Out of Proportion

I see some people are aghast that Keir Starmer has rejected the Labour Party conference vote to adopt what they regard as the open goal of proportional representation. The fact that they think such a system would be an answer to the political impasse in which most modern democracies now find themselves reveals much about the dearth of political savvy in the membership.

How would it work, I ask myself. Seriously, how? How would you allocate seats, and in whose name would those incumbents vote? Do we just vote for a party then have the bureaucrats divvy up the seats based on total numbers? That is, if the Libdems get enough votes to claim 20 seats in Parliament, how is it decided to which local area area they are appointed? On that basis we might see that most Labour of seats, Liverpool, being gifted a Conservative MP, which while it may be fun for the rest of us would be a death sentence to the duly elected.

If local candidates stand in constituency seats are they then awarded victories based on a lottery system against total votes cast? So a traditional Labour seat gets a Labour MP, if sufficient national seats are won, even though the local vote perhaps swung towards another party. Because it strikes me that we already have a functioning form of proportional representation – the person with the largest proportion of votes wins.

Or maybe we should do away with constituencies altogether, rendering boundary reform obsolete and preventing the sitting party of government from fiddling with the demographics. In which case most MPs would come via the Oxford PPE route and reside in London… and likely tend towards ‘progressive’ stances. Oh how the Shires would wail!

The more I think about proportional representation, the more I wonder what it means, and more particularly, what its supporters think it means. Would it really be a benign, closest-thing-to-direct-democracy system, in which every decision better represents the wishes of the unconsulted majority? I thought that was called populism; apparently the harbinger of fascism. Or would it mean just endless coalitions in which ideals were traded for the sake of cabinet positions?

And what would a government under PR look like? Would we have, instead of single party government, a cabinet selected on proportional grounds? If we think the last few governments have exhibited a distinct lack of unity, imagine what will happen when we let the foxes into the hen house… and then invite along a motley assembly of pigs, donkeys and aardvarks to boot. It’s like the regular calls to adopt a Basic Minimum Wage – everybody seems to have their own idea about what this actually means, but nobody knows how it could work.

"Something tells me they're expecting a low voter turnout"

Some say that under PR we can make every vote count. I don’t see that at all. Just as now, you can wish as hard as you like that your vote – your specific vote – will elect your favoured candidate, but under PR just as under FPTP there will be winners and losers and those who voted for the losers will feel their vote didn’t count at all. 

I have a feeling that voters may, more than ever, turn away from engagement with the running of the country. In only the second nationwide referendum held in the UK, In 2011 the people voted against a system that was, by another name, proportional representation. Lest the irony is lost on feeble minds, when given the chance to vote party-free for PR the population overwhelmingly rejected it.

Huge Rant

With the impossible to prove but almost certain collusion of the postal vote Labour held on comfortably to Erdington in last week’s by-election, installing a muslim activist, black-first MP in Westminster. With crime and corruption rife among its back benchers, it is only a matter of time, some have surmised, before the wearing of an ankle tag in the Commons becomes de rigueur for Labour members. And the vote machine of the left will continue to ensure a steady supply of unsavoury characters to its ranks.

But how do we solve politics? Wealthy parties like the Conservatives hardly cover themselves in glory, with a legion of investigative reporters uncovering scandals such as links to party donations, cash for questions and honours for sale, etc. It is hardly surprising that representatives of the party of individual responsibility, small state and enterprise should have associations with the successful, but how hard is it, for goodness’ sake, to keep a lid on it? The least we should expect from the Tories is competence in covering one’s tracks.

The institutionalising of governance, the very notion of a career politician should be anathema, but amateurs have little chance of breaking through. For a start, there is the no small matter of raising funds to campaign. And then there is the cost of a media team to rid history of your less savoury interactions on social media. Somebody has to scour your records for hints of Nazism or Communism, such as that march you went on one time as a student. Others have to vet every last member of your family and all your acquaintances to grub up and eradicate the merest whiff of unsavoury thought crime.

Who would even want to stand, given that even the cleanest and most honourable inevitably have skeletons in the family cupboard which will be paraded by the tabloids for the nation to see? Why, you would have to be as shameless as the lurid Keith Vaz. Or as apparently unselfconscious as Chris - Captain Underpants – Bryant. In plain, you would really not have to give a shit what people think of you… or be so stupid as to not realise, naming no names though many spring to mind.

Proportional Representation, some cry, that will fix it. How? I mean, really, how? When you really stop to think about it I can’t imagine anything much worse. You would have an endless string of vainglorious misfits with the most bizarre sets of beliefs, being thrust onto the national stage via social media popularity contests, only to be toppled in days as reality dawns. You would have card-carrying, blood-red Stalins strutting their poisonous stuff alongside neo-Nazis in lederhosen while the grown-ups are trying to get the business done.

