I’m not going to take issue with the title of Jacob’s last post, partly because I’ve been guilty of the odd bit of abusive language myself at times, and partly because I’ve known Jacob long enough to realise that trying to stop him being gratuitously offensive is a bit of a fool’s errand.

What I am going to take issue with, however, is that he’s completely and utterly wrong on the AV referendum. To make things simple, I’ll set out my piece to mirror his, addressing each of the pro-AV arguments he attacks:

“Won’t it be wonderful when you can vote for whoever you like without the concern that you’ll let the tories in?”

Jacob dismisses this on the grounds that the personal satisfaction at being able to vote for your minor lefty party of choice (and then presumably put Labour as a second or third preference) is a pretty poor substitute for actual meaningful political change. This would be an entirely reasonable argument, aside from the fact that this is a total straw man. The actual partisan leftwing pro-AV argument here isn’t that you’ll finally be able to feel all warm inside at voting for the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition regardless of whether they get elected or not; it’s that under AV the anti-Tory vote (which, it’s worth pointing out, has been a majority in practically every election for the past hundred years) won’t have to be split any more. That, needless to say, is why the Conservatives oppose it. Of course, what this would in all likelihood mean in the short-to-medium term is more Labour or Labour-led governments, which I’m sure Jacob and many other lefties – including me – would disagree with strongly on various issues. But if you really think that this wouldn’t be an improvement on the Conservatives, I’ve got a few million NHS patients, Minimum Wage recipients and EMA beneficiaries I’d like you to meet.

“It will give minority parties a better chance.”

Here Jacob’s argument is that at present leftwing candidates tend to get elected on a minority of the vote in their constituencies, and that under AV this would be less likely to happen. There are two ways of interpreting this. The first is that Jacob thinks that getting leftwing figures into Parliament is more important than having MPs who actually reflect the views of their constituents – in other words, that he gives more priority to having his political views (imperfectly) promoted by MPs than he does to having a House of Commons that’s actually democratically representative. I don’t think this is a position totally without merit, but since it effectively entails arguing that majority opinion is irrelevant, I’m going to be nice and assume that’s not what he’s actually trying to say. The second, more likely interpretation is that while at the moment the radically leftwing candidates who get elected on a minority of the vote probably aren’t that representative of the views of their constituents, at a national level this goes some way to make up for all the radical leftwing voters in other constituencies who have moderate or rightwing MPs. With AV, there’s less scope for this to happen as all candidates will have to appeal to centrist swing voters to get elected.

This is the most convincing anti-AV argument I’ve heard anyone put forward, but the best that can be said for it is that it’s a plausible possibility; it’s simply not possible to know whether this is actually how things are going to work out. It’s interesting to note that Jacob cites two MPs as exceptions to the case he’s trying to argue (Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell) but just one (Caroline Lucas) in support of it. I realise three examples isn’t exactly statistically significant, but one out of three ain’t great when you’re trying to marshal the numbers in support of your case.

The main reason to be dubious of this argument, however, is that it assumes that people vote for candidates solely on the basis of how right- or leftwing they deem them to be. In fact, this isn’t really how things work. There’s a reason the old saying goes ‘all politics is local’, not ‘all politics is interpretable purely on a simple left-right spectrum’. MPs get elected in large part on the basis of how well they deal with the issues their constituents care about, and how well they do this doesn’t necessarily have much to do with how leftwing they might or might not be. There’s no reason why a staunchly leftwing MP can’t also be good at dealing with local issues and listening to the concerns of their constituents – a lot of them manage it at the moment – and if they can’t, do you really want them in the House of Commons anyway regardless of how much Marx they’ve read? Five more years of George Galloway, anyone?

“This is the one route to proper proportional representation.”

Again, Jacob’s correct to say that PR isn’t on the cards anytime soon. But it’s a hell of a lot more likely to happen in our lifetimes if AV goes through than if it doesn’t, a point made very well by Sunny at LibCon not long ago:

[T]he left should not lose the stomach for revolutionary change or radical ideas. But it must also have the pragmatism to find ways to push for them, perhaps even incrementally, rather than constantly throw toys out of the pram when change does not go far enough quickly…

…Failure will not breed success. The Conservative party and Taxpayers Alliance funders etc will continue throwing money at keeping FPTP, and next time there will be even less traction to discard FPTP.

I don’t have much to add to Sunny’s arguments here.

“It is just inherently fairer and more representative.”

This is effectively the same argument as the one about minority parties above. The same comments apply.

