to recognise that the best hope of long overdue penal reform in this country lies squarely in Ken Clarke remaining in office as Justice Secretary, with sufficient all-party backing to enable him to carry through the reform proposals in his Green Paper on sentencing policy issued a few months ago. These include sensible practical changes designed to reduce the numbers of people unnecessarily sent to prison and above all to bring down the present horrifically high rates of reoffending. They also include measures to reduce sharply the numbers of sentences of indefinite imprisonment — actually an indefensible system of preventive detention — and to reform the unjust, incompetent and repressive ways in which such sentences are administered. If Ken Clarke is forced out of his job, it’s almost inconceivable that his successor would have the liberal instincts and political weight to get these desperately needed reforms past the reactionaries in the Tory party and the media.
For all these reasons, the action of the leader of the opposition and the shadow justice secretary in actually increasing the pressure on Clarke to resign (or on the prime minister to sack him) was wrong on every possible count. Most of the reforms espoused by Clarke have been made urgently necessary by ill-conceived and illiberal measures for which a succession of disastrous New Labour home secretaries and a justice secretary were responsible. By seeming to oppose their reform, the Labour front bench is giving the impression that the party leadership has learned nothing from the Labour government’s dreadful record on human rights and civil liberties, and will oppose any attempt to reverse it.
It’s time now for Labour to issue a ringing endorsement of Clarke’s reform proposals and to promise the beleaguered Justice Secretary full support against the right-wing enemies of reform. Labour needs to acknowledge unambiguously that there are far too many people in prison who ought not to be there, that reoffending rates can and should be brought down and that there is no place in a decent democratic society for preventive detention. In doing so, the party would be fulfilling the explicit promise in Ed Miliband’s acceptance speech at the party conference immediately after he was elected leader. He knows, as we all do, that by returning to its historic commitment to justice, civil rights and enlightened penal policies, Labour will be accused by the Tories and probably the LibDems of doing a U-turn and admitting that Labour in government committed serious errors that now have to be put right. We all know that Labour’s former home secretaries will fight tooth and nail to defend their shoddy records and avert any implied or explicit repudiation by Labour’s new leaders of the harm they did. But we also know that when you have dug yourself into a hole, the best thing to do is to climb out of it, not to keep on digging. In this context, that’s not only the best practical course: above all, it’s the right one.
By their actions yesterday Ed Miliband and Sadiq Khan have aroused the suspicion that they are once again heading down the wrong path on penal policy and reform. If this continues, it will be a disaster for the party, and potentially also for the country and for justice. Fiat justitia, ruat caelum!
Update (20 May 2011): I have now listened carefully to the whole of the Radio 5 Live interview of Ken Clarke by Victoria Derbyshire (http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/victoriad, victoriad_20110518-1416a.mp3) and I have to say that I found nothing remotely objectionable in anything whatever that Clarke either said or implied. The accusation that he said or even hinted that he regarded some kinds of rape as not serious is absolutely unfounded: indeed he said with emphasis at least twice that all rape is a serious crime deserving severe punishment. He drew a distinction between different kinds of rape, some aggravated by violence and lack of consent and others not, as the explanation for sentences for the crime of rape varying in severity. Anyone who professes to be offended by that must be living on another planet.
Brian
My letter in the Guardian of 18 May 2011 questioned Madeleine Bunting’s description, also in the Guardian, of the option of an English parliament as “unappealing” and her fear that if England had its own parliament, it would spell the demise of the Labour party. Unfortunately the Guardian edited my letter in such a way as to obscure its intended meaning in some respects. So here is the full text as submitted to the Guardian, with added hyperlinks:
Madeleine Bunting’s wake-up call about the implications for England of Scottish secession from the UK (If Scotland goes, all we’ll have left is the Englishness we so despise, May 16) is timely and rings many bells, but she needn’t dismiss “the unappealing option of an English parliament” as part of a federal Britain, which would be greatly preferable to dismembering the UK through Scottish independence and good in itself for the whole country. Devolution of all internal powers to the parliaments and governments of all four UK nations, with minimal functions left to the federal government and parliament at Westminster and safeguards against English dominance, would solve many problems besides Scotland’s demand for full self-government, including our besetting sin of over-centralisation, the West Lothian Question and the other anomalies created by incomplete devolution.
