Missing the opportunity

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The idea that the way people vote may not always be the result of a careful assessment of the parties and their candidates is not exactly a new one. Graham Wallas, back in 1908 (“Human Nature in Politics”) argued that political opinions and actions are largely the result of habit based on irrational assumptions. I can’t remember exactly where, but another formulation of a similar idea which I came across in 1970 or 1971 described voting as an essentially irrational act. Not everybody would agree, of course, but there is enough truth contained in the statements for us to be wary of those who argue strongly for a position which implies something different. As evidence, of a sort, I can offer one story from my own campaigning history in which an elderly couple told me that they were going to vote for myself and Plaid Cymru “because Labour and the Tories gave away the Empire”. There are plenty of other examples, and few people who’ve ever done any serious canvassing will not have similar stories to tell.

The immediate relevance of this is the debate over the proposed new voting system for the Senedd, which has aroused the ire of some. Some of the criticism is justified; some rather less so. Personally, I’d prefer that the two parties pushing reform (Labour and Plaid) had agreed to implement STV instead. There are problems with all voting systems, but it's always seemed to me that STV is the best – or perhaps I should say least worst. For me, the primary criticism of the closed list system as opposed to STV is that STV allows second, third etc choices to influence the outcome, whilst under a closed list, only first preference votes count, meaning that the votes of people whose first choice is for a smaller party are completely disregarded. Much of the public criticism of the closed list has, however, revolved around a rather different issue, which is about the right of voters to choose an individual to represent them, rather than simply a party.

In small rural community council elections, where most of the candidates will be known to most of the electors, I don’t doubt that the personality and history of the individual is a major factor in the voters’ choice. But the more populous the area choosing a representative, the smaller the proportion of the electorate that will actually know enough about the individuals, and the more likely it is that voters choose based on party rather than person. And whilst some long-standing MPs and MSs like to believe that they have an enormous personal vote, my own experience of canvassing at Senedd and Westminster parliament levels tells me that that is likely to be greatly exaggerated. As a candidate, I’ve had people telling me that ‘I don’t normally vote for your party, but I’m voting for you’, and as a canvasser for other candidates, I’ve had people telling me that ‘I normally vote for your party, but I’m not voting for X’. Candidates hear the positive messages – their foot-soldiers hear the negative ones. It is a fiction of the UK constitution that voters choose an individual to represent them rather than a party, but a fiction that many choose to believe. It's true, of course, that a closed list effectively allows parties to select which of their candidates will be the first to be elected, but the extent to which that ceases to be true under a more open system is somewhat exaggerated.

There is another aspect to this as well. Some of the critics of the closed list have also been quite critical in the past of the quality of some of those elected to the Senedd. There is a certain degree of arrogance behind that criticism, implying as it does that those making the criticism have the knowledge, experience and ability to do better. But let us suppose that the criticism is indeed a valid one. Are electors really in a position to be able to address that, given their necessarily limited knowledge of the individuals? If the quality of those elected needs to be improved, the only people in a position to do that are the political parties themselves. Furthermore, it isn’t just about individuals – if we want a successful Senedd leading a successful Wales, we need the best team. And as any sports fan will know, the best rugby team isn’t the one with 15 outside halves, and nor is the best soccer team the one with 11 centre-forwards. A closed list invites the electors to vote for a team rather than an individual, and that gives the political parties the opportunity to decide who their A-team is and position team members on the lists in such a way as to get that team elected in the order it chooses. The problem with that however is that, in practice, there is no sign to date of the parties abandoning a selection system based entirely on ambition and popularity and trying seriously to assess ability and suitability instead. As it is, they seem to be hell-bent on going for a closed list system which is not as representative as STV and then ignoring the one big advantage that it does have.

