We all know that the Alternative Vote isn’t the panacea. It’s not going to cure all the ills of our democracy. Only true proportional representation can do that. But since it’s the best we have on offer, it deserves fair consideration on its own merits.

I support AV because I believe that in a democracy, I have the right and the responsibility to vote for who I want to run the country, not who I think would be least bad out of the devil and the deep blue Tories. Under AV there is no wasted vote, no ridiculous need to squander my democratic right on tactics, no dyed pink in the wool New Labourites telling me that if I vote Green or Respect or whatever I believe is best for this country and the world, I’m letting the Tories in through the back door.

The last eleven months of Tory-Lib Dem cuts and fees have already left an unpleasant taste at the back of my mouth. But a decade of Blair’s neoconservative wars hardly made me feel much better. Like so many people I know, I marched against the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. We’d campaign against Blair for five years, shouting from the streets and rooftops, across blogs and broadsheets, but come polling day, so many of them would swallow that sick and stick their cross next to New Labour for fear of the Tories getting in. As George Monbiot told me before the last election, “As much as I dislike and am disgusted with the Tories, I think you have to vote for what you think is right. And if you cling onto something bad for fear of something worse, no one will end up with the government they want.” I will always vote for what I think is right. Under AV, I can do that safe from the fear of something worse. A two party state, after all, is only twice as good as a dictatorship, and I refuse to accept a system that allows me the choice between one of two evils.

This is exactly why Reuben was wrong to argue that AV should be voted down as the most extremist-proof electoral system. True, the BNP are voting against it, which in itself might be enough to make any sensible progressive support it, but there are more compelling reasons. What Reuben has done is mistake radical parties for parties that are unpalatable to the majority, fascists for example, who may well lose out under AV because they are less likely to be able to attract second preference votes from the mainstream, as Rupert Read argues. As Martin Kettle writes, however, the German experience suggests parties like the Greens could do very well out of AV. This is precisely because the progressive majority we hear so much about in this country will no longer feel that a vote for their conscience is a wasted one.

Some radical have argued that AV will constrain extremist viewpoints because it will encourage parties to attract the widest possible range of voters to scoop up their second and third preferences. They’re right to argue that AV is about coalition building, but I see it not as a constraining force, but an enabling one. As Labour MP Alison McGovern explained to me, this process of pre-election coalition building will naturally benefit the UK’s progressive majority. After all, Labour can look to pick up support from the Greens, the Lib Dems and other left of centre parties. In doing so, it will mean the party, already on a leftwards tilt, will be forced to abandon the banal middle ground, get off the fence and start reaching out to progressives with policies that will appeal to them. Who will the Tories reach out to? UKIP? Perhaps, but go too far down the Europhobic line and they risk falling back into their familiar patterns of disastrous infighting. The BNP? I don’t think so.

Some on the left have argued that the best reason to vote against AV is to deal a blow to the Lib Dems and cripple the coalition’s weak link. Hate Nick Clegg, vote against AV. Hang on, isn’t David Cameron doing the same thing? Don’t we hate him even more? I think we need to be more sensible in picking both our enemies and our battles. The Lib Dems may be the weaker part of the coalition, but it won’t come apart if AV fails, the Tories have thrown them enough bones and there’s no where else for them to go. It might ruffle a few backbench feathers, it might irk the rank and file, but the Parliamentary Lib Dems will stay behind the coalition because they’ve lost their clothes and the wilderness is too cold without them. AV, on the other hand, will benefit genuine progressive reformers. It is childish to put short term political gripes that we all share ahead of long-term democratic reform. Nick Clegg deserves to be the punchbag he wishes he weren’t. He deserves every expletive, every hate-filled column inch, every ounce of fight we can possibly bring to him, but the future of our democratic system is not the right battle.

And let’s not forget, this really is about the future of our democratic system. AV is far from perfect. It’s a sop, another Tory bone, a limp excuse for listening to the people and above all, it’s not proportional representation. But it’s all we’ve got for the moment. We can either say yes to meagre change, or stick with what we’ve got. If we vote down this reform, we will derail all attempts for genuine democratic reform for decades to come. Our opponents will say ‘look, no one wanted AV, there’s no demand for PR’. And the debate will die there for another generation. If we vote to pass AV, we have a platform. We have an argument to say this is just the beginning, we want more and we’ll have the power of a referendum behind us.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. But when Honorious saw the Visigoths coming over the hill and decided to do nothing, it was sacked much more quickly.

That is why I’m voting for AV on May 5.

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.

In a couple of months we will be taking a vote on the most basic aspect of our democracy – the way in which we elect our government. Yet one could be forgiven, over the past few days, for forgetting that such  politically important matters were at stake. First we had the much trumpeted revelation from the no to AV campaign that reform will cost £250 million (!). The figures themselves were rather suspect, but regardless of that, many rightly considered the whole argument to be ridiculous. As one person tweeted “egyptians abandon revolution, decide democracy is  too expensive.” The idea that we should keep the same undemocratic voting system simply to save a figure that amounts to less than 0.05 % of annual government spending, is pretty hard to sensibly defend.

"Expenses Scandal!!"