Nor need Ms Bunting fear that an English parliament “spells the (Labour) party’s demise”: according to an expert comment on my blog, there have been only two UK Labour governments which didn’t have a majority of members in England, in 1950 and for a few months after February 1974. (After the October 1974 election there was the Lib-Lab pact in which no party had a majority in either the UK or in England.) All other Labour governments have had majorities in England. Labour would need to adapt radically to an internally self-governing England within a federal UK, but that might be no bad thing; the other parties would have to adapt and change too. Given leadership and a national consensus on the objective, it could all be accomplished in under 20 years. Better than Scotland breaking up the UK!
Brian
Easily the most significant and daunting feature of last week’s elections and AV referendum was the sensational victory of the Scottish National Party, with an unexpected overall majority in the Scottish parliament and a commitment to the secession of Scotland from the UK. Alex Salmond, SNP leader and Scotland’s First Minister, has promised a referendum on Scottish independence during the second half of his five-year term, i.e. 2014 to mid-2016. This poses the greatest potential threat to the integrity of the United Kingdom since the second world war. Responding to this challenge to save the country from disintegration demands a radical programme of constitutional change that seems likely to be beyond the courage and imagination of our political leaders at Westminster. Compared with this, the referendum on AV and the future of Mr Clegg are mere entertainments.
Media reactions in England have broadly been twofold: either that according to opinion polls barely a third of Scots want independence, so the SNP’s referendum will fail, and there’s nothing to worry about; or else that the SNP have enough time to bring enough Scots round to voting Yes in the referendum, which will accordingly and irrevocably spell the end of the UK in just a few years’ time. A third theme is that the SNP’s fiscal and social policies are so manifestly unaffordable, with the promise of continued free university education for Scots (and EU citizens other than the English, Welsh and Northern Irish), free prescriptions, free care for the elderly, a freeze of council tax, etc., that the SNP government will soon be exposed as irresponsible and incompetent, and obviously incapable of governing an independent Scotland. All these forecasts need sceptical examination.
On the prospects for the SNP getting a majority for independence in a referendum in, probably, three or four years’ time, it’s dangerous to underestimate Mr Salmond’s remarkable skills and powers of persuasion. He’s extremely canny, taking a shrewd long-term view; charismatic and likeable, even by those who distrust him and reject his policies and objectives and risky exploitation of nationalistic passions; witty, quick on his feet, and — perhaps most potent of all — optimistic and up-beat. A Scottish friend, long resident in England, described him to me as a politician who
would have made a formidable leader of the Labour Party (at Westminster, that is). A good deal more formidable than the present incumbent, indeed. His chiefest asset by far is that he so clearly enjoys what he is doing – whether that be governing Scotland or pissing off Westminster. He is also genuinely funny, and hard not to warm to – quite a combination. [1]
He’s probably the most capable and effective politician in Britain today. He has been running a minority government with considerable flair and success, despite having been constrained by the risk of being voted down on every controversial issue by a numerically superior opposition. Now he has an overall majority and can do whatever he likes, subject only to the need to woo and satisfy Scottish public opinion.
Mr Salmond is already seeking greater fiscal powers through amendments to the Scotland Bill now going through parliament at Westminster: extensive borrowing powers, increased scope for varying income tax, power to reduce or raise corporation tax, a share of oil revenues. Scotland will gain additional funds from the transfer of certain sources of income from Crown Lands; and we can expect a fierce struggle over Scotland’s claim to the lion’s share of the income from North Sea oil, around 80% or more of which is in waters which would be Scottish if Scotland were an independent state. As long as oil prices remain sky-high, oil revenues would in principle be more than enough to pay for tuition fees, prescriptions, and the freezing of council tax[2]. Of course before Scottish independence, or even after it, no government at Westminster is likely to hand over the bulk of its oil revenues just because Mr Salmond asks for them, however politely.
