I always know when a campaign is fishy when I get unsolicited mail from actors or TV 'personalities' telling me what I ought to do. Just recently I received some junk mail (in the truest sense of the word) telling me to vote 'yes' in the AV referendum. The arguments advanced were simplistic and threadbare, not because they necessarily are so but because almost all the space on the leaflet was given to photos of 'celebrities' endorsing the campaign: Steven Fry, Colin Firth, Helen Mirren and Benjamin Zephaniah amongst them. A ship of fools if ever there was one.
Steven Fry was best and most amusingly described as ' a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person should be'. Colin Firth's acting skills seem to extend no further than the deadpan Bridget Jones/George V expression of vacuity which he employs in every role. Still, at least he has royalty-obsessed Americans to compensate for this paucity of talent by awarding him an Oscar for doing virtually nothing in a film. His 'performance' in the King's Speech reminded me of 'Bob Fleming', the Fast Show character who couldn't talk without coughing. Maybe Harry Enfield would have done a better job.
Elections are a serious business. The acting profession rarely so. So AV should be judged on its merits, not on its endorsements; on its efficacy and fairness both in its own right and relative to the FPTP system.
The precedents for the AV system are not good. At the moment the only countries in the world that have it are Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Australia. Not exactly resoundingly popular then. Australia has as much cronyism and corruption as we do, if New South Wales is anything to go by, and apparently they want to ditch AV.
There's no doubt that the British political system is totally dysfunctional and needs overhauling. I'm just unconvinced that AV is the way to do it. If anything I fear it could be used as a fig leaf to cover the failings of the current setup, and to distract from real reform.
The motives of both sides in this debate are suspect. They are supporting or opposing the Alternative Voting System (or the 'Preferential Voting System' to give it its correct name) because of the electoral advantage or disadvantage they perceive for their own favoured party. So the Tory and Labour bigwigs favour FPTP because they want general elections to keep giving them a majority in the House of Commons; the actors and their ship of fools want AV because they think 'progressive' parties will benefit; Lib Dems and some Labour supporters support it for the same reason; Lib Dems in particular are facing meltdown and hope this will rescue them (it won't). Likewise the Greens think they might gain but the BNP fear they will be shut out; these two parties are campaigning accordingly.
You couldn’t expect politicians to be any less cynical, with all their hypocritical cant about 'fairness'. They want power, pure and simple. The advantage of AV is that voters of smaller parties cannot be so easily ignored - the preferential transfer in the second and successive rounds ensures this, and their supporters have made much of it. Except that they can be ignored in many seats, as recent studies widely quoted in the press, have shown. Studies like this in the Guardian have shown that election results might only change relative to FPTP where voting margins are tight.
But this is where some unfairness seems to creep in, which to me makes AV less convincing. Given that the least popular candidates are eliminated first, their second preferences get counted before the second preferences of voters of popular parties. So if you vote Green, BNP or UKIP as a first choice you have a handy second vote that you know will also count. The second choices of voters who have returned the more popular candidates are extremely unlikely to have their second choices counted at all. Fair? Perhaps not.
The alleged 'advantage' of FPTP, that it returns 'strong' governments, seems a little disingenuous, however. The question has to be asked: strong for whom? For the electorate? Maybe. But I think it's 'strong' for the party machines and apparatchiks who inhabit them, don't you think? I mentioned that the British system is dsyfunctional, but so are its parties. They long ago ceased to faithfully represent large swathes of the electorate as they scrambled around for the mythical 'centre ground', aping each other in their attempts to do so. (Cameron, remember, was the 'heir to Blair'.)
What needs reform is not so much our electoral system, which allows just one choice for everyone, but our outdated political parties and our absurd parliamentary whips. The main British parties are walking cadavers, zombie parties which should have died a long time ago due to lack of support and membership but which are kept alive by dodgy millionaires, state subsidy and an uncritical and flattering press. Have you seen the membership of the Conservatives? If you were aged 65 in that club you'd be considered youthful. Labour long ago abandoned the working class.