Jacob also ignores one very important reason why a yes to AV matters. I take the point that a yes vote for AV isn’t going to change the political system all that much in itself. What it might well do though, is royally screw over the government. The argument that we should vote no to AV to spite Nick Clegg is horribly misguided, a point that, once again, I’m not the first to make. I’m sure most Marxists won’t want to hear from terrible bourgeois Fabian reformists like Sunder Katwala, but there’s no denying the power of his arguments on this:

[I]t will hardly surprise either [George Osborne's] friends or foes that the big idea is to cut deep enough to build an election war chest so the Tories can run on tax cuts as in the 1980s and 1992. For Osborne, the big prize is reversing their retreat on taxes against spending on public services after 1997. His ideological ambition is that it should be like the Labour years never happened.

For Osborne, keeping the current electoral system forms an important part of this plan. So he has stepped up to the plate in the campaign, though constitutional issues are not usually a major focus for a Chancellor of the Exchequer, particularly when his day job might be thought rather pressing in current conditions.

Osborne has hit the headlines with prominent attacks on the Yes campaign – though the idea that the Electoral Reform Society is backing electoral reform might seem unsurprising to many.

Probably more important has been the behind the scenes encouragement to Tory donors. (“Downing Street channelling cash to the No campaign, as the Telegraph reported) to get stuck in.

The message has been that they should support a No vote now – or expect to have to make bigger donations in future because Osborne and the Tories fear election campaigns would be harder to win under AV.

So, to sum up, there’s a good chance of further-decimated public services and a second wave of Thatcherism if AV fails, but we should vote no anyway in case a couple of members of the Socialist Campaign Group lose their seats? Yeah, you’ll have to forgive me for not being wholly convinced by that.

On the same day that David Cameron and arch-Blairite former Home Secretary, John Reid, shared a platform to denounce AV, the Evening Standard came out against voting reform, patronising the electorate by basing its flimsy argument on the crazy notion that AV is so much harder to understand. I wonder what’s so hard to understand about ranking candidates in order of preference. Most semi-intelligent people have learnt how to count to five by the time they reach 18. Then again, perhaps the Tories implicitly accept that right wing voters are inherently stupid and that’s why they’re so scared of electoral reform. It might also explain why the BNP are equally opposed to AV.

Meanwhile, with a few honourable exceptions, the Greens are out in force campaigning for AV. As Waveney Councillor Graham Elliott reports:

In Waveney I know several people who voted for their THIRD choice candidate in the 2010 general election in an attempt to keep the Conservatives out. They knew their first choice (Green) would not win and they also knew that the Lib Dems (their second choice) were weak in Waveney and the contest was really a two-horse race between Labour and the Conservatives. They therefore voted Labour which was their third choice. Under AV they would have been able to vote 1 for Green, 2 for Lib Dem and 3 for Labour with no increased risk of letting the Tories in. This is just one specific example to illustrate why the current system doesn’t work. Far too many people vote to keep a party out rather than vote for they believe in. AV will allow a more honest expression of voters values.

From my time campaigning with Elliott, back when I used to live in Suffolk, I’ve come to realise that he’s one of those people whom if they’re on your side, you’re probably on the right one. And if it’s a choice between the Greens, Ed Miliband and the Lib Dems vs. The Tories, John Reid, Nick Griffin and the Evening Standard, I think it becomes clear which side has the moral highground.

Of course, as Reid’s appearance with Cameron shows, the debate does cross party lines. But, increasingly it seems, it is running along ideological ones. With a few obvious exceptions, the left are falling behind AV and the right are coming out against it. No one wants to have Nick Clegg on their team, I admit, he’s the spotty fat geek with asthma we got lumbered with because nobody picked him. But set him aside for now. The referendum isn’t about kicking Clegg – we can wedgie him in the changing rooms come the next election – this is about setting the direction of our democracy.

We can go forward or we can stand still forever. It’s time for those on the left who, for whatever genuine and principled reasons they have, have come out against AV, to look around them and see who’s playing for their team and what their agenda is. It’s time for them to ask themselves, whose side are they on?

It has been an odd few days for the campaigns around electoral reform. This whole exercise, supposedly, is about making our electoral system fairer, and our Parliament more properly representative of the population. Yet both the pro-AV camp, and the supporters of First Past the Post, have been falling over themselves to demonstrate that their preferred system has a greater capacity for gerrymandering – otherwise known as “keeping out extremists”.

