AV - The Alternative Vote changing politics

On 5 May, you will be asked to vote in the first referendum we’ve ever had on the way we elect MPs in Britain. It is a choice between business as usual and a different system, the Alternative Vote. Writes Lord Navnit Dholakia.

The change is extremely simple: people will vote for constituency MPs as they do now but they would be asked list candidates in order of preference rather than with a single X. But it’s a small change that can make a big difference because it will make politicians seek extra votes, outside of their core support on which they’ve been able to rely for so long, until they attract the backing of a majority of their voting constituents.
 
The debate has been heating up in recent weeks and the arguments going to and fro deserve some time. The first arguments we heard were about cost, with allegations that an AV system will involves costly voting machines. It actually won’t cost anything more as votes are counted manually as now and there will be no need for costly voting machines.

It has been said that AV is untried and exotic, un-British even. In fact, it is widely used in a variety of British institutions where they have internal democratic elections: political parties, trade unions, charities, boards of directors and even within Parliament to select the Speaker and Select Committee Chairs. It begs the question that if it’s good enough for the Prime Minister to get elected as Conservative Party Leader (under First Past the Post, David Davis would have won) and for MPs to use in Parliament, why shouldn’t the British public have it as well.

It is often forgotten that Britain would already have an AV system had it not been blocked by unelected hereditary peers in the House of Lords in 1931.
 
It’s not un-British reform at all, it is an update to a system that no longer works for us. We only ended up with the current system in the 1950s and although it worked then, it doesn’t work anymore. Back in the 50s, over 90% of the people voted for Labour or the Conservatives.

First Past the Post (FPTP) works perfectly in a two-party system. But we don’t live in those days anymore: less than two-thirds voted for the Conservatives or Labour in May 2010 but you don’t see those people represented by many MPs: a few Liberal Democrats, a couple of Nationalists and a Green MP is all that third of people who didn’t like Labour or Tory candidates enough to vote for them got.
 
FPTP means that there are many, many constituencies out there where people have an MP who is supported by less than three out of ten of their constituents! All those other people’s votes, who didn’t support that MP, are wasted and they don’t count. So people campaign like that, saying it’s a two-horse race and hoping people won’t vote for the candidate they want – but for the candidate they dislike least but has a chance of becoming the MP. That cannot be right.
 
Under AV, everyone’s vote starts to matter because you can make clear who you prefer as your MP. If the frontrunner doesn’t get half of the vote, the candidate with the fewest votes will get eliminated and those people’s second preferences get re-allocated in the second round of counting in which everybody else’s votes get counted again as well. That continues until one person emerges with the backing of half the constituency.
 
AV will mean that MPs can no longer rely on a small majority of constituents, on their core support, to get elected but they will have to reach out to people they can currently ignore. It’s a very British reform: an evolution, not a revolution. It’s the way we’ve always changed our system: gradually increasing the number of people allowed to vote, gradually lowering the age at which people can vote, gradually eliminating seats where you had two MPs and gradually abolishing the right of people to vote in more than one constituency if they owned property and so on.
 
One of the accusations against AV which may have worried you the most is that the new system will favour extreme parties like the BNP. I would like to assure you this is not the case, in fact: the opposite is true.

Currently, in a perfect storm of low-turnout, voter apathy and disappointment with incumbent local councillors, the BNP can get elected because you only need a small number of votes, just one more than the runner-up. Under AV, the BNP and other extremist parties will have to get half of the voters to back them – this is so far out of the realms of possibility that the BNP wants people to vote no.
 
That is why the Muslim Council of Britain, Operation Black Vote and the Hindu Culture and Heritage Centre are all strongly backing the Yes campaign and are calling on you to back it too.
 
I passionately believe that this is the most important vote any of us will see in a generation – to make our voting system work for us. So if you want to change the way we do politics, if you want a system where people reach out beyond their core support, if you want a system which will end the complacency some MPs have gotten into and work harder to get your vote and a system where your voice because stronger and is no longer ‘wasted’, then vote “yes” on 5 May.
 
Lord Dholakia is Deputy Leader, Liberal Democrats