The Tories support only their own version of democracy

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There have been plenty of studies over the years which show the correlation between the probability that people will register to vote and then turn out to do so on the one hand, and relative poverty or wealth on the other. There is no doubt that relative affluence corresponds to an increased likelihood of voting. By the same token, that correlation is reflected in the support for different parties – parties which draw support from the more affluent citizens benefit directly from the differing propensity to vote – and a lower overall turnout thus works to their advantage. Those few simple facts of life are all that is required to understand why the Tories in the UK are so keen to make it harder for people to vote; their insistence on presenting ID will have a disproportionate negative impact on the support of their opponents.

Conversely, of course, making it easier for people to vote potentially damages the Conservatives; increasing the turnout will disproportionately benefit their opponents. It’s easy to see, therefore, why the Tories have turned their faux outrage blasters to the maximum setting to attack the experiments being proposed by the Welsh Government for next year’s council elections. However, in accusing the Welsh Government of deliberately choosing Labour areas in which to run the experiments they have not only ignored the basic facts of the selection process (that all council areas were given the opportunity, but only some responded) they have also spectacularly failed to understand the electoral dynamics referred to above. If I wanted to give Labour a chance to win more councils by making it easier for people to vote in carefully selected areas, I wouldn’t select areas where Labour is already the dominant party. I’d select areas like Monmouth or the Vale of Glamorgan, where an increase in non-Tory votes might be enough to dislodge a few Tory councillors; I wouldn’t be trying to just stack up even larger majorities for Labour in existing strongholds. If this is, as the Tories claim, a sneaky attempt by Labour to give themselves an unfair advantage, then Labour would be staggeringly incompetent as vote-riggers.

The underlying attitude of the Tories is revealing – when encouraging more people to take part in the democratic process by making it easier to vote is regarded as being some form of cheating, it’s reasonable to ask to what extent the Welsh Tories believe in democracy at all. But then, looking to their masters in London, I think we already know the answer to that. Back in the 1970s, it was Dafydd Iwan who sang “Rwy’n credu mewn democratiaeth – fy nemocratiaeth i”. I somehow doubt that he intended it as an instruction manual for the Tories.

Fiddling the rules

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Last week, the Times reported (paywall) that Michael Gove had been ‘enlisting old enemies’ in an attempt to ‘save the union’. The thought of Gove working with George Galloway, former Lib Dem Minister Danny Alexander, and former Labour Scottish First Minister Jack McConnell manages to be both bizarre and entirely credible at one and the same time. That these people all think both that ‘saving the union’ is vital and that they are the people to do it is also entirely credible and more than a little bizarre. On the other hand, to many independentistas it is more likely to look like the dream team they would choose to go up against for the next referendum. Perhaps the unionists actually want to lose. If only they could also persuade Boris to personally lead the crusade against independence, Scottish independence could be more or less guaranteed.

With the polling figures increasingly turning against them, it appears that at least some of them want to try and amend the rules about who can vote. Instead of only those registered to vote in Scotland, Galloway has suggested that the franchise should be extended to Scots living elsewhere in the UK, a suggestion which Gove described as ‘interesting’. The assumption, obviously, is that those Scots who’ve left Scotland to live elsewhere in the UK will be more inclined to vote ‘no’, (although I’m not as certain as they seem to be about the validity of that assumption – ‘Gorau Cymro, Cymro oddi cartref’ as the saying goes) on which basis, the surprising thing is that they’re thinking of restricting it to the UK. Scots living outside the UK might be even more opposed. Leaving aside the ‘minor’ practical difficulty of devising an electoral register across the whole UK which identifies who is Scottish and who is not (have they even thought about how to define that, let alone identify the relevant people?), there is another obstacle as well. If it is to be a vote based on whether a voter is Scottish or not (however that may be defined), on what basis should people who are not Scottish but who choose to live in Scotland be allowed to vote?

