Prime minister should leave the goalposts where they are.

Now online! In today's Belfast Telegraph I argue against Gordon Brown's proposed electoral reform.

Today MPs decide whether to hold a referendum on the introduction of ‘Alternative Vote’ for Westminster elections. It is part of Gordon Brown’s plan to rehabilitate the damaged reputation of Britain‘s politics. It is also a spectacularly bad idea.

How can an electoral system which affords less clarity, demands more fudge and disconnects lines of accountability between the electorate and its government help to revive public confidence in tarnished institutions and discredited politicians?

Of course we are accustomed to Alternative Vote in Northern Ireland because it is used in council and assembly by-elections. Like AV’s close relative, Proportional Representation, it is popular amongst politics aficionados, who relish its complexity, its labyrinthine twists and the strange vocabulary of ’surpluses’ and ’quotas’.

However, if the prime minister really wants to tackle the ’crisis of legitimacy’ which has afflicted politics since the expenses scandal, tinkering with the voting system is the wrong way to go about it. AV, and PR, might give the appearance of greater accountability, but actually they serve only to exacerbate a popular perception that politicians are a privileged caste, practising a murky and mysterious craft.

Comments

andrewg said…
AV has one big thing in its favour - if people use it properly, it's immune to vote-splitting. For that reason alone, it should be introduced for NI Westminster seats - even if it isn't elsewhere in the UK. No more talk of "Unionist Unity" candidates. Jim Allister could do his worst.
9 February 2010 at 11:36
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retained a substantial haul of arms.
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro
Read more