But Mr Cameron, or indeed any UK prime minister, is going to be in a dilemma. The more toughly he rejects Mr Salmond’s demands, the more unreasonable and oppressive the English will appear to Scottish public opinion, and the more potent the effects on the result of the independence referendum. The SNP will be given the perfect excuse for any fiscal or economic failings. If, on the other hand, Mr Cameron accedes too readily to the more modest of Mr Salmond’s requests for greater fiscal autonomy, he’ll be giving the SNP government the opportunity to demonstrate that its generous social policies, contrasted with the coalition’s assaults on the welfare state south of the border, are affordable, and that the Scottish government has the necessary skills to run a viable independent Scotland. This is going to be a no-win situation for the Conservative-led coalition at Westminster unless Mr Cameron can prove himself even cannier than Mr Salmond. Mr Cameron has pledged to fight to keep the United Kingdom together “with every single fibre that I have”[3]. Whatever he might mean by his ‘single fibre’, he may have his work cut out to succeed.
However, even if the referendum, when it comes, produces a clear majority for independence, that won’t and can’t be the end of the story. No British government is likely to ignore the will of a majority of Scots expressed in a referendum, but the terms of the divorce will have to be agreed by both sides, and their negotiation will provide ample scope for disagreement, delay and dispute. We can expect that after losing the independence referendum, any government at Westminster would take every opportunity to impose the harshest and most ungenerous terms, in the hope of impressing on the Scots that independence would cost them dearly, that they might have made the wrong choice, and that they could still change their minds. Mr Salmond however will see the way round that danger: he will try to pin down the UK government on the terms it will offer for the divorce ahead of the referendum, thus presenting Mr Cameron (or his successor, if we’re lucky) with the same dilemma. If his terms are unduly harsh, anti-Westminster and anti-Tory sentiment in Scotland will be hardened and a consensus for independence encouraged; if his terms are too generous, the independence option will seem the more attractive.
One joker in this pack is often overlooked. Mr Salmond promises a third option in his referendum in addition to “Yes” or “No” to full independence: “devolution max”, or full fiscal autonomy for Scotland within a sovereign United Kingdom [1] [4]. This will not only complicate the interpretation of the result of the referendum (what if each of the three options wins around a third of the votes cast? will voting be by AV or first past the post?): it also presents a problem for the UK government. Should Westminster offer to grant “devolution max” if the Scots vote for it in preference to independence, given that it would at least avert the disintegration of the United Kingdom, or should it state, ahead of the referendum, that this option is simply not on the table, forcing the Scots to choose between full independence and the status quo? The latter would represent a reckless gamble, and as such it might appeal to Mr Cameron; many in Scotland and the rest of the UK would think it unforgivable to exclude in advance what might prove to be the least bad result. More on this in a moment.
There’s a naive tendency on the part of some commentators to assume that a Scottish vote for full independence will be the end of the story. In practice it would only mark the opening of a new chapter of demands, conditions, bargaining and recrimination. One of the most difficult matters requiring agreement between Holyrood and Westminster would of course be the division between an independent Scotland and the rest of the UK of government revenues, including especially revenues from oil, and government debt. If the Scots had voted to break their ties with the rest of the UK, no Westminster government would see any need to be unnecessarily generous on this, and anyway English public opinion might preclude generosity. Would the Westminster government be willing to sponsor an independent Scotland for membership of, for example, the UN and the EU, and if so on what terms? The EU in particular, smarting from the cost of bailing out some of its bankrupt smaller members, might well impose ferocious conditions of fiscal austerity on a Scottish application for membership, noting the role of the Scottish banks in the recent banking crisis. (The notion, voiced in a recent Guardian letter[5], that both Scotland and the rest of the UK would have to apply to join the UN or the EU in their new independent identities is entirely fanciful: Russia automatically inherited the Soviet Union’s UN membership when all the other Soviet constituent republics seceded, without the need for a fresh application, and UK membership of international bodies would not be affected by Scottish secession, even in the unlikely event — predicted in the same Guardian letter — of the UK being obliged to change its name after Scotland’s departure.)
