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.

No one expected Nick Clegg to bring his long (but apparently flimsily) held desire to abolish tuition fees into the coalition agreement. Even before the election, he had already distanced himself from the policy.

“I want to get rid of the tuition fees system too – it’s just a question of when,” Clegg told me in an interview with The Third Estate last year.

However, one would have expected Clegg to have stuck to a pledge which he, like all of his party’s MPs, signed to vote against any rise in tuition fees.

“With the benefit of hindsight, I signed a pledge at a time when we could not have anticipated the full scale of the financial situation the country faces now and the absence of plausible alternatives for students to the arrangements we are now advocating,” Clegg wrote with his tail between his legs this week.

No Nick, the economic situation hasn’t changed since you signed that pledge. You just didn’t expect to be in government to deal with it. If you didn’t anticipate it, it’s because you were making empty promises which you had no intention of seeing through. Not unusual for a party which never expects to be in power. But the coalition has caught you with your pants down and your U turn can be blamed on no one but yourself.

I wonder if Clegg anticipated the scale of his betrayal of his voters and party members? Perhaps, if the look on his face at PMQs, grimly nodding behind Cameron as he flapped through Ed’s understated assault, is anything to go by.

Further evidence of Clegg and his party’s betrayal can be seen over at The Daily (Maybe). 17 MPs voted for Caroline Lucas’s ammendment to give voters the choice of PR in the referendum on electoral reform. Not one of them was Liberal Democrat. Was there not a single one of them with sufficient backbone to stand up for a policy that was in their manifesto? Clearly not.

Here’s a pledge: I promise not to vote Liberal Democrat.

After 4,500 submissions and 100,000 votes, the POWER 2010 pledge has finally been revealed.

1. Introduce a proportional voting system.

2. Scrap ID cards and roll back the database state.

3. Replace the House of Lords with an elected chamber.

4. Allow only English MPs to vote on English laws.

5. Draw up a written constitution.

I, and others writing for this site, have drawn some criticism for our broad support for the deliberative process of the POWER2010 campaign. However, for me, this moment was always going to be crunch time. Can I comfortably put my name to POWER2010’s finalised pledge as chosen by members of the British public? Well, let’s go through each in turn.

1. Introduce a proportional voting system: By far the most popular suggestion. Indeed it formed the core of my idea for POWER2010. Any democratic reform has to start with proportional representation. A two-party state is only twice as democratic as a dictatorship, after all, and if we are to see a new kind of politics in this country, it has to include new voices from across the political spectrum. There are those who would argue that proportional representation will only let the extremists in. But curtailing democracy to keep the likes of the BNP out is not the correct answer to their challenge. Rather it is part of the problem as people feel increasingly alienated from the political process when forced to choose between two parties whose policies often appear indistinguishable. Red, blue and yellow just won’t cut it anymore. I want to see a rainbow Parliament and in this, I fully support POWER2010’s aim.

2. Scrap ID cards and roll back the database state: Whilst not so much a reform of the political system, this is still, in my view, a very necessary demand. At best ID cards are a pointless expense. At worst they are part and parcel of New Labour’s systematic erosion of civil liberties and human rights. Together with DNA databases retaining the records of thousands of people never convicted of any crime, anti-terror laws, detention without trial and an explosion of CCTV, they represent an alarming trend. I am not paranoid enough to suggest that they amount to a police state, or even that in and of themselves ID cards will curtail the everyday freedoms of the British public. However, in a democratic society, it is important to resist these small steps towards the removal of basic freedoms while we can. Because once they’re all gone, it’s too late to speak out. For this objective, POWER2010 gets another tick from me.

3. Replace the House of Lords with an elected chamber: It is a startlingly anachronistic aberration that in a democratic society with a bicameral Parliament, we can have an upper house that is unaccountable to the people. The second step to mending Britain’s broken political system, I have always argued, is to have a directly elected upper house and I am behind POWER2010 all the way on this point.

4. Allow only English MPs to vote on English laws: Devolution has done wonders for the Scottish and the Welsh. However it has left the largest part of the United Kingdom without its own legislative body. Banning non-English MPs from voting on English laws, however, has always seemed to me a messy and incomplete answer to the problem. Moreover, it sends the message that the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is primarily the Parliament of England. It would be better, in my opinion, to have a separate English Parliament, or to devolve powers regionally. In any case, this issue has never been high up on my list of priorities. I was surprised by the number of votes the suggestion received, but mine certainly wasn’t among them.

