Gordon Brown's Labour conference speech in full | Politics | guardian.co.uk .
Brown's got this one horribly wrong:
There is now a stronger case than ever that MPs should be elected with the support of more than half their voters — as they would be under the Alternative Voting system. And so I can announce today that in Labour's next manifesto there will be a commitment for a referendum to be held early in the next Parliament it will be for the people to decide whether they want to move to the Alternative Vote.
Wrong system - ATV does not produce PR. Only the single transferable vote will do that. And the referendum should be next May - on the day of the general election.
His failure to pick winners continues - and he's now nearly out of time.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
You’re dead right Richard. AV is in my view even worse than First Past The Post; it has the disadvantage of a proportional system – complexity – without the advantage of actually being proportional.
I think we should take the multi-member system used in the Euro elections and just use that for Westminster elections – parliamentary constituencies would be (say) 7 times bigger than currently, and you’d elect 7 MPs to each one. That way, you’d stand a chance of having at least one Labour and/or Lib Dem MP in each constituency out where I live (Essex), or even a Green, rather than wall-to-wall Tories like we have at the moment.
I appreciate that a party list system has disadvantages, so I’m not especially dogmatic about this. But the system MUST be proportional for reform to be worth the time of day.
Absolutely correct that AV is the wrong system. This is a deeply cynical move designed to save the duopoly. It would reduce the representation of alternative points of view in parliament, and pile up crazy impregnable parliamentary majorities for the big 2 parties on a minority of first choice votes.
It is deliberately and cynically designed to ensure elections are limited to a choice between Pepsi and Coke forever.
Brown has always been utterly untrustworthy on electoral reform, and he was only ever going to do the right thing when we were holding a gun to his head and he was forced to do so.
This abysmal announcement on AV at least removes any lingering doubt that Labour might ever voluntarily do the right thing.
A hung parliament was always our only chance of proper electoral reform, and now we know it.
Our only chance is to do what we can to work out how a hung parliament may happen, make the information available to voters, and hope & pray that the electoral arithmetic gives us one.
Then time to pull the trigger and bury Brown, as he deserves, and get ready to install a new Labour leader who will do the deal acceptable to us on proper electoral reform.
On a more pedantic technical note, AV is a form of single transferable vote, but with the fatal design flaw of being for single member constituencies. Meanwhile, there are other means of achieving PR than STV in multi-member constituencies, but none of them are as good or put as much power in the hands of the voter.
At last! Something to agree upon!
AV is a pretty daft voting system. Perhaps its main “advantages” for Gordon are retaining power for politicians, and showing that reform is on the agenda.
STV with multiple member constituencies is fairly easy and free from defects. Which may relate to why it has just been resoundingly defeated in British Columbia, Canada. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/bcvotes2009/story/2009/05/12/bc-election-stv.html This referendum on STV was fascinating to watch by virtue of the amount of confusion and disinformation being peddled on all sides. Something to be wary of if the UK ever gets that far.