And even those grown ups will desperately water down otherwise sound policies in order to find a consensus among the unwilling. If governance by proportional representation had a colour it would be beige. No, worse, it would be a colour that even fans of beige thought dull and lifeless. If it’s PR you want you may as well join the ranks of the LimpDems and attend their next national conference at some village hall in the back of beyond.

And as for government by celebrity, people are actually suggesting that Hugh Grant would make an excellent Prime Minister. See, this is why so many people relay ought not to vote. When they are swayed by the clumsy and naïve political punditry of people like Gary Lineker or want other rich, ex-kickball players like Gary Neville, or ‘comedians’ like Eddie Izzard to enter politics you realise that they simply don’t take the world of Westminster seriously. Given the clown palace it has become there is little wonder.

Maybe we should restrict further who can vote; but who would decide? The left would allow babes in arms to scrawl their ‘X’, the right would want only people carrying British flags. Even the apparently intelligent would restrict the vote to their own cortege, and then we would end up with a sombre resurrection of British communism, in the grand old academic tradition. Let the wealth makers decide and we really would end up with the new world order so many are afraid of.

Nope, on reflection, we have, as Churchill once observed, the worst form of government except for everything else that has been tried. So instead of trying to bring down the system maybe we need to get smart and do what the lefties have done, reasonably successfully, for generations and insert our own activists into the system. Reform Parliament from the ground up and rebuild it not in their image, but in ours.

The PR Business

It’s the Americans who declare they have government of the people, for the people, by the people, but increasingly they are realising they have no such thing. And just as we never had the equivalent of the Gettysburg Address, neither have we ever, really, had any such form of government. We have, instead, a government and an opposition, loosely formed around class divides, with neither side truly representative of the people they supposedly, er, represent.

To the notional right we have the Conservative and Unionist Party, originally comprised of landowners and wealthy potentates but now, increasingly recruiting from the lower orders. Yes, Eton old boys are still prominent but once upon a time that alma mater would have been a given. The main thing people hate about The Tories is the belief that the patronage from rich donors means they are always and only on the side of the elite.

At least, that is the relentlessly lazy attack line from the other side. Labour, from its inception took the side of the working man, but its parliamentary party is now overwhelmingly comprised of Oxford PPE graduates, former hardened trades unionists, and various other adherents to dogged Marxist dogma. With the exception, possibly, of wanting ownership of the means of production, Labour appears to have no firm principles. Instead it insists on fragmenting along numerous identity-based fault lines.

And that’s it; that’s your choice; those are your only options. Unless you think that tactically voting for the various unelectable minor parties – the Greens, Libdems, Monster Raving Loonies, etc – rather cleverly prevents one of the others winning a seat. Much was made of Ukip’s huge surge in the 2015 general election, taking 12.6% of the vote and winning precisely one seat. Proportional Representation, they claimed, would have meant some 70+ seats and a place at the table.

But it wouldn’t be an answer. It really wouldn’t. PR would mean that every election resulted in a grand shuffle of the fringe players, those who had got in on a surge in local popularity, or (more likely) partisan funding for nefarious purposes. A large part of the parliamentary seats would be held for single terms by inexperienced political players. That’s great, you might think; we’ve had enough of career politicians. And you’d have something of a point, except I’m pretty sure you’d opt for a career dentist rather than somebody who just fancied having a go.

No, I’m afraid we are stuck with a political class who love the game, who are steeped in playing parliamentary poker, unblinking through a haze of cigar smoke and constantly checking out the mirrors. The unprepared have no chance – as evinced by many of the gaffs of Labours child MPs like Zara Sultana and Nadia Whittome who regularly parade their callow naivety for all to jeer at. But were they not using the amplifier of their party for their tiny voices they would have no voice at all.

Under PR those who held seats relentlessly would form their own allegiances – I’d guess along Labour and Conservative lines – and the power would forever be held by them, as now. But the weird coalitions that we would have to endure between the start of the PR experiment and the eventually return to a form of uneasy vaguely-left/vaguely-right sanity would be a nightmare. Imagine two, or three parliamentary terms with no direction; it would be much like the European Union.

Oh, except the EU has no real democratic structure, all the power residing in the star chamber of a handful of individuals acting as a monolithic autocracy. When, in 2011, we did have a referendum on an alternative voting system it was overwhelmingly rejected by those who bothered to turn out; and only 42% of the electorate bothered anyway. My conclusion is: not only would PR be doomed to failure, it also, ironically, wouldn’t even be popular enough for people to vote for it. Meet the new bosses; same as the old bosses.