Other almost insoluble problems would arise from Scottish independence, most of them requiring resolution before independence could take effect. What would be the citizenship status of the thousands of Scots living in England and elsewhere in the UK: would they become foreigners in what most would still see as their own country? What would happen to the Scottish regiments of the British army, and to other Scots serving in the UK’s armed forces? Would all those expatriate Scots throughout the world be allowed to vote in the referendum? Would English people living and working in Scotland vote in it? Would an independent Scottish government require the closure of UK naval and military bases in Scotland, notwithstanding the economic disaster that such closure would inflict on local communities — not to mention the damage the demand for closure would inflict on infant Scottish-Westminster relations? Would Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland watch passively while Scotland broke away from the United Kingdom or would there have to be some new negotiation of the status of Northern Ireland’s position in the rump of the UK? Mr Salmond envisages that an independent Scotland would wish to continue as part of the English Crown’s realms, but would the English monarch, acting on the advice of Her English (and Welsh and Northern Irish) ministers at Westminster, meekly and automatically comply with that wish — and would it require the consent of all the Queen’s other realms as well? Mr Salmond also wishes to maintain sterling as the currency of an independent Scotland: how much say would he have to be given in its management? Negotiation of answers to all these and a thousand more practical questions could well take years before Scottish independence could become a reality; and in that time, who knows what changes in Scottish public opinion, indeed what changes in the régime at Holyrood, might take place under the impact of the problems that would emerge?
Meanwhile a factor that could exercise a negative influence on the referendum result is mounting anti-Scottish sentiment in England, prompted by envy of Scotland’s self-government under devolution (still indefensibly denied to England); by the largely unjustified conviction that Scotland’s ability to do without prescription charges, to freeze council tax and to provide free university education to its people is all at the expense of the English taxpayer; by resentment of what’s represented as Scottish ingratitude to the generous English in seeking to break up the United Kingdom; and even by a Little Englander supposition that England would be better off without the need to go on subsidising the pesky, demanding and rebellious Scots. As the Guardian’s Michael White says in a characteristically trenchant blog post,
I love it when the egocentric London newspapers periodically remember that there’s a place called Scotland somewhere to the north of the M25 and either get into a huff about its demands or say – with equal silliness – that England should sever its ties and good riddance
– except that I personally don’t love it at all: I despise it. This infantile and demeaning prejudice against Scotland would be boosted by any concession on the part of the Westminster government to Scottish demands for much greater fiscal and other autonomy as the price for forgoing full independence, while England, alone of the UK’s four nations, continues to be denied even the basic building-blocks of self-government, namely its own government and parliament. Continued adamant refusal by anyone at Westminster even to contemplate devolution for England may limit the extent of any concession to Scotland of substantially more fiscal and other autonomy than it already enjoys. That in turn could turn the Scottish tide in favour of a majority vote for full independence, the almost certain prelude to the eventual break-up of the United Kingdom, with formidable implications also for Northern Ireland.
What conclusions should the government at Westminster draw from this complex of problems and decisions? First, it’s no good blaming devolution. Devolution was devised (mainly by Scots) as a means of heading off growing demands for full Scottish independence, and we can now see that it has failed in that purpose. But it has not failed through any fundamental defect in the concept of devolution: it has failed, so far, because weak and narrow-minded leadership by all three of the main parties at Westminster has failed to push devolution to its inevitable and logical conclusion, namely full internal self-government for all four of the UK nations (yes, including England), leaving the government and parliament at Westminster with only those powers which are bound to be exercised centrally and which can’t be devolved — principally foreign affairs, foreign trade and defence. There’s a name for that kind of constitutional settlement: it’s called a federation. Not only would it require a government and parliament for England, and a significant reduction of the powers of what would become the federal government and parliament at Westminster: it would also require a written constitution setting out the powers and functions of the respective tiers, written constitutions for each of the four constituent nations, and probably a Senate on the lines of those in the US and Australia, with equal representation for all four nations regardless of size or population, to prevent the federation being unduly dominated by the disproportionately numerous English — a protection conspicuously missing from our existing constitutional arrangements.
