Knowing Your AV from Your Elbow - the Lib Dems and PR

So now that the Lib Dems have sold their soul to the Conservatives for PR, what are they actually going to get for it? There's talk that the Conservatives might agree to AV, (Alternative Vote). It's being touted as proportional representation. It's not. It's a slightly more sophisticated FPTP system and will not usher in the new politics for Westminster if it's introduced. Let me explain why.

The problem with the FPTP system is that the country is divided into discrete parts, or constituencies. Each constituency is only allowed one MP, so regardless of how many votes that the Lib Dems may get across the country, that's not going to translate into seats.

Under AV, a vote can be transferred to another candidate. AV is the system used by political parties to elect their leader; it's also known as 'Instant Run Off'. The voting goes through several rounds, the least popular in each round dropping off until one candidate holds 50% or more of the vote. Now here's the problem. If you vote first preference for one of the big parties; Labour or Conservative, your second, third and fourth preferences will be unavailable to other smaller parties. It is only when your candidate is eliminated in a round, that it transfers to someone else. And because there is only one seat available and thus only losers that get eliminated, this means that the biggest parties hold on right until the final round. So votes will transfer from smaller to bigger parties, but not the other way round and thus you are in much the same position as FPTP.

The single transferable vote system is different. Under this system, there is more than one seat available in each area,(a multi member system) and when a candidate reaches a certain number of votes, they get elected,drop out and their surplus votes pass onto the next round. So what a party has to do is to reach a quota of votes through the rounds, say 20%; once they have accumulated that, they gain a seat and drop out. This would make a substantial difference to Westminster; the Lib Dems would have far more seats and it would be much more representative of how Britain actually votes.

So why aren't the Lib Dems pushing this? One of the factors that they may be considering is that using STV in a multi member system does tend to lead to a larger number of MPs. This is because you are trying to balance a national preference for a party, with a local preference for a particular candidate. For example, the BNP got enough votes regionally in London to get an MP under PR, but who would that MP represent? And what area would want them? The way we get round this in Scotland is that we have a 'mixed member system'. This means that 73 candidates are elected in the traditional FPTP system and then 56 are elected on the larger regional vote. But this means we have 129 MSPs, compared with 59 MPs. That's more money and more expense. Westminster would probably double in size if PR proper was brought in and in the wake of the expenses scandal, that ain't going to be popular.

The Lib Dems have some choices to make. Increasing the number of MPs is not maybe the way to win friends and influence people just now and so introducing electoral change gradually, looks more attractive. But given that they have gone into coalition with the Tories and alienated a large section of their vote, they may not get another chance to change the system and noone is going to thank them for replacing one form of FPTP for another. It's now or never for the Lib Dems and it has to be STV or bust. If they manage it, it may be the only benefit that the UK receive from what has been an uninspiring and negative election.