referendum day

So, it's AV referendum day.  People who are enthusiastic about it, either for or against, have been grumbling that cover of the AV debate was hijacked by the royal wedding and the death of Osama Bin Laden, but I suspect that the media would have found something else to talk about instead of constitutional reform in any event.  I was quite keen on the sound of AV when I first heard about it on R4, some months ago.  Then I began to think I understood how it actually worked, and became less convinced.  I read my little leaflet carefully when it dropped through the letter box, which confirmed I'd grasped the mechanics correctly, as did Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis on The Now Show that Friday.

I haven't been at all impressed by the campaigns either for or against.  The Vote No lot's explanation as to why AV would not be a Good Thing has been limited to making spurious sporting comparisons, in which the horse or athlete or whatever that crossed the line first ends up coming third, which is Not Fair.  I am utterly indifferent to sport, and dislike being treated like an idiot.  The Vote Yes Campaign have mainly trotted out assorted actors and luvvies who have told me that AV forces politicians to 'reach out' to more voters, and that 'every vote will count', which is bilge every bit as bad as the No Campaign.  The other reason given for voting in favour of AV was that while AV was not very good, voting against it would be interepreted as voting against change and in favour of the status quo, whereas if we went for AV now it would signal that we wanted change, and we might be allowed to have another change later.  So, I don't want to go to Disneyland on holiday, but if I say so it will be taken as meaning I want to stay at home, whereas if I agree to go to Disneyland I might be allowed another holiday some other time? (sorry, the bad comparisons are catching).

Under AV, if no candidate gets an outright majority with half the vote or more, the candidate who scored the fewest votes is eliminated, and the second choice votes of their supporters allocated to the remaining candidates.  And so on, until a candidate has half the votes.  There, that isn't difficult to understand.  I'm a bit perturbed that The Now Show seems to have grasped it more clearly than The Today Programme.  In British politics there are some mainstream parties, and some smaller parties, which range from the comical to the downright sinister.  In my constituency of Harwich and Essex North, seven candidates stood at the last election, and the sitting MP, Tory Bernard Jenkin, came in first with 46.9% of the vote, leaving him 3.1% short of an outright majority.  Bottom came an independent candidate, with 0.3% of the total vote, then a Green, with 1.9%, then the BNP with 2.2%.  So under AV my MP would be chosen by the second preference votes of people who voted Independent, Green and for the BNP.  If that didn't clinch matters then UKIP votes at 5.2% of the total would come into play.  The second preference choices of the voters whose first choice was Liberal Democrat or Labour, 43.5% of the total, seem unlikely to be taken into account.

So it isn't true that 'every vote counts'.  The second choices of people whose first choice was a minority party will count, but not those of voters whose first choice was one of the main parties.  As for MPs being forced to 'reach out to voters across the spectrum', how exactly is Bernard Jenkin supposed to reach out to supporters of an Independent candidate plus the Greens and the BNP?  Apart from being a good constituency MP, and appearing a decent and reasonable human being, which a sensible MP would do anyway, to 'reach out' to people for their first choice votes.

One conceptual difficulty appears to me to be that having a proportional system, which could be considered Fair, is incompatible with retaining the constituency link.  The electorate get round this to an extent by choosing to live in areas with other similar people, so we end up with home counties Tory enclaves, Lib Dem tofu land in the South West, and so on.  The British appear attached to the idea of the constituency link.  I am myself, because it makes MPs clearly accountable to a defined group of people, which does seem to help keep them on the straight and narrow.  Plus as more decisions are taken by Government rather than Parliament, more and more of an MPs role is as a glorified social worker (that or trying to get into Government) so people need to know who 'their' MP is, and the MP needs to know his or her patch, which would be tricky if it were the size of East Anglia.  Another difficulty is that having a larger number of political parties does by definition fragment politics, as demonstrated in Iraq where following their elections they had about two hundred parties and no Government.  If a sizeable part of the British electorate is strongly opposed to one of the large parties, which under the present electoral system is likely to win, then they may need to make some realistic compromises, organise themselves and band together, rather than vote for a huge range of minority parties.  But I didn't hear those sorts of issues discussed in the media.  It was all rather a disappointment.