Is FPTP so much simpler than AV? Ask the voters of South Thanet

During the AV referendum (I'm not bitter, honest) we heard time and again from No campaigners how much simpler First Past the Post is than the Alternative Vote.

After all, all you need to do is put an X next to the person you want to win and then job done. That's so much easier than faffing about having to rank candidates, surely?

Well it depends where you live and what you want to achieve with your vote. Under FPTP you only get one choice. It's a system with limited inputs and therefore there is a limit to how the system can process that input.

There are plenty of examples of three way marginals in the current general election but let's take a live example. South Thanet.

This is the seat that Nigel Farage hopes to win for UKIP. Indeed if he doesn't win it he has already said he will resign as leader so the stakes are pretty high for him. But an average of recent polls in the constituency put UKIP on 31.6%, the Tories on 30% and Labour on 29.8%.

Let's put aside the fact that on these numbers, UKIP would win the seat on less than a third of the vote with nearly 70% of voters voting against the somewhat extreme Mr Farage (which is a definite defect of FPTP as well).

What I want to focus on here is what a voter in South Thanet who wants to keep Nigel Farage out should do. So if you wanted do this you could vote Tory. After all they were slightly ahead of Labour in the polls. Well, 0.2% ahead, but given that there is a margin of error of 3% in the polls it's actually equally likely that the Tories are behind Labour and you'd be better off voting Labour to keep Farage out. This is an invidious position to be in for a voter. You are almost being forced to vote for someone you might not actually want to vote for. Let's say you're a natural Labour voter but you become convinced that the Tories actually have the better change of keeping UKIP out. In order to keep Farage out you'd have to vote blue. But that might be the wrong choice. Doing that might let Farage in! There's no way of knowing until the count.

This is where AV would be a much better system. If our Labour inclined voter wanted to keep Farage out he could simply vote Labour 1, Conservative 2 (and either not rank UKIP at all or rank them at the bottom below all other candidates). Then when lower preferences are distributed at the count, if Labour are eliminated our voter's vote would go to the Conservatives who would then be in the final round with UKIP. But if it turned out Labour were in the final round, he/she had already voted for the other party in the final round to keep the purples out.

This is a scenario where AV is actually a much simpler system than AV. The voter would not need to second guess how everyone else if going to vote in order to try and make sure their vote made the difference. They would simply rank their votes in such a way as they would definitely know it would count in the final round.

Sadly we are not voting under AV or any sort of preferential system. The electorate rejected the change to the system so we are stuck with the current system for probably a long time to come.

But when, eventually electoral reform creeps back onto the political agenda (as it may if we keep seeing hung parliament after hung parliament) just remember South Thanet in 2015 when someone tries to argue that FPTP is the simplest system.

There are plenty of occasions when this is manifestly not the case.

First Past the Post prevented Rotherham Council being challenged sooner

The horrendous child abuse scandal in Rotherham and the consequent political fallout has led me to ruminate on what is doubtless one of the contributing factors.

Rotherham Council was effectively a one party state under Labour. This has been commented on in some of the coverage. Indeed Evan Davis on Newsnight last night put this question of lack of opposition on the council to the Deputy Children's Commissioner Sue Berelowitz and she did concur that it was one of the problems.

I have had a look at the numbers from the Rotherham Council elections from 2012 which are the latest I could find. Not all seats were up for election but 21 of them were. The results were:

Labour: 19 seats
Conservatives: 1 seat
Independent: 1 seat

But the percentages were:

Labour: 55%
Conservative: 17%
UKIP: 14%
Independent: 7%
BNP: 5%

Had there been a purely proportional system* then the seat distribution would have been roughly thus:

Labour: 12 seats
Conservatives: 4 seats
UKIP: 3 seats
Independent: 1 seat
BNP: 1 seat**

So Labour would have had just over half the seats (in proportion to their vote) rather than more than 90% of the seats as happened in reality under First Past the Post.

I have been banging on about changing our electoral system ever since I started blogging. Indeed I have even reached the point where I sometimes bore myself on this topic having written and spoken about it so many times.

But the Rotherham case highlights one of the key reasons why so many of us campaigners want to see change. Because having one party taking all or almost all the seats on a council on say 55% or 60% of the vote (as too often happens across the country) isn't just irritating for reform activists like me, it can actually be dangerous.

In an area where the vast majority of councillors are of one party there by definition is bound to not be much opposition and therefore less scrutiny of decisions taken by councils. In some cases this might lead to things like the bin collection service being a bit slapdash or pot holes not being repaired quickly enough. Unfortunately as we have seen in Rotherham the consequences can be and were much, much more serious.

