I don’t buy into the idea that with the AV ‘no’ vote, electoral reform is simply off the table ‘for a generation’ and the issue settled. Of people who care for electoral reform, too many knew that AV wasn’t the ‘real deal’ next to the option of a proportional system. It would be difficult to make the case that the argument for retaining FPTP had been won – despite the resounding rejection of the meagre option presented.
On top of this, any referendum on another voting system will likely come the same way the AV referendum came – through a back-room coalition deal in a hung parliament. In a sense, electoral reform was never really on the table as an issue. The Lib Dems simply put it there during hung parliament negotiations. So whether the issue is dead or alive in the popular consciousness is frankly irrelevant, as to an extent it was never really important to a lot of people.
But there are reasons specific to Britain that will make it very difficult for any referendum on a proportional system to be won after the ‘no’ vote against AV. This is because of the little mentioned fact that the two most likely candidates for a proportional system in the UK are both based on AV. These systems are AV+ (“Alternative Vote top-up”) – recommended by Labour’s Jenkins commission, and STV (“the Single Transferrable Vote”) which is the system backed in the Liberal Democrat manifesto and the Electoral Reform Society.
AV+ is AV but with a second vote top-up regional list tacked on to make the result more proportional. STV is AV preference voting, but with multi-member constituencies which help keep the result proportional. What both these systems have in common is that AV is, in one way or another, a huge part of them. They are not just similar, or related. In both, the mechanism of the alternative vote is most definitely fully intact as a component of a larger system. AV+ even keeps the name, and STV is practically a synonym.
It should be fairly obvious that the rejection of AV will cause incredible problems for the ‘Yes’ side in any referendum on either of these systems. As we saw last week, in a referendum on an issue that most people have little knowledge of and care little about, campaigns with a catchy ‘hook’ do very well indeed. “We’ve already voted on this system and rejected it by a huge margin” is as catchy a hook as any – even if it isn’t really true and is irrelevant. Even simple association with the ‘loser’ system AV will put any ‘yes’ campaign for either system off on the wrong foot from the start.
There are other PR systems of course, but none of them have quite the same following in the UK as STV and AV+. AV+ and STV are the most popular systems for a reason – they are the best ones. The Additional Member System (AMS) used to elect the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly is also a contender, but has its problems – at the constituency level it is FPTP where it shares most of its problems – the ‘spoiler effect’, wasted votes, split votes, and leading political parties at a national level to be disproportionately concerned with marginal constituencies.
Pure party-list PR is another option, but there are legitimate arguments against it – it is the caricature of ‘proportional representation’ of the Tory MP’s popular imagination – with no constituency link, candidate lists drawn up by parties, and no real space for independents. It is probably still better than FPTP, but it isn’t a great system.
It isn’t as if a referendum on PR would need any help being defeated. If you thought that the establishment was out in force to fight against AV, you’ll find even fewer members of the Labour Party who are willing to step up to defend a proportional system.
Whether AV would have been a ‘stepping stone’ to PR was always a debatable claim. But the defeat of the referendum is almost certainly going to make it more difficult to eventually get.