All this, especially the creation of autonomous governing organs for England, would take many years to accomplish. It would also take an imaginative leap on the part of our political leaders, and a willingness to exercise bold leadership in order to gain the consent of public opinion throughout our instinctively conservative and sceptical kingdom, a degree of imagination and leadership that look to be well beyond the talents of our existing national politicians. But, like it or hate it, we are already half-way to that federal destination, having by now become, whether or not intentionally, what Professor Bogdanor calls a “semi-federation”. This is a process which, like riding a bike, you can’t suddenly suspend in its half-finished state without producing increasingly itchy and distracting anomalies and problems. The West Lothian Question encapsulates the most pressing of these. There can be only one durable and democratic solution both to the West Lothian Question and to the plethora of problems raised by the overwhelming electoral victory of a secessionist party in Scotland: the completion of the devolution project, and the conversion of the relationship between the four nations of the United Kingdom into a full-hearted federation. Waiting to be recognised and adopted, here is a far-sighted, generous, optimistic, inspiring and democratic programme to match and surpass the narrow, nationalistic vision of Mr Alex Salmond. Does Ed Miliband, searching for a way out of the mess that Scottish Labour has got itself into and for the Big Idea that could re-launch the British Labour Party as the party of change and reform, have the imagination and courage to pick up the federal ball and run with it? The mere adoption by a major political party of federalism as a long-term aim for the whole of the United Kingdom would transform forever the whole context in which a Scottish independence referendum would be held. What alternative is there, other than the disintegration of our country?
I have to declare an interest. I am English, but I regard Scotland as being as much a part of my homeland as Dorset or London: in the sense that JFK declared himself a Berliner, I am a Scot (and a Welshman and Northern Irish) too. Britain without Scotland would be an unfamiliar and unattractive land. I could never regard my Scottish friends as foreigners, or think of visiting Edinburgh or Glasgow as going abroad. Scottish secession would be a kind of amputation. There has to be — there is — a better way. Come on, Mr Miliband: take the plunge: the water’s lovely!
Brian
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Notes:
[1] “If only someone had managed to get Alex Salmond to grow up, he would have made a formidable leader of the Labour Party (at Westminster, that is). A good deal more formidable than the present incumbent, indeed. His chiefest asset by far is that he so clearly enjoys what he is doing – whether that be governing Scotland or pissing off Westminster. He is also genuinely funny, and hard not to warm to – quite a combination.
“What those opposing independence need to take on board is that it is essential not to run a purely negative campaign – eg one based on the experiences of Ireland and Iceland, for example. Salmond’s campaign will be positive, optimistic, forward-looking, inspiring – and the opposition needs to be on a par.
“It appears unlikely right now that he will win an independence vote – which is of course why he has announced the intention of putting a further, compromise, question on the ballot: that way his chances of being on something he can represent as the winning side are greatly increased.”
[Scottish expatriate living in London (private message)]
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[2]“[Mr Salmond's] tactic will be to blame any budgetary problems he has, and he certainly will have them, on the Coalition in London and its attempt to cut the UK deficit too fast and therefore cut the Scottish block grant. Having stoked up a fair amount of ire against Westminster policies he will then have the referendum. He will also blame Westminster for not letting him have all the fiscal powers he wants, notably oil revenues and power to reduce corporation tax.
“… Scotland has public expenditure per head about 16 per cent above the UK average, much the same as London, less than Northern Ireland but more than Wales or the two northern regions of England. Tax revenue per head is about the UK average if North Sea oil is excluded. So there is a deficit. But if some 80 per cent of North Sea revenues came to Scotland that approximately fills the deficit so long as the oil price remains high. In the past, on this basis, Scotland would have been in colossal surplus in the first half of the 1980s but in deficit for much of the 90s when the oil price came down. …
“I do not expect the Scottish Government to become insolvent. … But their commitments certainly raise an affordability problem. [There is an obvious problem over the pledge to maintain free university tuition for Scottish and EU students (but not those from England, Wales and Northern Ireland).] The gap there will be about £300 million and the Council Tax freeze will be about £500 million over the lifetime of the Parliament. The local authorities are already being squeezed hard and that will mean school education in particular. But if the block grant is cut as savagely as I expect he will of course blame that on Westminster and use that as an excuse to abandon the commitment to freeze Council Tax. In addition, if the Calman proposals are enacted, he could put a penny on income tax and use that to help fund the tuition fees, saying all the while that none of this would be necessary if Westminster would let him have the oil revenues from the Scottish sector. Independent assessments make it quite clear that 80-90 per cent of the North Sea oil is in what would be Scottish waters if the area was divided between sovereign states. Never mind that it was developed as a UK resource with the infrastructure funded from the UK exchequer rather than only the Scottish taxpayer. So he has quite a lot of wriggle room.”
