Paul Anderson talks to David Lipsey, journalist turned
Labour peer and chair of the campaign for electoral reform for Westminster
“Electoral reform is still an elite issue at this stage,”
says David Lipsey, the new chairman of Make Votes Count, the campaign for a
more proportional electoral system for the House of Commons. “But at root it’s
all about giving power to the people and taking it from the politicians.”
Acting as a figurehead and spokesman for a campaigning
pressure group is something of a novelty for Lipsey. But he has been a player
in Labour politics for a long time. I’m about as old Labour as you can be while
still being new Labour,” he says with a grin. “I’m essentially a Croslandite
egalitarian.” His main role to date have been policy adviser, journalist and
sympathetic intellectual. He worked as an aide to Labour prime minister James
Callaghan between 1977 and 1979, was on the Sunday Times from 1980 to 1986 and
edited New Society from 1986 to 1988. After spells on the ill-fated Sunday
Correspondent and The Times, in 1992 he became political editor of the
Economist, a job he relinquished this year after being given a peerage. It was
Lipsey who coined the phrase “new Labour”, in a 1992 Fabian Society pamphlet,
The Name of the Rose. In 1997, he was an obvious choice as a member of the
Independent Commission on the Voting System, chaired by Lord Jenkins, set up by
Tony Blair to come up with a recommendation for an alternative electoral system
for the Commons to be put to the country in a referendum.
Lipsey is taking to his new role with Make Votes Count with
an almost boyish enthusiasm and some confidence – even though the Westminster
rumour-mill has for some months been buzzing with stories to the effect that
the Labour leadership has decided to abandon the promised referendum on
electoral reform. Immediately after the publication of the Jenkins report
electoral reformers were a little over-optimistic about the ease of the task
ahead,” he says. “We had come up with an agreed system, which in itself was no
mean feat, the press coverage was favourable and most electoral reformers
accepted the Jenkins recommendations.
“But anyone could have foreseen that there would then be a
very difficult period – first of all because some members of the cabinet were
unpersuaded and secondly because of the impact of the new electoral systems for
the Scottish parliament, Welsh assembly and European Parliament elections. We
live in a very conservative country: people always look for the downside of
things. For a variety of reasons, there were a lot of people saying that they
didn’t like this very much.”
Lipsey is now optimistic that the campaign to change the
electoral system for the Commons can regain momentum. Those first elections are
now behind us – and in retrospect, they were an advertisement for changing the
electoral system, though I’m not a fan of the closed lists used in the European
elections. If the European elections had been held under first-past-the-post,
the Tories would have won 15 extra seats, Labour’s representation would have
been unchanged and there would have been no seats in the European Parliament
for the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. I think the consequence of a result of
that kind would have been a wave of rampant anti-Europeanism and headlines in
the papers declaring that William Hague had bounced back. It would have been
very bad for politics. A minority of people with hostile views on the euro
would have been given far more influence than they deserve.
“As far as Scotland is concerned, if the elections there had
been fought on first-past-the-post, we’d now be facing a choice between two
ghastly options: permanent Labour hegemony, which would reproduce on a larger
scale everything that is wrong with politics in the great Scottish cities, or
the emergence of the Scottish National Party as the only feasible alternative,
with the prospect that it would at some point lead Scotland to independence
even though it had the support of less than half the electorate.”
The main priority now, he says, is to make sure that the
case for the Jenkins proposals is made loud and clear in the Labour Party and
in the Liberal Democrats.
Jenkins recommended a system known as “AV-plus”, under which
all voters would have two votes, one for a constituency MP and one for a party.
The constituency MPs would be elected by the alternative vote system, in which
voters number candidates in order of preference. If nobody won 50 per cent of
first preferences, the second preference votes of the candidate with least
support would be redistributed to other candidates – and so on until one
candidate secured more than half the vote. The party votes would elect up to
132 “top-up” MPs on the basis of proportions of the vote won by parties in 80
sub-regional areas.
Labour is holding a consultation on the Jenkins proposals
that lasts until the end of the year, and Make Votes Count is making every
effort to ensure that the result is favourable. The consultation is important
not only in itself but also because of its influence on MPs,” says Lipsey. “The
biggest obstacle to electoral reform has always been the difficulty of getting
a bill through parliament. Reform potentially threatens the job of every single
MP.”
He is nevertheless convinced that the reform lobby can
prevail. There are two key arguments to get across in the Labour Party. The
first is the “electoral deserts” argument – in other words, pointing to the way
in which so many people live in places where they never get an MP from the party
they vote for under the current system. The second, which is even more
important, is the “inner cities” argument. Under AV-plus, inner city votes
would count once again. Politicians could not afford to concentrate their
effort just on a handful of affluent “swing voters” in marginal seats. Already, he says, there is evidence that
Labour’s grass roots see the need for change.
What, though, of the prospects of support for electoral
reform at the top of the party? Robin Cook, Mo Mowlam and Jack Cunningham are
strong supporters of the Jenkins proposals. But John Prescott, Margaret Beckett
and Jack Straw are equally strong opponents – and, crucially, the positions of
Labour’s two most powerful politicians, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, are
unclear.
Lipsey is optimistic about Blair’s position. “He was as warm
as anyone could have expected in his response to Jenkins, and -although I don’t
have any inside source – I think that he was convinced by the report’s
arguments, particularly those on ‘electoral deserts’. I don’t think he’s
interested in proportionality as a concept, but neither is the Jenkins report.
AV-plus is a more proportional system than the existing one, but
proportionality is not the whole story.”
Some have criticised Jenkins precisely because AV-plus is
not a genuinely proportional system. Because of the small size of the
constituency clusters from which the “top-up” MPs would be elected, they argue,
a party winning, say, 15 per cent of the vote across a region would be lucky to
win any representation. Although the Lib Dems would benefit from AV-plus, they
would not do as well as under a pure PR system – and the Greens and other small
parties would be lucky to win any seats.
Lipsey counters this line of argument with characteristic
candour. “It is absolutely deliberate that Jenkins isn’t really proportional.
It is not an accidental side-effect. Any electoral system has to strike a
balance between conflicting interests. Perfect proportionality gives tremendous
power to small parties – witness the Free Democrats in the Federal Republic of
Germany for most of the post-war period – and makes it very difficult for the
people to throw the government out. I think it’s very important that the
electorate should be able to cast the rascals out.
“There’s also a Realpolitik argument, which is that real
proportionality is not saleable because MPs would not stand for it. I think the
best way of making the case for electoral reform is not to say, look, this is a
brand new continental import. It has to be sold as an evolution of our
traditional British constituency-based electoral system to suit a country that
no longer has two-party politics, preserving the best of that system while
introducing the best features of other systems.”
Lipsey dismisses the claims of the first-past-the-post lobby
that AV-plus would result in permanent coalition government. “If you look at
past results, only two elections since 1945 would have had different outcomes
under the system recommended by Jenkins. Ted Heath would not have won an overall
majority in 1970 and John Major would not have won an overall majority in 1992.
Otherwise, the results would have been the same: Labour majorities in 1945, 1950,
1966 and 1997, Tory majorities in 1951, 1955, 1959, 1979, 1983 and 1987, and
hung parliaments in 1964 and both 1974 elections.”
Lipsey is an articulate and persuasive advocate. He would
make an excellent spokesman for the reform camp during a referendum campaign.
At this point, however, the battle is to make sure that the referendum takes
place.
