The Alternative Vote is nobody’s first preference. A mitigated solution to our wheezing, elitist first-past-the-post system, the referendum on AV has nonetheless drawn the catty claws of Westminster at its very worst. As the big day approaches, the Yes and No campaigns smear, counter-smear and tear chunks out of each other like schoolgirls bickering over a strip of stickers. Voters watch them squabble like solemn parents: we’re not angry, we’re just very disappointed.
The spiteful infantilism of the No campaign, whose posters have featured doctored statistics and dying babies, is bad enough without having to feel frustrated with the Yes campaign for rising to it. Should we vote No to dead babies or Yes to glib celebrity platitudes? The choice is hardly inspiring.
Ironically, it is precisely this sort of situation — the Westminster elite and vested interests carping and bitching at each other while millions of voters prepare for their lives to get a lot worse extremely quickly — that AV is supposed to challenge.
As the two camps sling buckets of privately-funded muck at each other in the hope that some of it will stick, one comes inevitably to the very question that has inspired electoral-reform campaigners for generations: shouldn’t our politics be better than this?
The No campaign in particular seems determined to reduce this deep, principled issue to one of cost-effectiveness and scaremongering. Summoning the spectre of the British National Party might be more convincing had the Conservative Prime Minister not just made a speech on immigration that played directly to the far right. If the only way local and parliamentary politicians can stop the BNP is not by challenging their racist dogma and offering working-class communities a real alternative, but by rigging the electoral system against them, there is something chillingly amiss in Westminster.
Faced with opposing campaigns that remind us how cheapened and directionless our politics have become, it is hard to muster a shrug of indifference to the upcoming referendum, let alone the shrill, orgasmic ‘Yes!’ that some campaigners would like us to summon.. This is a great shame, because the truth is that electoral reform matters. If it did not matter, Conservative donors would not be pouring money into the counter-campaign.
The prospect of AV frightens professional politicians from all the main parties who have become used to a culture of safe seats and easy privilegewhere the votes of the majority of their constituents can be ignored. A Yes vote would be a shot across the bows for the political elite, our one chance in a generation to toss a rock into the stagnant pool of parliamentary privilege.
The trouble is that it feels madly insufficient, like being told to eat more vegetables when you have tertiary cancer. There is too much desperation in Britain today for many voters to believe that creeping democratic change will deliver the fair and democratic settlement Britain has craved forgenerations.
Political integrity
Electoral reform is the honest heart of liberal politics. Unfortunately, liberal politics has let us all down. Immediately after the groundswell of liberal reformism that boosted the Liberal Democrats during the election, a thousand activists marched slowly to Downing Street to hand in a petition for ‘Fair Votes’. Six months later, many of the same young people were being baton-charged by police horses in the same thoroughfare. As the country lurches between radicalism and resignation, I’ve watched a number of activists who once trusted electoral reform to bring progressive change masking up to battle the police in the streets of London. It all feels too little, too late.
The Liberal Democrats have flogged every last scrap of political integrity for this referendum, and the price was painfully high. After watching them hold the towels whilst the Tories squat with intent over education, health-care and what’s left of the welfare state, many voters who otherwise support electoral reform would prefer to see the Liberal Democrats humiliated by defeat in their precious referendum. That sentiment is absolutely understandable.
Petty revenge politics, however, does nothing but reduce us to their level — the level where honest politics are subsumed by splenetic personal vendettas and snide tactical voting. If we are ever going to get the politics we deserve then we, the voters, need to show a maturity that our politicians are currently failing to evince.
The Alternative Vote feels like a compromise, and it is. It’s easy to feel torn between the longing for a more honest politics and the desire for revenge. There is time, however, to express such conflicts when we have a voting system that honours real choice. If we ever get second preferences, I’ll happily vote for bile, spleen and spite — but my first preference is for a clear and heartfelt challenge to parliamentary privilege. That’s why I’m voting Yes.
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