[Scottish economist (private message)]
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[3] Mr Cameron said he would campaign to keep the UK together, as he congratulated Mr Salmond. He said: “I passionately believe in our United Kingdom, so I congratulate Alex Salmond on his emphatic win, but I will do everything obviously as British prime minister to work with the first minister of Scotland, as I always do, and treat the Scottish people and the Scottish government with the respect they deserve. But on the issue of the United Kingdom, if they want to hold a referendum, I will campaign to keep our United Kingdom together, with every single fibre that I have.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-13319936
[4] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/08/scotland-independence-vote-financial-autonomy
[5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/09/scotland-snp-victory
PS: Dear M***, I can’t resist quoting your succinct remarks on AV: ‘I would vote for AV if we were only electing MPs. But we’re electing a govt and I want to be able to pick the government, and not just change the relative negotiating position of the parties. So I shall be voting “no”.‘ My views exactly. Thank you.
I’m afraid I can’t pay the same compliment to the pro-AV article in yesterday’s Observer under the names of John Denham (Labour — remember him?), Chris Huhne (LibDem minister in the coalition government, emerging as principal scourge of the prime minister) and, alas, the usually estimable Caroline Lucas, leader and sole representative in the Commons of the Greens. Can they all have read it when they agreed to put their names to it? In the very first paragraph, we read:
On only two occasions in that long century – 1900 and 1931 – have the Tories won a majority of the votes. Instead, they have divided and ruled. No wonder David Cameron says the current system “has served us well”
– which is pretty disingenuous, considering that in that ‘long century’ (much longer than any other?), as in this shorter one, no other party ever won a majority of the votes in any general election either. The reason has nothing to do with the electoral system: it just reflects the fact that since the aberration in 1931 no one party has ever had the support of half of the electorate or more, whether measured by election results or opinion polls — and in recent years the proportion of the electorate supporting the two major parties has declined even further. So the more accurately this distribution of party support is reflected in the house of commons by the electoral system, the more likely it is that we shall be faced with virtually permanent minority or coalition governments, with all the drawbacks that recent experience has demonstrated. If the LibDems’ unpopularity, stemming from their marriage to an exceptionally reactionary Tory régime, leads to the final demise of their party as a force in British politics, AV (and any form of more proportional representation) will mean not only permanent coalitions but also coalitions of an incoherent temporary alliance or patchwork quilt of splinter parties, and death to any hope of coherent, durable, accountable government. Look at Israel!
Reciting, as our three heroes do, the mantra that “two-thirds of MPs have more people voting against them than for them” ignores the fact that the same is true of the voting record of every party in every election since 1931 — and that it will remain true under AV in every constituency where the winning candidate has to rely on second and third preferences for his ‘majority’. In every such case, more first preferences will have been cast against him than for him, and that reality can be reversed only by pretending that second, third, etc preferences are of equal value to first preferences — which, as a matter of plain, unvarnished fact, they are not.
Denham-Huhne-Lucas go on to suggest that under AV there will be a chance to challenge holders of what are now ‘safe seats’, whereas logic suggests otherwise — in most ‘safe seats’ the incumbent can expect to receive more than 50% of the first preferences, so second preferences will never be redistributed and AV won’t make the slightest difference. So the three writers’ jibe about MPs in safe seats under first past the post (FPTP) earning almost twice as much in outside earnings as those in more marginal seats is neither here nor there.