5. Draw up a written constitution: Always a tricky issue if one’s not sure exactly what would be in this written constitution. Historical example, however, and in particular the American case, tends to show that written constitutions are more a means to constrain democracy rather than enable it. Often used to prevent the ‘tyranny of the majority’, written constitutions, with a few notable exceptions, reign in the power of far-reaching reform. In any case, I do not believe that the problem with British politics, and the public’s engagement with it, is our lack of a written constitution and I would be tempted to say, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Well, that’s my humble opinion on the POWER2010 pledge. And to paraphrase Meatloaf, three out of five ain’t bad. I have, therefore, decided to support the POWER2010 pledge, with a few caveats. None of these reforms will come easy, however. Unless we see a hung parliament with Labour desperate to court the Lib Dems, it may well take more than one election to see the most important democratic reforms through. And the true test of POWER2010’s effectiveness will be in its staying power after the General Election. It cannot afford to be another Make Poverty History, or a flash in the pan playing with people’s expectations. In politics as in sex, no one likes a quick finisher.

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

When Americans went to the polls last year it was not only the success of Obama that gave us a jolt. Popular perceptions of the States – long saturated with George Bush, the stolen election and frequently traded statistics about how many Americans own passports – were confronted with a different vision of American politics. As McCain and Obama battled  for their respective nominations before finally facing off, we witnessed a level of mass participation that left us inspired, and perhaps even a little envious.

Against this background, and with our longstanding sense of political malaise now revved up a notch, the idea of bringing primaries to the UK  is gaining something of a toehold. In late May the Olympics minister Tessa Jowell called for Labour to introduce primary elections open to non-members. More recently, Will Straw, writing in the Guardian, advocated making primaries part of the whole procedure of British elections. “Though many constituency Labour parties remain vibrant and representative of the local community”, he argued, “do we really think that a CLP [Constituency Labour Party] with 200 members can make a democratic choice?”

Certainly the idea of primaries does seem to address the situation we have before us. I don’t need to reel off the depressing statistics from recent elections to convince you that vast swathes of people feel currently feel unrepresented by the major parties. Nonetheless I sympathise with the unease expressed by grassroots Labour supporters over the idea. Taking away the power of CLP’s to select candidates would, as Alex Hilton puts it, ‘finally turn Labour membership into nothing more than a supporters club.’

The question is whether we want political parties which are simply ‘representative of the community’, to quote Straw’s piece.  Political associations are crucial to a democracy because, in theory at least, they enable citizens to engage in collective action and thus to shape politics far more profoundly than they can as individual electors. Ideally, political parties should be a means by which people with a common sense of purpose pool their energies, develop programmes and policies, and win support for their collective ideas.  Their role should not simply be to reflect the political landscape but also to make it. As such they must be able to come to important decisions – which surely include their choice of candidates – internally.

“Yes”, I hear you retort, “but for all your guff about political  associations,  the British party system today is  lightyears away from the world of Jacobin clubs and sans-coulettes”. And you would be right.  As things stand, Britain is dominated by two major parties in which just a tiny  fraction of our nation choose to  enjoy any formal influence, and in which an even smaller minority exercise any real influence. Primaries would enable a broader constituency to exercise power over these all-powerful organisations, but merely as voters, not as partners or as activists.

There is, however, an alternative to simply pushing our major parties to bring society in from the cold. It almost goes without saying that the current electoral system maintains our current  duopoly so powerfully and so artificially that it is barely susceptible to shifts in public opinion. With this in mind, it might just be that the reason millions of people say that nobody represents them is not that those people are stupid, depoliticised or cynical, but because where major parties do not appeal, newer parties are effectively barred from filling the void. If some form of PR were brought in, the rise of small,  or ‘marginal’, political parties would not be the unfortunate side-effect of a fairer electoral system. Rather, it would represent a step forward,  in enabling  our diverse and well educated society to play a genuinely creative role in politics – and to do so in far greater numbers.