It all started when Baroness Warsi accused AV supporters of “backing a system which rewards extremism and gives oxygen to extremist groups”. The AV camp have hit back, insisting – correctly in my opinion – that AV “makes it harder, not easier, for extremist parties” to get elected. The idea that electoral systems ought not to contain an inbuilt bias, and that minority opinions ought to enjoy parliamentary representation, was apparently lost, today, on Andrew Rawnsley. Extolling the virtues of AV, he boasted in The Observer that it was “most extremist-resistant electoral system.”

On this point, he is almost certainly correct. Opinion-splitting parliamentarians are likely to fair badly in a system thats’s based upon clocking up second preferences. Under AV it will be most important to be tolerable to a broad cross section of the electorate. “Extremists”, even if they attract the enthusiastic support of a substantial minority, are unlikely to stand a chance, while even left wing Labour candidates and right wing Tories are likely to seem like bad electoral prospects.

In considering whether or not this is a good thing, I suppose that I ought to declare an interest. Measured against the consensus that has prevailed in politics for the past 3 decades, my opinions could certainly be categorised as extreme. And what frightens me far more than the prospect of the odd BNP man in parliament, is a parliament filled only with moderates. Indeed, while the current order things condemns two and a half million people to unemployment, and throws so many into despair, I am scared most by the terrible calm amongst our political classes. FPTP has entrenched our current duopoly, and frustrated the emergence of newer parties, but AV will accentuate this drive towards the centre. We might be preserved from the distasteful sight of Fascists in Parliament, but not from the utter hopelessness of business as usual.

So, Power2010 has been criticised on the grounds that it won’t have the massive reach and appeal that it’s aiming for. This seems likely to be true, but how much does it matter? I don’t think that in order to revive mass popular interest in our political system it’s necessary to have a campaign which itself has mass popular support. That seems to be demanding the impossible; if only a small unrepresentative minority is currently interested in parliamentary politics (which I would argue is indeed the case, even if there is widespread interest in politics as it impinges on people’s everyday lives), and if we want that to change, then unfortunately it’s up to that small unrepresentative minority to re-engage everyone else.

In order to do this, I suggest that getting rid of the First Past the Post system has to be the first step. Salman already covered electoral reform in his post on this, but in my view it’s a far more important issue than any of the others under discussion. A written constitution, resolving the West Lothian question, reforming the Lords …yes, these are all important changes that need to be made. But I don’t think any of them are going to re-engage people’s interest in politics. There are two (related) reasons why electoral reform would do this where other changes wouldn’t.

First, every vote cast in an election would actually matter, and every voter’s views would have to be taken into account in an election campaign. As things stand, party manifestoes are targeted at a tiny group of voters – centrist swing voters in marginal seats – hence all the drivel spouted every election cycle about Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman. This is why the parliamentary parties have all moved so far into the centre, and why so much parliamentary debate  just reduces to bickering over who thought of a policy first (cf. the squabbles over inheritance tax and points-based immigration systems).

Second, the reason why parties’ high commands know they can get away with this is that it’s nigh-on impossible to break the two-party deadlock under the present system. It tends to be strongly majoritarian, disproportionately favouring large parties over smaller ones. (Though it also has random quirks, such as favouring small parties with concentrated support in one area, like the SNP and Plaid Cymru, and occasionally gifting a parliamentary majority to a party that comes second in the popular vote, like the Tories in 1951). In the entire history of the British Parliament, the second and third parties in British politics have only changed places once – when the Liberals were superseded by Labour in the 1920s – and that took a much-disputed combination of a World War, the Liberal Party literally tearing itself apart with infighting and the introduction of universal suffrage. The upshot of this is that as things stand the most likely effect of supporting a small leftwing party rather than Labour is that the Tories will get stronger. It’s worth noting that while Labour were busy overtaking the Liberals in the 1920s, the Tories were in government almost continuously for decades; they were in power either absolutely or in Tory-dominated ‘National Governments’ for all but three years between 1918 and 1945.

I’m still undecided as to which specific voting system would be the best replacement – though dusting off the findings of the Jenkins Commission wouldn’t be a bad idea – but pretty much anything would be better than the current setup. No more FPTP would mean that parties would have to take into account everyone’s views, not just a few geographically fortunate waverers. It would, as Salman so eloquently put it, turn the House of Commons from a tricolour into a rainbow. Yes, it’s a top-down reform that only cared about by a few geeks with an unhealthy interest in politics. But it’s one we desperately need.