The Political Times
Friday 11 May 2029
AV earthquake crushes Labour
Tories win vast majority in electoral earthquake
Lib Dems poll third but are the official opposition
Anger at "grossly unfair" voting system
Matt Quinn, chief reporter
Labour has suffered its worst general election defeat for over a century, winning fewer seats that at any time since 1918. After 14 years in power, voters angry about the pension crisis and energy shortages deserted the party. Not only has Labour lost power but the brutal vagaries of AV voting mean that it is not even the official opposition.
In constituency after constituency, the AV voting system enabled supporters of all the other parties to gang up to defeat the Labour candidate, even though these voters could never have imagined that it would produce such a distorted national result.
Despite polling 30% of first preferences, Labour won only 85 seats largely because its second and third preference vote collapsed, haemorrhaging seats to its rivals. By comparison, the Liberal Democrats polled 20% of first preferences but picked up 130 seats. The Tories have a majority of 160 seats, more than the Thatcher landslide of 1983.
At Labour campaign headquarters shock quickly turned to anger, with visibly-shaken activists openly claiming the result was "illegitimate", "grossly unfair" and "viciously disproportionate". One senior aide likened the result to the kind of thing that happens in a banana republic. Voters are not thrilled either. Again AV has done nothing to increase the representation of smaller parties. "My first preference doesn't count," said one voter. "It always gets transferred. What's the point?"
The seismic result is bound to re-open the debate on the voting system. Only 18 years ago the country narrowly voted to use AV, controversially ignoring the conclusions of the Jenkins Commission into voting reform. Reporting in the late 1990s, the commission found AV to be unacceptable because it has the potential to substantially exacerbate disproportionality. The Commission found that Blair's majority in 1997 may have soared from 179 seats to 245 under AV. It feared a landslide election could turn into something worse. We found out what this something was yesterday, when an electoral earthquake rocked British politics.
Writing on the wall how AV may have changed the 1997 election
| 1st Prefs | Seats with AV | |
|---|---|---|
| Labour | 43% | 445 |
| Conservative | 31% | 70 |
| Liberal Democrat | 17% | 115 |
- This projection gives Labour an overall majority of 205 seats. The Jenkins Commission cited two analyses that gave Labour majorites of 213 and 245 seats under AV.
- The result would have given Labour 68% of the seats on 43% of first preferences. For the Queensland Assembly elections AV has frequently returned a winner with over 66% of seats on a minority vote. More signficantly, it has frequently given the second party far fewer seats than the third party and, on one occasion, half the seats of the fourth party.
Projections of the 1997 General Election and actual results from the Queensland Assembly elections were warnings of what could happen (see Writing on the wall). During the referendum in 2011 such concerns were brushed aside because landslides tend to be rare, blatantly disregarding the commission's sound principle that "risks have to be measured by their consequences and not merely by their incidence." Today the Labour party pays the price for the consequences of a disproportional and "disturbingly unpredictable" electoral system, which ironically was backed by the Labour leadership at the time.
"Governments have lost elections badly in the past," comments elections expert Andy Tunbridge, "but they could always re-build in opposition. "Today we've seen a major party slide from a position of power into political oblivion. This measures a 9.9 on the electoral Richter scale."
Whether Labour can recover may depend on how effective the Liberal Democrats prove to be in opposing the new Tory government. With such a huge government majority, the opposition has its work cut out. Its first task will be to fight the referendum on changing the electoral system back to first-past-the-post, a Conservative manifesto commitment. It is hard to see Labour voting against the bill given its fate in the election that turned politics upside down. © AV2011.co.uk
"So far from doing much to relieve disproportionality, AV is capable of substantially adding to it."
A key objective of the the Independent Commission Into Voting Reform ("the Jenkins Commission") was to find a more proportional voting system. For decades electoral reformers have held that any change to our voting system must be based on the principle that it offers at least some increase in proportionality.
After considering substantial evidence in its two volume report, which also weighed the benefits of AV, the Jenkins Commission rejected AV on its own, primarily because it can be signficantly less proportional than our current system.
AV was unacceptable to an independent commission looking into electoral reform.
It should be unacceptable to electoral reformers now.