It is an exquisite irony that Gordon Brown, so determined to deny the British people the general election they obviously crave, has made the centrepiece of his (latest) relaunch an investigation into the Westminster voting system. Refusing to play the game, he launches a full-blown inquiry into its rules. It is the most insultingly scarlet of red herrings.
There appears to be a measure of support on the Labour side for the so-called ‘alternative vote’ procedure. Under this system, voters rank the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate secures more than half the votes cast, the one who has fewest first-preference votes has his or her votes re-allocated according to voters’ second preferences. This continues until one candidate has more than half.
Champions of the system claim that it is both ‘fair’ and preserves the constituency link. ‘AV’ was part of the solution proposed by the 1917 Speaker’s Conference on electoral law, and was endorsed by the House of Commons in 1930 (only to be wisely rejected by the Lords). The problem with the alternative vote, as Churchill observed, is that it allows an election to be decided by ‘the least important votes of the least important candidates’. In 1998, the Jenkins Commission on electoral reform also noted, correctly, that ‘so far from doing much to relieve disproportionality, [AV] is capable of substantially adding to it’. It has been estimated, for instance, that this system would have given Labour a majority of 213 rather than 179 in the 1997 election. Other than its tactical value to Mr Brown as a massive distraction — an intellectual fiddle to be played while Rome burns — it is hard to see what conceivable purpose there is in a grand debate on the ‘alternative vote’.
The voters are not crying out for a new electoral system. They are crying out for an election. And in this respect they show a considerably greater appreciation of what the polity now needs than does the governing party: a general election is required not as an act of collective vengeance upon the political class but as a historic punctuation mark and (to mix metaphors) a wholesale cleansing of the system. For what we have now is not only an insult to the electorate but deeply damaging to the national interest.
Consider what the Labour turmoil of the past fortnight has bequeathed to the rest of us: the country is led by a Prime Minister who is quite overtly on probation. Ludicrously, a politician who has been a familiar face at Westminster for a quarter-century, whose strengths and weaknesses have been known for many years, and whose methods are notoriously inflexible, promises that he will now ‘change’: that, aged 58, and with less than 12 months to go until the last possible date for the general election, he will transform himself into a quite different kind of person.
Far from resolving his difficulties, Mr Brown has simply postponed the moment of reckoning, and weakened himself gravely in the process. Nietzsche’s over-quoted aphorism — ‘that which does not kill us makes us stronger’ — does not always hold true. The PM held together his Cabinet only by yielding to its demands: denied his wish to instal Ed Balls in Number 11, he is hemmed in by Alistair Darling and David Miliband, and has in Alan Johnson a new Home Secretary who is explicitly recognised as the heir-apparent.
Mr Brown’s spin doctors insist that the coup failed and the matter has been settled once and for all. But the coup merely stalled. The Prime Minister has been left suspended in a political limbo, still vulnerable to instant removal at any moment. He faces dangerous by-elections in the seats vacated, respectively, by Ian Gibson and Michael Martin: Norwich North and Glasgow North East. He may yet have to perform a humiliating U-turn on the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail to prevent a potentially fatal backbench rebellion. Once again, the week of the party’s annual conference — in Brighton from 27 September — has been named as an (entirely arbitrary) deadline, by which the PM must have brought unity and purpose to the government. How often have such deadlines been set and ultimatums delivered? In truth, they have been the defining feature of Mr Brown’s unhappy premiership: it has been one long last-chance saloon.
The self-destruction of the Labour tribe would be a matter of anthropological fascination were it not that the party happens to be holding the country hostage. And this is no moment for Britain to be in the hands of a gang in apparently terminal decline, neurotically introspective, fatally self-absorbed. Britain faces dire economic problems, indebtedness on a terrifying scale, and has public services and infrastructure singularly ill-equipped for the needs of the 21st century. We are embroiled in a long-running conflict in Afghanistan and face a deadly Islamist terrorist threat within our own borders. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the only nation other than the United States that shoulders its full military responsibilities on the global stage, and a key member of the G8, Britain still punches above its weight — just about. But how ludicrous we have seemed to the rest of the world in the past fortnight: a banana republic engaged in a risible political farce.
In 1997, Tony Blair declared that New Labour was ‘the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole’. At the time, this claim sounded rather sinister. Now it seems merely preposterous. Labour is entitled to engage in self-immolation if it wishes, but it should let the rest of us go first. Please, Mr Brown: can we have our country back?
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