It is an exquisite irony that Gordon Brown, so determined to deny the British people the general election they obviously crave, has made the centrepiece of his (latest) relaunch an investigation into the Westminster voting system. Refusing to play the game, he launches a full-blown inquiry into its rules. It is the most insultingly scarlet of red herrings.
There appears to be a measure of support on the Labour side for the so-called ‘alternative vote’ procedure. Under this system, voters rank the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate secures more than half the votes cast, the one who has fewest first-preference votes has his or her votes re-allocated according to voters’ second preferences. This continues until one candidate has more than half.
Champions of the system claim that it is both ‘fair’ and preserves the constituency link. ‘AV’ was part of the solution proposed by the 1917 Speaker’s Conference on electoral law, and was endorsed by the House of Commons in 1930 (only to be wisely rejected by the Lords). The problem with the alternative vote, as Churchill observed, is that it allows an election to be decided by ‘the least important votes of the least important candidates’. In 1998, the Jenkins Commission on electoral reform also noted, correctly, that ‘so far from doing much to relieve disproportionality, [AV] is capable of substantially adding to it’. It has been estimated, for instance, that this system would have given Labour a majority of 213 rather than 179 in the 1997 election. Other than its tactical value to Mr Brown as a massive distraction — an intellectual fiddle to be played while Rome burns — it is hard to see what conceivable purpose there is in a grand debate on the ‘alternative vote’.
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