Political Economy

For democracy to be seen to done in an election the candidate chosen must get more than 50% of the vote. If this does not happen you get the situation that we in the UK are familiar with. Candidates and governments are elected with less, sometimes much less than half of the votes cast. To get around this the French use the “run-off” system in their Presidential elections. In this, if the leading candidate does not have more than 50% of the vote, the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated and the voters are called back to vote again. This continues until one candidate gets more than half the votes. Such a system ensures that a minority President, or government, cannot be elected. It is democratic and it is fair. But, with its multiple rounds of voting, it is arduous and time consuming.

The Alternative Vote system is nothing more nor less than a run-off voting system where you have to make you choices in how you would vote in subsequent voting rounds at the time you cast your first vote. It gives all the advantages of run-off voting such as fairness and democratic governments whilst avoiding the time and arduousness of the original version. (For more on the technicalities see the Note at the end of this blog.)

The already low standards of the “NO” to the Alternative Vote (AV) Referendum continue to drop.

Listening to BBC radio 4 on Saturday (19/3/2011) it transpires that a reason to vote “No” is that the AV will give someone who votes for the British Nationalist Party (BNP) a second vote. Notice that the speaker did not say that a reason to vote “No” was that it gave a Labour (or a Conservative, or a Liberal Democrat) voter a second vote! I do not like the BNP, but then I do not like the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberal Democrats either. However I do not make my dislike a reason to deprive a fellow citizen of their democratic voting rights.

The implication is clear. If you vote BNP, a legally registered political party, then you are not worth giving an alternate choice to. How fascist can you get?

I have said it before. The “No” campaign have used lies, deceit, anti-democratic and now fascist arguments to support their views.

A vote for the “No” campaign is a vote for a continuation of the status quo in our already creaking democracy. The speaker for the “Yes” campaign pointed out that the high point in the two-party system in England was in the 1951 election and that this was also the high point for the “first past the post” voting system. Now in a pluralistic political era we, the voter, desperately need a voting system that reflects the political realities and allows us the flexibility to vote in a way that reflects these multiple choices whilst giving us only candidates, and government, who have a majority of the votes.

Those who believe that the way to democracy is to cut voting costs should remember that this is what dictators believe. The fact that the “No” campaign believes this is no accident.

In reality what is not to like about the Alternative Vote system, the efficient, fair and democratic replacement for the run-off voting system?

Note for Readers.

Some voting systems require the voters to vote again if no candidate has more than 50% of the vote. At subsequent voting the bottom candidate of the previous round is eliminated.

The Alternative Vote System is an example of “Instant Run-off Voting. You have the choice to rank candidates – 1, 2, 3 and so on. When the votes are counted the candidate with most votes, provided this is more than 50% of the votes cast,  is elected. If no candidate has more than 50% then the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated and their votes are given to their second choice. ALL the votes are now counted again and if no one has more than half the votes the new ‘last’ candidate is eliminated. This continues until a candidate has a majority. See Wikipedia

On the 5th May we in England will have our first opportunity, ever, to vote on the voting system that is used to elect MPs.

Let me say that again. “we in England will have our first opportunity, ever, to vote on the voting system that is used to elect MPs.”

Notice that I am not including the Scots or Welsh in this since they have already had a choice to vote in matters like this. It is only the English that will have this opportunity for the first time. The English who, remember, invented the parliamentary system and representative democracy are, at last, being allowed to vote on something that is of reasonable constitutional importance.

Perish the thought that we might actually vote ‘Yes’. Were we to do so we might get ideas above our station, ideas that we can actually change things, dangerous ideas that there are perhaps other things that we should change!

It is interesting therefore to review the ‘No’ vote campaign’s leaflet to see how they intend to steer us away from this dangerous action.

First off they claim that AV is not fair because some people will have their vote counted five or six times. Well I have some news  for the ‘No’ campaign. My vote hasn’t counted for 20 years. There are some people whose vote has never counted over 50 or 60 years – assuming that they still bother to vote. The fact is that the current system is undemocratic and broken. The ‘No’ campaign state that  the ‘First Past the Post’ system has served us well for hundreds of years whereas in reality the system has been failing increasingly since the introduction of universal suffrage in the last century.

