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.