SHOULD WE HAVE PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION?

There are arguments put up by the, mostly self-interested, defenders of “first past the post”. First past the post is the current system for electing Members of the House of Commons, under which the candidate who gets the most votes wins the seat. These are not to be on the basis that it is a fair system, or even that it is a democratic system, but rather that it is the system of voting which has traditionally produced a strong government. This is said to be unlike many European countries which have proportional representation; Italy being the example often quoted.

There are increasing difficulties with this defence of first past the post. One is that it is not very historic. Before the Second World War there were often coalitions and, in any case, the current party alignment cannot sensibly be considered as going back before the re-establishment of the Conservative Party in 1922 over the issue of Irish Independence.

The defence also suffers from the difficulty that our Nation’s social conditions have now changed and a smaller proportion of the electorate is voting. Even during General Elections the results frequently show no more than about 60% turnout of the registered electorate. This is a registered electorate which probably only represents 80% of those who are eligible to be registered as electors.

Also the support for parties other than Labour and the Conservatives across Great Britain has been steadily increasing. This is not only in the striking cases of the nationalist votes in Scotland and Wales, but also in England.

Also the two main post-war Establishment parties, the Conservative and Labour Parties, have ceased in any meaningful way to be mass membership parties. In the late 1950’s the Conservatives had over 2½ million paid up members and Labour had nearly 2 million, whereas the Conservatives now have perhaps 100,000 paying members (if you allow for all their various concessions) and Labour may now have 150,000 paid up members. The Parties themselves are therefore no longer either representative of, or even in touch with significant strands of public opinion. Indeed both parties are now more representative of what the commentator and journalist Peter Oborn called the elitist “Political Class” rather than of any strand of democratic populism.

In these circumstances it is not perhaps surprising even if regrettable that the leaderships of both of these increasingly unrepresentative parties are anxious to hang on to the increasingly undemocratic first past the post.

To illustrate how undemocratic the system is, it is worth considering that Tony Blair won his last landslide majority in the House of Commons in 2005 with the votes of just 21.6% of the electorate.

David Cameron, despite the current unequal size of some constituencies favouring Labour, has won his parliamentary majority with the votes of just over 26% of the electorate.

It is therefore obvious that the “first past the post system” has a tendency to clothe the Establishment party with the votes of only about a quarter of the registered electorate with the parliamentary appearance of being a democratic majority.

Consider also in the recent General Election the numbers of votes required to elect a Liberal Democrat, a Green, SNP, UKIP, Conservative or Labour.

Here are the figures:-

This is a voting system whose democratic credentials are increasingly threadbare.

It is in these circumstances that parties like the English Democrats, and, indeed, all of those who care for the health of our county’s democracy and for the ideal that the political system should deliver policies which are in accordance with the majority of our Nation, are calling for proportional representation.

There are a variety of systems of proportional representation, the details of which could easily run to the contents of a full (and tedious) text book. Suffice to say that almost all of them deliver results which would be much more representative of the political will of the People of our Nation. As most European political systems show, when not tested to destruction by EU idiocies, (such as poor suffering Greece), proportional representation produces reasonably stable governments which are a better reflection of their country’s national will than our current electoral system.

Robin Tilbrook

Chairman

English Democrats