The three musketeers complain that the disproportionate results delivered by AV are not “a recipe … for a parliament that holds up a mirror to the nation”, which is true: but why should the house of commons (which is what they mean by ‘parliament’) be such a mirror? Someone recently quoted the now largely forgotten Harold Laski as writing in 1950 that “The first and most vital function of the electorate is to choose a House of Commons the membership of which makes possible the creation of a Government which can govern.“ Just so. The more proportional the voting system, the less likely is the creation of a government ‘which can govern’: and AV, while often no more proportional than FPTP and sometimes actually less so, also makes effective government less, not more, likely, by increasing the votes and seats of third and other smaller parties at the expenseof the two major ones. Demanding a mirror misses the point.
Never mind the three authors’ misattribution of the phrase “the mother of parliaments” to the parliament at Westminster (actually it refers to England): there’s no excuse for their carefully worded suggestion that “no major democracy” apart from Britain uses first past the post when two of the biggest democracies in the world, the United States and India, use it and show no signs of wanting to change it.
Then finally: what’s the basis for the claim that “under AV, voters will no longer face the dilemma of voting ‘tactically’“? AV is nothing but a formalised system of tactical voting which requires the voter, if she wants to make the most effective use of her preferences to influence the result rather than merely to make an ineffectual gesture, to try to guess which of the candidates is likeliest to be eliminated at the first and each successive recount and which of the front runners is likeliest to benefit from successive redistributions of preferences. AV has been likened to the French Presidential electoral system in which if no candidate wins more than 50% of the votes on the first polling day, those who came first and second have a run-off election a week later, ensuring that one of them will score the magic 50%+1. But in that system, the voters know in the second election which of the candidates are still in the race, and can cast their votes accordingly. Under AV, you have to guess who’s going to be knocked out in the early rounds if you’re to make intelligent use of your preferences. That’s ‘tactical voting’ par excellence.
Few commentators have remarked on the rushed and deeply unsatisfactory manner in which the electorate is being confronted with this option of a major change to our constitution. Such a change should have been analysed and debated at far greater length before a decision on it is taken. Where was the Speaker’s Conference or Royal Commission, representing all the major parties, academic experts and ordinary voters, tasked to analyse the experience of other countries, to consider and lay out the pros and cons of the options and to make an objective recommendation, free as far as possible from party bias, that could be properly put to a popular vote? As it is, the lion’s share of the (mostly inadequate and often misleading) discussion of the issues in the media has been directed to guesswork about which result will do the greater damage to either Mr Clegg or Mr Cameron. The general expectation is that fewer than half of the electorate will bother to vote in the referendum on Thursday. According to the polls, opinion varies widely in different parts of the UK, with at present a slim majority in favour of AV only in Scotland. This opens up the possibility that on a very low turnout (influenced mainly by which voters are also voting at the same time in local or national elections), the outcome could be determined almost at random by a narrow majority voting in Scotland. This is no way to amend our constitution. The whole thing is no more than a bargaining chip used by the Tories to seduce the LibDems into joining them in the coalition. If as a quasi-federation of the four UK nations we had a proper written federal constitution setting out the respective powers of the four nations and the federal centre, it would also necessarily set out special procedures for amending the key provisions of the constitution, making it impossible for such a thing to happen in this negligent, almost frivolous manner[1]. The Conservatives and LibDems responsible for it should be ashamed of themselves.
I’m uncomfortably aware, M***, of the unattractive company you and I will be in when we vote No on Thursday — Blunkett, Reid, Straw, Cameron, the BNP! — and even more uncomfortable at the thought of the rubbish arguments that some of them have been putting forward for rejecting AV when there is a perfectly sound case readily available instead. Those of us who see FPTP, with all its imperfections, as the lesser evil, will indeed be in some nauseating and unscrupulous company, but that doesn’t make us wrong. I’m glad you’re going to vote No on Thursday: so am I.
[1] Please however now see the comment and my response to it at http://www.barder.com/3206#comment-100604.
Best wishes,
Brian