Of course, logic and consistency are not words which deserve to be used in the same sentence as Galloway and Gove (unless properly and definitively negated), but the application of that little piece of logic shows that a proposal to base the franchise on the nationality of the voter is a double-edged sword. The only reasonable and fair basis on which to decide whether a territory is to become independent is for the people who are registered as living there to take the decision – whatever their origins. Trying to adjust the electorate to include others on the basis of their nationality is a blatant attempt both to gerrymander the outcome and to turn the debate into one about origins and roots. It’s also likely to be very divisive – so exactly what its proponents want, and something for which they could and would then blame independentistas. The idea is unlikely to disappear as long as the unionists are staring defeat in the face.

Searching for a rational explanation

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It could, of course, be the case that reducing the self-styled ‘mother of parliaments’ to complete farce is an accidental by-product of the madness of the author of the new system of voting. Clinical insanity is certainly the simplest and most obvious explanation of the thought process which would lead anyone to conclude that the most suitable way of voting in any parliament is one which excludes many MPs completely and requires the rest to spend 45 minutes shuffling along a 1km long queue every time they hold a vote. And Rees-Mogg certainly looks less than 100% compos as well as having a history of expressing strange views. The problem with that explanation is that it doesn’t explain why a majority of those taking part in the farce concluded that it was, indeed, such a brilliant idea that it should become the new norm. There could be something in the water in Westminster – but if that were to be the explanation, the Tory MPs would need to be imbibing from a different water supply than that used by members of other parties. Some of them, of course, just do whatever they’re told, either because they’re part of the government or because they want to be, but they surely can’t all be blind to the sheer idiocy of what they’ve agreed. I know that they wanted the UK to become a ‘world leader’ but I assumed they meant in terms of respect not mockery and derision.

There is however an alternative and much more sinister possibility. Deliberately excluding some members from participation in decision-taking might suit the government rather well on the whole, particularly if it differentially affects its political opponents. Excluding those MPs from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who choose to abide by the advice of their respective governments instead of returning to London would certainly have the not insignificant side-effect of boosting the Tory majority. At a time when the PM’s actions over Cummings are causing huge disquiet on his own side, reducing the opportunities for a combination of opposition MPs and disgruntled Tories to conspire against him could be quite handy. And the derision with which the rest of the world views the system, coupled with the reluctance of MPs to be seen participating in such a farce might help in another way as well: it could make MPs less keen to call for divisions at all. If they know not only that every vote is going to cost them valuable time, but also that they’re all going to look like complete fools every time a vote is held, that might just encourage some to call for votes less frequently. (Although that could backfire if the public blamed the government rather than those calling for votes.)

It’s certainly a negation of democracy, but whether that’s due to a serious outbreak of madness in the governing party or a deliberate action to avoid scrutiny and challenge is open to interpretation. As a rule, I always tend to favour the simpler explanation, but there is something of a pattern to the avoidance of scrutiny and debate in the case of the current PM.

Breaking the log-jam - 1

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With the results of the Assembly election all done and dusted the log-jam in Welsh politics remains firmly in place.  It’s partly to do with the nature of the electoral system in Wales.  On that point, just over a week ago, Professor Richard Wyn Jones of the Wales Governance Centre, wrote an article for the Sunday Times about the electoral system in Wales, which also appears on the Governance Centre’s website.  It draws attention to the way in which the particular electoral system used in Wales favours the Labour Party, and makes it difficult to remove them from power. 

At one level, that should be no surprise; the electoral system, like many other aspects of the devolution settlement in Wales, is a product of the Labour Party’s internal difficulties and disputes.  The result is that it’s a bit proportional, but not too much so.

What are the alternatives?  This little chart is based on the results of last week’s elections, and shows a range of various possible scenarios, based on the votes actually cast last week.  (Note: all of these depend on the accuracy of my arithmetic!)

Party	Const's	Region	A	B	C	D	E
Labour	27	2	29	40 or 41	27	21	19
Plaid	6	6	12	9	11	12	13
Tory	6	5	11	9	10	13	11
UKIP	0	7	7	0	6	8	8
Lib Dem	1	0	1	1 or 2	3	5	4
ATA	0	0	0	0	2	0	3
Green	0	0	0	0	1	1	2
Total	40	20	60	60	60	60	60

Column A is the result actually recorded in the elections, for comparison purposes.

