The New Politics, Part 18
LIBERAL Democrats have changed their mind on yet another policy, I just realised after re-warching the debate I had with Jo Swinson on Newsnicht last night. Jo said something which others in her party have been harping on about recently, namely that the Alternative Vote…
… means that whoever’s elected will actually have the support of at least half the people in their constituency.
Since when have the LibDems worried about the so-called legitimacy conferred by a candidate winning a plurality of the vote? In fact their preferred system of election makes it virtually impossible for any MP to win more than a much tinier proportion of the votes cast than at present.
Let me explain.
Before the election, the LibDems tabled an amendment to the then government’s Constitutional Pointlessness (Chattering Classes) Bill or whatever the damn thing was called. And this amendment helpfully set out their plans for the electoral map of the UK, which basically meant keeping Scottish LibDem seats as they are – represented by a single (LibDem) MP – and bundling the rest of us into multi-member seats. Take Glasgow, for instance, which would be transformed into a single seat represented by seven MPs. Now, according to the Single Transferable Vote system which the LibDems favour (and which, purely coincidentally, would result in their winning many more seats than at present), a successful candidate must pass a quota of votes before his/her second preferences are redistributed to other candidates. This is the quota:
So, assuming a 70 per cent turnout (300,000 votes), I would need to win 37,501 votes – just 12.5 per cent of the vote – to be elected.
You see where I’m going here?
The LibDems have never supported AV. They still don’t, but they’re claiming that one of its advantages is the 50 per cent principle – a principle that they’ve never valued and which their preferred system would utterly destroy.
And yet that principle, for which they care not a jot, is the only one they can mouth when asked why they’re supporting AV.
And they wonder why their poll numbers are falling?