At the same time, supporters of AV are also stoically resisting the urge to focus on any important political principals. The headline statement from Nick Clegg yesterday was that FPTP allowed MP’s to abuse the expenses system.  ”When a person is corrupt, they should be punished” Clegg said. “When a system makes corruption more likely, it should be changed.” If there were  an offline equivalent to Godwin’s Law, it would almost certainly refer to the tendency of all politicians to invoke The Expenses Scandal. Though last year’s revelations were distasteful, they hardly demonstrated a level of corruption sufficient to materially effect our public services, or a form of corruption that would imperil our democracy (i.e. bribes for votes). In the cold light of day the issue seems miniscule compared with mass unemployment, the possible double-dip recession on our door step, or indeed the real democratic deficit inherent in first past the post. Yet expenses have become a kind of lowest common denominator argument that commentators  can use in place of politics.

Indeed the idea of democracy has been curiously absent in the campaign for AV. The term barely appears on the website of major pro-av pressure group Take Back Parliament, who instead have chosen the amorphous slogan of “yes to fairer votes” (as though the already vague concept of fairness hasn’t been stretched beyond recognition by the rhetoric of the current government).

This watered down contest might, in part, reflect the political class’ low opinion of the people. Yet more fundamentally, it reflects the nature of the proposals that we are voting on. Unlike the great constitutional reforms of the 19th and early 20th century, and in contrast to proportional representation, there has never been any desire outside parliament for the Alternative Vote. The proposals emerged almost wholly from the Westminster village. And this is because they  do not represent the application of an clear principles to our political system. A system that equates  the first preferences of some with the least objectionable options of others, and which – on a fairly arbitrary basis – counts the second preferences of some but not others, cannot, unproblematically, wrap itself in the flag of democracy.

Equally the temptation to see AV as a stepping stone to a genuinely proportional system is misplaced. As Andy Newman explains, the AV system is best seen as a variant of of First Past the Post. As Jim Jepps, of the Daily Maybe put it to me, one of the underlying principles of Proportional Representation is that minority opinions ought to be represented in parliament. AV in fact does the polar opposite, ensuring that nobody can be represented unless they win over 50% support in a given constituency.

Indeed, it is difficult to see what great criteria AV meets, aside from introducing a bias towards moderates – who are most likely to be people’s least bad option –  and therefore making the electoral system more amenable to the Lib Dems. At the same time,  FPTP, a residue of the pre-democratic age, remains fairly indefensible in contemporary political language.

So expect to see more of the rubbish, more arguments about how much money reform will cost, more references to the expenses scandal, more shallow and patronising rhetoric about how “tribal” and dinosaur-like the opponents of AV are. But just remember, it’s not because the people are stupid. It’s because the proposals before us fundamentally miss the point.

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.

The Third Estate is brought to you today by the letters DEMOCRACY and the number 2010. In just one month the Power2010 campaign has received over 2000 ideas to reform our political system. To highlight their launch, I invited Guy Aitchison to set out the campaign’s stall in a piece that was met with mixed reactions, and some head banging from Dave Semple who has just written a detailed rebuttal of the campaign’s approach, alongside a picture of Wolfie Smith praying for the glorious day. Last week, Guy returned the favour by tagging me in his new meme to encourage bloggers to post their own suggestions for Power2010. I would have responded to it sooner had I not been writing up my interview with Nick Clegg who, amongst the usual policy platitudes, said: “One of the great things about Power2010 is that it’s asking for your ideas, from people well beyond the bubble at Westminster. I’m really looking forward to reading what people come up with after November 30th. Politicians don’t know it all, and we have to ask people directly if we’re to know what they want.” That’s how big it’s got.

Do I think Power2010 is the answer to the millions of British people who are rightly disenfranchised with a broken political system? I don’t know. But then, I didn’t really think we were going to stop the war either and I gave that my best shot too. So here goes, my grand plan come that glorious day!

When I am king, you will be first against the wall

The Lords have got to go. Almost a century has passed since the Parliament Act and we still have an unelected upper house. No serious approach to democratic reform can begin without addressing the Lords.

What do we want? Democracy! When do we want it? Erm. Now!

The crucial stumbling block for leaders trying to reconnect people with politics is the first-past-the-post method, which essentially leads to a system based on voters choosing the major party they dislike the least. When, as in the last decade, the difference between the two main parties appears to have evaporated faster than Gordon Brown’s popularity, people begin to believe that their vote won’t make a difference. That’s why they stay at home. That’s why Nick Griffin ends up on Question Time. The answer to both problems is, quite simply, to introduce proportional representation. Not only will it ensure that people can vote for who they want to run the country, rather than just voting against who they don’t want to run the country, but it will turn the House of Commons from a tricolour into a rainbow, giving people a genuine choice and reconnecting politics with ideology.

Please sir, I want some more lollipop ladies outside my school

The biggest potential drawback to proportional representation is that it might remove one of the most popular elements of British democracy: the local MP who hears the concerns of their constituents, represents them to Parliament and faces losing their seat if they fail to do so. This is where the Lords come in. I propose an upper house composed of constituency politicians directly elected by the alternative vote system to sit alongside a lower house that proportionately represents the wider passions of the people. All neatly tied up? I think so. Why am I not Prime Minister yet?

For some strange reason I can’t quite fathom, other people have different (some might even say better) ideas for democratic reform. So I’d like to tag a few of them. Some may be sympathetic to Power2010’s aims and objectives. Others may prefer to bang their heads. It’s their choice. That’s democracy.

Jim Jepps – The Daily (Maybe)

Andy Newman – Socialist Unity

Phil BC – A Very Public Sociologist

Derek Wall – Another Green World

Carl Packman – Raincoat Optimism

Left Outside