proportional representation

This month it will be ten years since I made a decision that would change my life. I joined a political party for the first time. Naturally it was the Liberal Democrats. Why naturally? Well I had been brought up in a Scottish non-conformist family all of whom had always, at least as far as I can remember of family discussions, voted Liberal. At least in my grandparents' day the Conservatives in Scotland were the party of the Kirk and the middle classes and Labour the party that the Papist working class were told to vote for by their bishops. So both sets of grandparents, Gospel Hall Brethren, had voted for that nice Mr Grimond.

Having been educated privately, however, mostly as a result of being predominantly either ex-patriate or just plain itinerant in my childhood, we were drilled not to vote Labour, because they would, obviously, close our beloved schools. And I certainly couldn't vote Tory in 1987 or 1992 in Birmingham, Edgbaston for that wicked old bat Jill Knight, sponsor of section 28 and staunch supporter of abandoning free eye and dental checks - an issue which was probably and somewhat surprisingly the first in my voting life which moved me to write to my MP (setting aside my eleven year old self writing to a lady called Shirley who was education secretary to complain about the punishments meted out - like not being allowed tuck - at the private prep school I attended!).

I instinctively wanted less government interference in our lives and choices. It's maybe hard to imagine for someone not affected by such seemingly arbitrary rules, but for someone growing up gay to feel that you're very being is somehow illegal, second class, it can be a powerful motivator (I'll never really understand gay Tories to be honest).

But that's not to say that my support for the Lib Dems was just a protest against the others. The issue that I remember most that clinched my vote though was a peculiarly wonkish one - PR. It had seemed to me during my teens that the sort of majorities enjoyed by the Tories under Thatcher were bad for politics and bad for the country. I had a sense that it didn't really matter what the policy agenda of different parties was so long as they didn't have an inbuilt monopoly on power and that dissenting voices had a fair shout in government. I had always been keen on devolution for Scotland also - I was always less convinced about the Principality for some reason! And this too seemed like Liberal policies. And personality wise, I just liked Paddy, as my parents had liked both the Davids, though especially David Steel, and my grandparents had liked Jo.

The demise of the ship-building industry that had given one grandfather his livelihood and the destruction of the coal (and steel) industry that had given the other his appalled me, as did the virtual civil war that caused, but I'm not entirely sure that I connected it with "government" so much as a general decline in heavy industry as other world industrial powers came on-stream - the era of Kobe Steel and Korean supertankers. I worked on the stock exchange through most of the period of the big privatizations and though I somehow instinctively liked the idea of widening asset ownership, I could see in the way that people cheated the system (at least in spirit) to get share allotments and then sell them for a quick buck that this great asset give-away was not necessarily the way to achieve that. Nor were taxes a huge issue. The poll tax had made me angry, but otherwise, whilst it was nice that they were falling, somehow I knew that death and taxes were inevitable and that they could go up or down all they liked and you'd still end up paying them.

Ultimately, even had I thought about voting for anyone else, the sleaze stories of the Major government repelled me and I could not quite trust Labour, riven as it had been through my formative years with the Militant battle. I had felt encouraged when the "Gang of Four" left Labour, believing that this was a chance to reinvigorate three party politics and break the duopoly of Labour-Tory dominance. I could probably have voted for a party led by John Smith, but never got the opportunity. It seemed to me however that New Labour had an innate artificiality about it. And this was reinforced when, during the 1997 election, I wrote to Millbank asking them about specific commitments on gay equality and was told there were none - manifesto commitments that is.

 I'm sure the celebration that followed Tony Blair's entry to Number 10 was genuine, if you were a Labour supporter, even at that point a broad left Labour supporter who may have hoped that "The Project" was a mechanism for getting into power that would be relaxed afterwards, but for me it seemed like insufferable arrogance. And so it was that in the September of 1997, I took a leap into the unknown and decided to put my money where my vote was and join the Liberal Democrats. I felt I didn't want to do anything else at first than be an armchair member, so I decided to make my subs the equivalent of a "recommended annual" subscription every month naively thinking that this would prevent me having to actually do anything, or at least allow me smugly to refuse to do anything! Eighteen months later - fifteen of which I had not engaged in any party activity locally - I was a City Councillor! And from a relative political bystander, it was suddenly a huge part of my life.

Next: Ten years; left, right but always liberal.

There used to be a rather insulting saying about PR systems that "if the Irish could understand it why shouldn't we". The Times' leader article today proves they still can't:

Vote of No Confidence -Times Online:

This is the nub of the issue. The current electoral system has the drawback of giving the largest single minority at Westminster an extremely large share of political power. Yet proportional representation would mean that much smaller minorities would wield undue influence, as without them it would not be possible to form a stable administration. Would this constitute progress?

It is not surprising, therefore, that the official Review of Voting Systems could not work up any enthusiasm for overhauling the current system. What is more intriguing is why the 110-page report has not seen the light of day until this morning. There has to be the suspicion that Labour, aware that at some point it might need the assistance of the Liberal Democrats to survive in office, is unwilling to offend its potential partners by publishing a document which is so damning of their pet project. Sustaining a dubious deal at a later date is surely the worst argument for PR.

Drawback? Drawback? It's a fecking democratic outrage, that's what it is! How can anyone vest so much power in an individual like a Blair, a Brown, a Cameron or, one day again, a Campbell on the mandate, at the last count, of just a quarter of the voting age population? It's almost as repugnant as that other scenario that sees a Chavez, Mugabe or Hussein elected on huge rigged votes. Come to think about it, even Mugabe is more sophisticated than that, allowing his opposition to win seats in parliament but reserving a presidential right to appoint as many more as will give him a decent majority (but then Blair had his peers I suppose, just to make sure). No, I take it back, Mugabe would just love the British system.

As to whether any particular form of PR would produce a situation in which "much smaller minorities would wield undue influence" that's so much tommy rot too. They cite Scotland's teething problems with PR, but it hasn't prevented a minority government being formed at Holyrood, and looking abroad, is Germany some unstable state? The Netherlands? Or that economic powerhouse of the EU, Ireland? Or any of the other big democracies that use fairer voting systems? Italy is corrupt from top to bottom it seems and Israel's very birth as a state almost made sure that certain minorities would hold undue influence.

Let's not forget that when "we" had the opportunity to sit down and draw up constitutions and electoral systems for two effectively new countries after the war, Japan and Germany, we didn't choose to foist our decrepit system on them, and look at how they have by and large shone since then.

But for me, the irony of this sort of whining from organs like the Times is that surely they would normally be crying out for less government. If PR delivers a legislature in which little can be done wouldn't that be a good thing, especially for lovers of the status quo? No more far reaching change wreaked by a minority party with a huge majority in the legislature and total control of the executive. A situation where all parties would need to agree in order to do anything significant - that's real democracy, surely.

For me, there is the tantalizing prospect, most of all, that we would see the bigger parties dissolve into their constituent parts - Cameron Tories and the Libertarian Right, Old and New Labour, Orange Liberals and Social Democrats and we would all get a chance to prioritize the traits we want in individual candidates. Of course I simply loathe Westminster and the overbearing presence it has in our lives, but for me, second only to dissolving Westminster and Whitehall altogether would be a system that makes it as hamstrung and impotent as possible, only able to do something when all our various persuasions of politicians actually agree on it.