The Spectator

The snare of PR

Tony Blair will now be wholly reliant on Scottish MPs to rubber-stamp English legislation

If Michael Howard were a football manager, he would be entitled to some very bitter post-match expletives. Tony Blair’s respectable-sounding majority of 67 cannot cover for the brutal geometry of the election result. Labour, with a mere 36 per cent of the popular vote, lower than any previously commanded by a British government, secured 356 seats; the Tories, with 32.3 per cent of the vote, a mere 197 seats. As if that were not reason enough to cry ‘We wuz robbed!’, 41 of Labour’s seats are in Scotland; the result being that Tony Blair will now be wholly reliant on Scottish MPs to rubber-stamp English legislation which will have no effect on their constituents. So blatantly unfair is the make-up of the new Parliament that the Tories have won sympathy from unlikely sources. ‘The system is viciously biased against the Tories,’ thunders Labour peer Lord Lipsey.

How tempting it would be to agree with Lord Lipsey, to cry foul at Blair’s elective dictatorship. Tempting, but unwise. True, there is certainly some urgent work for the Boundary Commission — it is absurd that even after a reduction in the number of Scottish seats, one constituency, Na H-Eileanan An Iar, or the Outer Hebrides as most Scots know it, has an electorate of just 21,576. This is just a fifth of those registered to vote in the Isle of Wight constituency. But boundary-readjustment is not what Lord Lipsey has in mind. Rather, he chairs something called the Make Votes Count Campaign, a cross-party Parliamentary group which advocates proportional representation. It is a cause which, besides the usual hordes of Lib Dems, appears to be drawing increasing numbers of Conservatives, among them Lord Patten, who was quoted in the Independent this week criticising the present electoral system for gifting Blair ‘crazy majorities’. Even Ferdinand Mount, Lady Thatcher’s sometime chief policy wonk, has leant his weight to the campaign for PR.

No matter how hard done by Conservatives feel about the election result, PR is a concept which they should oppose strongly.

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