( Combined from two newsgroup postings: 10 and 17 June 2000. )
It's all very well for British Premier, Mr Blair to talk about individual opportunity with respect for the community - democracy, in other words - but his government has shown no respect for proper democratic rules in British elections.
Much of the fault for this is the ill legacy of the Plant report, which recommended different electoral systems for different British elections. Consequently, the British government has been pre-empting the reform debate by instituting its own 'PR' and other methods, at various levels of government.
The British mainland now has half a dozen undemocratic voting methods where one democratic method would do.
The Jenkins report got the message that the German system, adopted by New
Zealand, allowed a small party, holding the balance of power, to choose a
coalition.
Did the commission decide to abandon additional member systems? Not a bit of
it.
As a last ditch attempt to promote a hybrid system of monopolistic single
members and party list monopolies of the proportional count, the report
cobbled together an even more complicated system of 'alternative vote
top-up'.
The effect of this, speaking of successive elections as days of the week, would be that on sundays, tuesdays, thursdays and saturdays, the largest minority party would monopolise or hog government. And on mondays, wednesdays and fridays, a crucial small party could decide the coalition.
So, the Jenkins commission's idea of justice was to try to engineer a Buggin's turn between these two types of unjust government.
This is a system virtually no-one wanted but which British reformers
largely are campaigning for, because they are afraid that's all there's on
offer.
As a result, AV top-up goes noticably uncriticised by reformers.
But the anomalies of AV top-up are so rife that they would be exposed as a
laughing stock in a referendum. As a consequence, the referendum result would
at best be indecisive and afford no lasting constitutional settlement that
would secure general respect from the people or the politicians.
Mr Blair's alleged support, for the alternative vote ( as used in Australian elections ), falls back on a system thought by analysts to bind the splits of the left in Labor's favor. But the alternative vote, minus a top-up of the small party bosses candidates, is deeply flawed, on its own account.
As electoral expert, David Butler pointed out to the Jenkins commission,
the alternative vote is arbitrary.
Even one voter, changing between two runners-up ( neck and neck ), can change
which candidate's second preferences are re-distributed, and give a
disproportionately different complexion to the final result, including a
different winner.
Also, Churchill's famous remark, about the alternative vote, will always stick: the worst votes for the worst candidates. The worst candidates are those with the fewest first preferences and yet their second preferences are the ones deciding which leading candidate qualifies as having an over-all majority.
And Roy Jenkins' notorious remark in favor of the alternative vote cannot be defended with justice. He said words to the effect that people must often take second or third best in life, in jobs, housing and one's wife, and there is no reason why this should not be so in the electoral system.
This contention is grossly misleading. The point of the single transferable vote, STV ( which uses a proportional count of a preference vote ) is that a large majority of voters in a multi-member constituency are ensured their first preferences are elected.
Even in quite small Irish multi-member constituencies of three or four seats, some two-thirds of the representatives will be elected by first preferences, and nearly all the rest by second or high preferences. So, it's fair to say that something in the order of twice as many voters will have their first preferences elected, using STV compared to AV.
Even the published submissions to the Jenkins report showed substantial support for STV. And the report gave no statistical break-down of the mass of 'ordinary' people's preferences - making the excuse there were too many of them.
Foot-note (january 2008):
BBC Newsnight reported that the Brown government quietly dropped the Labour party's commitment to a referendum on proportional representation. But that it went almost unnoticed during the week of the Electoral Commission refering Peter Hain's deputy leader campaign funding for criminal investigation.
Hain vowed to clear his name and he is only one of a series of politicians to come under more or less serious scrutiny. Since then, a Tory MP received a suspension from the House of Commons and expulsion from the Tory party for hiring his family without their earning their keep.
Richard Lung