Tribune leader, 9 April 1992
Paddy Ashdown has made it dear that he would refuse to give
support to any party attempting to form a government if it did not promise in
its Queen's Speech to legislate for “fair votes” before the general election
after this one. It is a ridiculous position, and he knows it. The only major
party that might possibly introduce electoral reform for the House of Commons
is Labour - but Labour is still only halfway through working out what it really
wants.
After years of backing the first-past-the-post system for
all elections, Labour is now open to change for the Commons, probably to a
version of the German additional member system, as its choice of AMS for its
proposed Scottish parliament indicates. But, as the interim report of Labour's
commission on electoral systems, chaired by Raymond Plant, made clear last
year, the party is some way from making a decision in principle about which
electoral system it wants for the Commons, let alone finalising all the
details. Indeed, just about all that the Plant commission has firmly decided
for the Commons is that it should not be elected by the single transferable
vote (STV) system - which is what Mr Ashdown's party has traditionally backed.
If Labour is moving towards AMS, there is a vocal lobby
within the party for the statut quo and a smaller one for the alternative vote
system. Among supporters of AMS there are crucial differences, particularly
over the percentage of the vote, at regional or national level, that parties
would have to reach to secure representation in the Commons. Tribune, for
example, while supporting the principle of AMS, would not support a version
including a threshold of more than 5 per cent, which would discriminate against
Green representation in the Commons. Others would make thresholds high to
exclude fascists.
All this is going to have to be worked out - and not just by
Labour. For all the Liberal Democrats’ shouting about "fair votes",
they have not thought through how, if at all, they are prepared to compromise
on their insistence on STV. Changing the electoral system cannot legitimately
be done by party leaders on the basis of a few back-of-the-envelope
calculations in smoke-filled rooms: it demands public debate about principles
and details and consensus within parties and among them.
By saying that it will open up the Plant commission to other
parties and to a wide range of organisations from civil society, and by saying
that the expanded inquiry will report within a year, Labour has gone as far as
anyone could reasonably expect. Mr Ashdown should stop making demands for
instant solutions and commit his party to backing Labour's attempt to secure a
new consensus on the electoral system, just as it did with the Scottish Constitutional
Convention.
Jason and The Face
The award of £200,000 damages and the same again in costs
against The Face magazine for libeling Jason Donovan shows once again the
urgent need for action to reduce the amounts of libel awards. It is absurd that
a magazine should face closure just because it has wrongly claimed that a pop
singer lied when he denied that he was gay. (Would he have been so lavishly
rewarded if a magazine had wrongly claimed that he was lying when he denied he
was straight?) It is time for the amount that can be awarded in damages and
costs to be limited to a total of £50,000, pending a thorough review of the
whole of the law of libel.
