High Peak Liberal Democrats
Tim Farron MP
The decision by what remains of the Labour high command to vote against legislation bringing a referendum on the Alternative Vote is one of the most hypocritical and staggeringly self-interested political decisions in recent years.
After 13 years of promising reform, in which precious little materialised, each and every Labour MP campaigned at this election on the promise of a referendum on AV. That referendum has now been proposed by the Coalition Government and a Bill to make it happen put forward, yet Labour's shadow cabinet has now decided to oppose the legislation.
What an astonishing decision.
It is even more astonishing given that most of the party's leadership candidates have publicly said they back AV. So what on Earth is going on behind the doors of Labour HQ to make them break their manifesto commitment?
Panic, I would venture, with heavy doses of political opportunism and naked self-interest thrown in. They claim their opposition is because they fear the proposal to make constituency sizes more equal, which is being put forward as part of the Bill, is a politically motivated move to put them at a disadvantage.
What no Labour member has explained to me or anyone else is why they are opposed to making everyone's vote count equally. Could it be that they know that they have an entrenched advantage with the current system? Or could it be that they fear it will mean the end of their cosy, safe seats that they expected to keep for life?
When the expenses scandal was exposed last year, there was a clear correlation between the size of an MP's majority and the scale of the abuses that took place. Not that every MP with a safe seat abused their expenses, but they were certainly more likely to - and Labour has a lot of safe seats.
Put simply, these are not good reasons to oppose legislation designed to make the voting system fairer and to makes votes across the country count more equally. They are not reasons grounded in principle.
When it comes to putting self-interest ahead of principle on voting reform, Labour has form. Despite years of talking about changing the voting system, Labour kept the creaking, out-of-date First Past The Post system while it suited them. It brought Tony Blair and his party huge majorities with mere fractions of the popular vote. They even appointed the hugely respected Roy Jenkins to carry out a review of the voting system in 1997 and then chose to ignore the AV-based model he proposed.
Despite their comprehensive defeat this May, the old system still favoured Labour, with its MPs still needing fewer votes to get elected than Conservatives, and far, far fewer than Liberal Democrats.
In all the calculations about whether or not to support this Bill, Labour appears to have paid little regard to the bigger issue that is at stake here: whether or not the Alternative Vote is a fairer and more democratic way of electing our parliament. Under AV every MP will need to have the backing of at least 50 percent of their constituents in order to be elected, whereas under the current system many MPs are comfortably elected with barely a third of the people they represent backing them.
AV eliminates the need for tactical voting and means that people can vote the way they want to without the fear that their ballot is wasted. It also encourages would-be MPs to court the second and third preference votes of people who they previously would have ignored, meaning less negative campaigning and more inclusive policy-making.
These are all good, principled reasons to back the Alternative Vote, and they explain why my Liberal Democrat colleagues and I will be backing the Yes campaign when the referendum comes.
Labour needs to figure out what it is for now that its MPs sit on the Opposition benches: naked self-interest and opposition for opposition's sake, or real reform that will make the country fairer? The early signs suggest the former.
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