Interesting..

Have just been on Grumpy RN, where it appears that civil servants from Westminster have taken a jolly to New Zealand to look at their voting system. Now, the voting system that New Zealand works is the same as the Scottish one; a mix of FPTP and a regional top up vote. (The New Zealand local elections are on this year, so I suppose that's why they went there to see it in action.)Does this mean that Westminster are considering STV after all?!


PS New Zealand also hold elections for their District Health Boards, so maybe some of our MSPs and health board CEOs should take a trip out and observe..

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.

Building Bridges?

Ok , I'm back. And what brought me back was this article today in the Herald. Nicola Sturgeon and her Irish and Welsh counterparts have written a letter to Alan Johnston, asking why he has gone ahead with negotiations about pay deals with NHS workers, without referring to them, and asking him to hold back from any major decisions until they have been consulted. Now, some might see this as political posturing. But I don't see it that way. This is the nub of a far more complex and troubling problem that is the NHS.

The NHS in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has always had a life of its own. But the idea of the NHS was that it was just that; a national health service that delivered an agreed standard of health care across the UK. Over the past few years, England and the rest of the UK have moved further and further apart. England is much further down the road to privatisation than its UK counterparts, whereas the devolved parliaments have largely steered away from this. Wales in particular took a scunner to PFI deals; its parliament shut its Private Finance Unit in 2004. So the question is; is there any point trying to influence what is happening in England, or should we just burn the bridges and keep privatisation out at the border? Judging by this letter from the three health ministers, they have opted to go for influencing the English, rather than leave them to their own devices.

There may be a couple of reasons for this decision. Westminster controls the budget for Scotland (and NI and Wales) through the lump sum that it gets every year. Therefore it still controls Scotland's health budget, although indirectly. If the Scottish Government takes the decision to use central funding for things like the Southern General, it will have to take a bite out of the cake slice that Westminster gives it. Therefore, it cannot ignore what is going on down south.

Secondly, companies such as United Healthcare and Atos are no respectors of borders. If Scotland decides simply to put up the shutters, it might not be enough. Perhaps the fight does have to be taken to them.

The main difference between England and the rest of the UK at the moment, is that England is the only part of the UK that still has first-past-the-post. Consequently, things move much slower politically in England than they do here; there is no room for independents to jouk in and shake things up as the St Johns Livingston crowd did in Lothian. There is not a party in England that you could call the friend of the NHS at the moment, and it is extremely worrying that there is an agreed deafening silence on privatisation of health in England.

So should we burn the bridges or should we cross them to invade? I would go for a third option. England badly needs proportional representation, so that the voice of the ordinary English can be heard on this issue.I don't think the English want privatisation any more than we do. But the people who have not spoken yet, need to find their voice.