Column B is an attempt to show what the result might have been if Wales had 60 individual constituencies, each electing one member under the first past the post system.  It simply assumes that the extra 20 constituencies carved out of the ones which exist would fall the same way – in practice, of course, it would vary depending on how the boundaries were drawn.  It does show, though, that Labour could expect to dominate a wholly FPTP Assembly – which is why some of them have argued for exactly that in recent years.

Column C shows what would have happened had we had a single national list to allocate 20 seats rather than five regional lists.  It improves the situation a little, but still doesn’t really dent Labour’s dominance because of their success in the constituency seats.

Column D shows what the result might look like if the constituency votes for all the parties were summed and the seats allocated on the basis of the total votes; Column E does the same thing based on the regional list votes.  Both of these are what might be called ‘truly proportional’ results, where the number of seats held by each party directly reflects the proportion of the votes gained.  And they highlight the extent to which Labour, in particular, is over-represented based on votes cast.  As for the other parties – well, Plaid, the Tories, and UKIP are actually not far off a fair share of seats; two are very marginally over-represented.  The ‘losers’ from a lack of proportionality are the Lib Dems, the Greens – and the Abolish the Assembly party.  Whilst I wouldn’t particularly welcome the presence of the last of those in the Assembly, those of us who support fair voting systems have to accept that that might well include providing a platform for those with whom we disagree.

So I agree with the point made by Professor Jones; the current system is ‘sticky’ in that, up to a certain point, changing voting patterns are not reflected in changing patterns of representation; short of a seismic change in voting patterns, Labour’s hegemony will continue.  I’m less optimistic than he seems to be however, when he says “Here’s hoping that this will be the last Welsh devolved election conducted through the medium of the current electoral system.”  I don’t see the system changing any time soon. 

Whilst it’s true that the question of the voting system to be used is amongst the matters set to be devolved to the Assembly itself, it’s also the case that this is one of the matters where Westminster is requiring that there must be a ‘super-majority’ in favour of any change.  That means that there have to be at least 40 AMs who agree not only that the voting system should change, but also what the new system should be.  I don’t see Labour agreeing to making the system more proportional, and that means that as long as they have 20 or more AMs, it won’t happen, even if every other AM could be signed up to a single agreed alternative proposal.  (Fortunately, the system is proportional enough to make it even more unlikely that they’ll ever have 40 AMs as a party, which at least means that they can’t change the system to wholly FPTP!)

It’s not only the results of the voting system which are therefore ‘sticky’; the system itself falls into the same category.  It’s a question of chickens and eggs; as things stand, we won’t see any change to the voting system in Wales without removing Labour’s hegemony; and we won’t see any real dent in Labour’s hegemony without a change to the voting system.  And that brings us to the second – and more important - reason for the log-jam in Welsh politics.  But I’ll come back to that tomorrow.

Compulsion isn't the answer

Tweet Last week the subject of making voting compulsory raised its ugly head again.  This time it was mooted by Labour MP Chris Ruane.  I’m no fan of the idea, to put it mildly – and I’m not sure that the motivations of politicians who propose the idea are entirely honourable either.

The usual rationale is that voting is a duty which citizens should take seriously and that governments elected on a low turnout don’t have the same legitimacy as those elected on a high turnout.  But the reality of politics in the UK these days is that, when it comes to the election of a government, there is no real choice at all.  For sure, we can choose who implements policies, but the policies will be broadly the same whoever forms the government. 

For those who are broadly happy with Labour-Tory policies, why on earth should it become compulsory to choose who implements them - or even care?  And for those who are not happy with any of the options on the table, why compel them to choose the least unpalatable in order to add legitimacy to a system they reject?  It is – and this is as it should be – up to the politicians to give us something worth voting for.

