If David Cameron wins a Commons majority at the next general election, on redrawn boundaries and under first-past-the-post, he should send a personal note of thanks to a former acting Labour leader and two former Labour home secretaries. Margaret Beckett, John Reid and David Blunkett were at the forefront of the Tory-funded, ultra-conservative No to AV campaign, loudly defending the dysfunctional electoral system that helped deliver the 20th century to the Conservative Party.
Beckett was president of No to AV; Reid shared a platform with Cameron for a joint No to AV campaign event on 17 April; Blunkett, meanwhile, on the eve of the referendum, cheerily confessed to having been fully aware of the No to AV campaign’s lies and smears.
AV looks likely to be defeated. The result isn’t out till this evening but I hear YouGov is predicting a 2:1 majority for the No side.
Do you get a sense of déjà vu? Just a year ago, it was Blunkett and Reid who led the (successful) attempt to scupper a “rainbow coalition” between Labour, the Lib Dems and the nationalists, preferring to luxuriate in opposition as Cameron, George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith squeezed the middle and demonised the poor.
A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reform our broken, majoritarian voting system that disenfranchises millions of voters and puts power in the hands of a hundred thousand or so “swing” voters in “Middle England” marginal seats has been lost. It was our last chance – supporters of PR who opposed AV, such as the RMT’s Bob Crow, whom I debated on the Jeremy Vine show yesterday, were perhaps asleep when Osborne pointed out that a No vote in the referendum would settle the issue of electoral reform “for the foreseeable future”. He’s right.
But John Harris and Guido Fawkes are wrong: there is a progressive, social-democratic, anti-Tory majority in this country, a majority of voters who back well-funded public services and redistributive taxation. The problem is that it doesn’t have a hope in hell of being represented until the likes of Blunkett, Reid, Beckett, John Prescott and the rest – David Cameron’s “useful idiots” inside the Labour Party – get out of the way.
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