The problem with AV (and any system other than FPTP) is that it encourages policy-making and deal-cutting after an election, rather than before it. So any coalition is not really tested at the polls by the electorate, but rather put together by people like Lord Mandelson or Eric Pickles. Coalitions should be formed before a vote if possible, rather than after it. The last election was unusual in that coalitions are so rarely needed in a FPTP system. And the outcome was pretty fair - the public wanted Labour out, but didn't quite have enough faith in the Tories. Hence compromise.
FPTP is far from perfect but the alternatives, especially AV, encourage deal-making and resultant policies which are tested less frequently (if ever) at the polls. Alliances made this way can do a disservice to democracy. The Jenkins-Heath agreement of the 1970s pushed through liberalising policies that were concocted after elections and untested at the polls. The Fast forward to today and policies on Europe, tax and health that are currently being pursued are equally untested by public opinion. AV is unlikely to change any of this, and may make it worse.
The two main parties have had their day and should, like the old Liberals or Whigs, be consigned to the dustbin of history. I think Britain needs a new (or several new) right-of-centre parties, and at least one new left-of-centre one. Parties outside Labour and the Tories seem to inhabit the lunatic fringe. Given that 'left' and 'right' are increasingly blurred and meaningless, especially where issues like civil liberties, armed intervention and the EU are concerned, new parties which genuinely address people's concerns would be welcome. Will they arise? It looks a long way off, but public disillusionment and falling membership may kill off the old parties.
Rather than tinker with the voting system to satisfy Nick Clegg and his Lib Dem followers, it's the party system that should be overhauled. FPTP has served us pretty well. The constitution also needs looking at. In the USA, one of Britain's first colonies, they have kept the old English political system. An elected Executive, answerable to an elected Legislature, with an (appointed) Judiciary to interpret the Constitution. It has its flaws but MPs in the US (that is Members of Congress) actually have something to do: they hold the President to account. It's the checks and balances system. By contrast our MPs are like overpaid drones, doing their parties' bidding, beholden to the whips and ignoring their constituents. Corruption is rife (or 'expenses' as we euphemistically call it). All MPs here do is select a Prime Minister (although if Ed Milliband becomes PM they won't even have done that).
The old parties' monopoly on democracy should be broken, and the parties themselves allowed to whither and die. Elected primaries to select MPs would be a positive start. FPTP should be kept, or if replaced at all then a full-blooded PR system should be properly considered; not this fudge, foisted on us merely as a sop to the soppy Lib Dems.
And as for those actors….
Benjamin who? Apparently he's a black Rastafarian 'poet', whose best known poem refers contemptuously to George V's daughter as 'Mrs Queen', which of course instantly endeared him to the liberal establishment. Amusingly, the 'yes' campaign dropped his black face from the leaflets distributed outside London. They didn't want to upset the whiteys in the shires, obviously. Faced with this blatant example of racism the 'yes' campaign scrambled around for a justification, which of course never materialised. Perhaps this gives lie to one of the 'yes' campaigns central claims, that AV will shut out the BNP and other extremist parties. But FPTP already shuts them out, so what's the argument?
There is an absurdity in taking advice on whom or what to vote for from vacuous 'actors', most of whom, like Steven Fry, are vastly overrated, overpaid and under-talented. Why would anyone take advice from someone whose 'job' is pretending to be something or someone they're not? I remember several years ago getting another leaflet with a message from Fry telling me that it was a 'frightening thought' that the Conservatives could soon win power from Labour. Frightening for Mr Fry, perhaps. How much more of taxpayers' and licence fee-payers' money does he want?
Sometimes absurd heights can be scaled: during the 2004 US Presidential Election, Guardian readers were encouraged to write to voters in an American state, urging them to reject George W Bush. Their arrogance was breathtaking. If I were an American I doubt I'd have been W's biggest fan, but I was still delighted to see the voters of the state (whose name escapes me) resoundingly returning George W. I believe some strategists think that the Guardian readers' campaign might just have swung it for him. Now there's a thought, Benjamin.
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