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May 27, 2005
Fuck You
This week Tony Blair continued to listen and learn. This time he listened to our impassioned pleas for electoral reform, and learned to say Fuck You!Prior to Labour's 1997 election victory, the party's manifesto contained a commitment to hold a referendum on electoral reform:
An effective House of Commons
We believe the House of Commons is in need of modernisation and we will ask the House to establish a special Select Committee to review its procedures. Prime Minister's Questions will be made more effective. Ministerial accountability will be reviewed so as to remove recent abuses. The process for scrutinising European legislation will be overhauled.
The Nolan recommendations will be fully implemented and extended to all public bodies. We will oblige parties to declare the source of all donations above a minimum figure: Labour does this voluntarily and all parties should do so. Foreign funding will be banned. We will ask the Nolan Committee to consider how the funding of political parties should be regulated and reformed.
We are committed to a referendum on the voting system for the House of Commons. An independent commission on voting systems will be appointed early to recommend a proportional alternative to the first-past-the-post system.
Of course, once the first-past-the-post system had delivered a landslide for New Labour, that particular promise got as far as the publication of the Jenkins Report (which was subsequently left to gather dust on the shelf) and no further. 2001 and FPTP delivered another substantial majority, so electoral reform gathered dust for another 4 years.
Bringing matters up to date, the 2005 election delivered an overall Labour majority on the back of votes from less than half of the electorate. The biggest single recipient of votes was a notional none of the above, and in England Labour actually polled fewer votes than the Conservatives. Tactical voting was the order of the day, and the public made it clear that what they wanted was a more democratic form of representation.
Blair's response has been to effectively say fuck you to every person who believes in proportional representation, by replacing pro-PR MP Peter Hain with staunch anti-PR MP John Prescott as chair of the Common's commitee responsible for electoral reform.
The problem is that there is a chronic need to address poor turnout. But by blocking voting reform, New Labour has to find alternatives that can be portrayed as addressing the issue of disenfrachisement. Thus we ended up with the continuing fiasco that is postal voting. Rather than address the real issue, New Labour prefers to take a sticking plaster approach, leaving the wound to fester to the detriment of the body politic. Postal voting is not the solution to poor turnout, but when you've ruled out reform, the alternatives are few and far between.
What is puzzling is the motivation behind this commitee change. If Blair is not going stand at the next General Election, then why should he be concerned with whether or not voting reform goes ahead. As far as I can tell, there are two possible reasons.
1. This is a pre-handover gesture to Gordon Brown. If Brown is determined to stamp his mark on both the Labour Party and the Country, if Brownism is to replace Blairism, then Gordon will need a substantial majority. The only realistic way of guaranteeing such an outcome is to stick with FPTP.
2. This change is to ensure that a Blairite successor has at least a chance of governing with an overall majority, rather than presiding over a hung Parliament or a minority government.
Either way, Blair's listening and learning isn't what you or I would like it to be. And these actions show his contempt for democracy. This should bother you. If it does, check out Make My Vote Count, sign up and get campaigning. In spite of Charlie Falconer's condescending comments, the groundswell is real and will be listened to. As Lord Lipsey says,
People who support electoral reform do not, by their nature, throw bricks through windows or assault policemen, but we be doing a number of things over the next few weeks to demonstrate there is huge public support for change.
So get out there, get active and make a difference to make your vote count in the future.
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Posted by Clive on May 27, 2005 4:37 PM in the category Old Stuff