The ‘No’ campaign have an equally dodgy approach to finance and budgets. They claim that machines will have to be used and that these will be very costly. Well so they might, in the first year. The next time and the time after that and after that, they will cost nothing because the machines will already have been purchased! And of course the greater speed of machines could mean that there will be savings in manpower, not just at the count, but also in the broadcasting organisations. It might be that the cost of a general election would actually go down.

But not only do the ‘No’ campaign begrudge the cost of machines to bring our vote counting practices into the 21st century, they also begrudge the cost of democracy, and hence democracy itself. Apparently the cost of holding referendums, and hence referendums themselves, is something we should not be countenancing.

I will not go into the advertising campaign claiming that the referendum is causing the deaths of babies and soldiers. Such deceit is a hallmark of the abysmal level to which public standards have fallen and which we the people must battle to raise.

All-in-all the ‘no’ campaign is hostile to democracy, solidly behind the hold that the two major parties have over parliamentary seats, indulges in deceitful financial analysis and is an example of the appallingly low standards which pass for good practice in public life today.

Vote ‘No’ if you must, but do not complain over what it will cost you in the future.

What if the Law and the Constitution enshrine something that we know is morally wrong? What then?

In the Government of the People, by the People and for the People this question is  important, it is difficult and, in its propensity to bring about civil strife, it is dangerous. Abraham Lincoln asked this question and struggled with it for many years. His simple answer, that  no individual or community had the right to do what was wrong led to his selection as the Republican candidate for President. And as they say, “All the rest is history”.

For the rest of us the issues are never so great, but the result, when we fail to adopt Lincoln’s answer, can be just as significant in our lives as well as in the lives of others.

Two examples of a moral failure in this respect have recently been before us in the news. The first is the matter of MP’s expenses and the second was a the case of a man sent to a private clinic, by the National Health Service, for an everyday knee operation who died because the clinic had no blood supplies on hand.

In both cases the defence is the same, “I/We followed the rules. I/We are blameless”. Well, not if you are Mr Lincoln, you’re not, say the rest of us!

It must surely be obvious to the parties in cases such as these that if harm results then the excuse of following the rules is not admissible. The degree of accountability  depends on the degree of the error and the level of knowledge and responsibility at which the parties operate.

In the case of the MPs there had already been concern raised within the House.  The failure to recognise that, helping yourself liberally from the public purse is morally wrong, whatever the rules may be, is worrying. It points to our premiere legislative body consisting of people who, in the main, appear to be unable to make moral decisions. And if they cannot do this then they are not fit to rule us.

The case of the clinic is perhaps worse in that a man died, perhaps because of the clinic’s failure to put difficult moral questions to itself. The answer, to the reporter’s question that surely it should be obvious that if an operation is being carried out then blood may be required as a matter of extreme urgency, of “We followed all the rules”  is clearly a failure of moral sense. We expect the professionals who treat us to do so in a safe manner having regard to all the unfavourable events likely to occur and to the importance of the outcome. Surely death as an outcome is important in any moral society?

The willingness of what appears to be many important people, organisations and their leaders to act at all time, without respect to other peoples safety or their property, in other words to act without morality, is a cancer in the side of our present society. A cancer moreover inserted by those who far too frequently have been heard to make harsh judgments on other people, often poorer and less well educated than themselves.

The answer is to change the law, if indeed the law needs changing. We all need to know that the law requires of us to carry out, when the health and safety of others or their property is in question, at the level of competence it is reasonable to expect from us, an analysis of the  importance of outcomes and of their likelihood of occurrence irrespective of any rules or contractual agreements in force. If for some reason we do not like the answers or cannot implement them  then we should be expected to take the moral decision and not go ahead with what was intended.

In the meantime, whilst we wait for the civil authorities to make their minds up about wrong doing, we should surely expect those who have failed this moral test to do the moral thing. Apologise and make recompense!