But I don’t think that the real motivation for compulsory voting has much to do with civic duty or legitimacy; it’s much more about seeking a party advantage.  For any party, ensuring that all those who might vote for it are identified and persuaded to go out and cast their votes is a major task – I’ve been involved in doing it often enough to understand that.  The best organised parties, with the most highly motivated voters and activists have a competitive edge over the others.  Compelling people to vote takes away that advantage, so it should come as no surprise that those parties with the least motivated supporters are most likely to find the idea attractive.  (Did I mention that it was a Labour MP raising the matter?)

Those not involved directly often fondly assume that all that canvassing at election time is about persuading people to vote for A or B.  It really isn’t.  Very little happens by way of persuasion; few people are swayed.  It is, rather, about identifying those who have already decided to vote for party A, increasing their motivation to go out and do the deed, and drawing up a list of people who can be cajoled on election day.  If voting were to be compulsory, there would probably be a lot less direct doorstep contact between politicians and electors.  Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing probably depends on one's perspective, of course.

But it isn’t really the job of the criminal law to make it easier for parties to get their supporters out to vote; it’s the job of the parties to make it feel worthwhile.

Counting speeches

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Measuring the performance of people in roles can be a difficult task sometimes.  Lots of organisations end up targeting their managers and staff against those things which can be defined and measured rather than those which are more important but difficult to measure. 

It’s an aspect of the way targets are set in the public sector which worries me.  As an example, targeting schools on exam performance may well lead to improvement in exam results, but that doesn’t necessarily tell us whether the education has improved.  Training pupils to pass exams is not the same as educating them.  Politicians, though, love targets (or at least, they love the ones that they can hit – they tend to want to forget about the other ones).

Some of them even try to measure their own performance – or more usually, the performance of opponents – by turning to simplistic counts.  Hence, last week, we had the story about the lack of speeches made to the House of Commons by Peter Hain.  As with a lot of other things which can be measured, I’m not sure that, in itself, it tells us a great deal about how effective he is, or isn’t, as an MP.

Some MPs have become little more than problem advice centres.  It’s a useful role, but whether it’s the right role for elected politicians is another question.  Some of those try to ‘count’ their casework in order to impress us with how hard-working they are.  The late Sir Raymond Gower used to include in his election address a figure (always many thousands) for the number of letters he’d written.  (I had my first personal letter from him at the age of 11, to congratulate me on passing my cycling proficiency test.)  Certainly, people seemed to like this approach, but what did it actually tell me about his effectiveness as an MP?

Others go for the voting record, proud to tell us how many times they’ve voted out of the possible total number of opportunities.  But unless it’s an issue on which there are significant numbers of MPs voting contrary to the party whip, how useful is voting?  For most votes in the House of Commons, they might as well just have the whips present, and allow them to cast an appropriate number of votes on behalf of their parties.  A bit like the card votes at Labour conferences in the days when conferences were allowed to vote.

Yet others count the number of hours they put in.  I don’t doubt that many MPs do indeed put in very long hours (even deducting the time attending dinners, receptions etc which I’m not really convinced can be counted as ‘work’), but as a lot of people in other walks of life will understand from observation of those around them, merely putting in long hours is no guarantee of effectiveness.

The job is pretty poorly defined, and the role of individual MPs in the legislative process is largely one of doing as they are told.  There are a few who manage to carve out a role for themselves as campaigners on specific issues (Adam Price comes to mind) or as mavericks, willing to say what they think whether their party bosses like it or not (such as Paul Flynn), but they are much more the exception these days then they were a few decades ago.

Perhaps the problem is that we don’t define in enough detail what we want of them, and then like to criticise when they don’t deliver on it.  I’m not sure that the effectiveness of the contribution of a legislator is actually amenable to anything as crude as measurement; it’s more subtle than that.  When we do come to judge our elected representatives, there’s surely more to it than counting the number of speeches that they’ve made to an empty House.