Tribune leader, 19 June 1992
The London School of Economics’ simulation of what
would have happened in the
general election if the electoral system had been different, conducted by the
ICM polling organisation and published last week, is of course only a rough
guide to the way that Britain would actually have voted if the first-past-the-post system had been replaced by the additional member
system, the alternative vote or the single transferable vote.
Apart from any considerations of margins of error in
opinion polls, even those which survey nearly 10,000 people, voters would
almost certainly have behaved differently in a real-life election under a new
system than they did when asked by the LSE's pollsters to play a game of
"what if?".
Nevertheless, the LSE survey, commissioned in the
expectation that there would be a hung parliament and that electoral reform
would be at the top of the political agenda, is the best guide we have to the
effects of electoral reform for Westminster elections. Its findings are
directly relevant to Labour's debates on electoral reform and, more surprisingly,
on relations with the Liberal Democrats.
As far as electoral reform is concerned, the survey
suggests that, of the two options for change currently being given serious
consideration by Labour's Plant Commission on electoral systems, the
alternative vote and the additional member system, only the latter fully corrects
the pro-Tory bias inherent in first past the post.
According to the survey, if the April 9 general election had
taken place using AV, which retains single-member constituencies but requires
voters to rank candidates in order of preference, the Tories would have emerged
with a share of seats much larger than their share of the vote, a couple of
seats short of an overall majority. Labour would have taken a seat less than it
did under first-past-the-post.
By contrast, under AMS, in which MPs from single-member
constituencies are "topped up" with MPs from regional lists, seats
gained by all parties would have been close to proportional to votes cast. The
Tories would have got 268 seats (down 68), Labour 232 (down 39) and the Liberal
Democrats 116 (up 96), with Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party taking
18 between them (up 11).
These conclusions should reinforce the already strong case
for Labour to reject the idea of changing to AV for elections to the House of
Commons. The LSE survey shows that AV has no significant advantages over first
past the post and all the disadvantages of non-proportionality.
The Plant Commission should now
explicitly rule out AV just as it has effectively ruled out the single
transferable vote, which is favoured by the Liberal Democrats and would do away
with single-member constituencies.
The next step should be a strong recommendation of AMS, the
only model to tackle the problem of proportionality at the same time as keeping
single-member constituencies, in good time for a decision at 1993 party
conference.
But the survey should also make Labour banish any notion
that it should enter into an electoral pact with the Liberal Democrats before
the next election. The reason that the Tories would have done so well under AV
is that more Liberal Democrat voters would choose a Tory as their second
preference vote than would choose a Labour candidate. This means that an
electoral pact in
which the Liberal Democrats stood
down in Tory-held Labour target seats would do Labour no good at all, and would
possibly save several Tories' skins.
The only anti-Tory electoral pact that might work would be a
unilateral decision by Labour not to stand in certain Tory-held Liberal
Democrat target seats, but the political costs of such a gift to the centre, in
terms of internal strife and Labour's credibility as a national party, make
such generosity distinctly unappealing.