Had there been more councillors from opposition parties there is every chance that the bizarre and harmful decisions that were being taken by Rotherham Council (over 15+ years let's not forget here) would have been flagged up much more quickly.

This is not just a Labour Party problem. There are fiefdoms all over the country not just for Labour but for the Conservatives and Lib Dems too. It doesn't matter what party is in control, if they have massively disproportionate power unchecked and unopposed locally due to a distorting electoral system then there is an increased risk of situations such as those we have seen in Rotherham happening and being allowed to continue to happen.

There has never been a more important time for those of us who want to see change to push our case. The lives and well-being of youngsters in some of the most deprived areas of the country are relying on us.

Rotherham proves this.


*Most campaigners like myself would not advocate a pure PR system but something like STV which would give a much more proportional result although perhaps not exactly as per the proportions listed above.

**Yes, yes the BNP would have got a seat under pure PR. In reality under a preferential system this would be very unlikely to happen actually but in a democracy if a party gets enough votes/preferences they win seats. We should not contrive a system based on its ability to prevent people's views being represented, we should instead strive to persuade them and have nothing to fear from any electoral system. For too long the "boogeyman" of the BNP (or the NF before it) has been used to stymie electoral reform. No more.

How First Past the Post could save the Lib Dems in 2015

We Lib Dems really dislike First Past the Post.

A post, yesterday

In fact I'd even go so far as to say that we hate it.

We hate the distorting effect it has on our politics. We hate the way its ossifying influence helps to keep the red/blue duopoly of our system. We hate the way it keeps smaller parties (not just ourselves but e.g. Greens and UKIP) out of power or even in some cases parliament altogether.

So I think it's fair to say we are generally not fans. And yet in 2015 the First Past the Post electoral system for Westminster could perversely be the thing that saves us. Let me explain how.

The Lib Dems got 23% of the vote in 2010 but only just over 8% of the seats (which meant 57 seats). As unfair as this is (and I regularly bang on about this as regular readers and listeners to my podcast will know) the reason is because the majority of that 23% of votes were wasted. When I say wasted I mean they were cast in seats where we didn't get an MP. In other words our vote was not very efficiently distributed given how seats are actually won.

But because of the way FPTP is structured we don't need to get 23% in order to return 57 MPs. In fact theoretically we could get way less than 23% and still hold all our existing seats. We could even get less than 8% of the vote and get 57 seats.

With 650 seats up for grabs the way to be certain of getting 57 seats is to make sure you get 50% of the vote in 57 of them. In reality you can often win seats on less (in some cases much less) than 50% but for illustrative purposes let's assume that's what we want to do. So if each seat has 1/650th of the voters we can see that the percentage of votes we theoretically need is actually

(100 x (57/650)) / 2

Or around 4.4% of the vote.

Of course this assumes an absolutely perfect distribution of our vote, i.e. getting exactly the votes we need (50% each) in the seats we are targeting and zero votes everywhere. In reality this would never happen. But what this demonstrates is that FPTP is almost infinitely elastic in the lack of correspondence between number of votes cast and number of seats.*

It doesn't take a massive leap from this to see that if the Lib Dems are very smart and target their resources with ruthless efficiency they have a reasonable chance of retaining most of their seats. When combined with the incumbency factor that many Lib Dems are expert at using to their advantage it becomes a potent scenario. The casualties of this of course would be all those candidates running in all the other non-target seats. If we follow this through to its logical conclusion then in order for this strategy to work they would get next to no or perhaps actually no help. We could see a large number of lost deposits. But I suspect the leadership would see this as a small price to pay if they get to retain a solid number of MPs.

Come 2015 I suspect the Lib Dems will get more than the 8% - 10% we are currently seeing in the polls. It will probably be into the teens perhaps around 15% in my view. But even if it isn't and it actually ends up being 10% or even lower, First Past the Post offers us plenty of scope for gaming the system to return us far more MPs than a simple "Universal Swing" analysis would suggest.

The only question really is whether the party leadership is ruthless enough to follow such a strategy and thus use the invidious and rightly despised First Past the Post system to its full advantage.


*As an aside here consider that UKIP could get 10% or even 15% of the votes and would still likely get zero seats because their vote is quite evenly distributed across the country which is an absolute killer for political parties under FPTP.

If Cameron is a "loser" we're going to see a lot more of them

If this is losing, I'll have a bit of that please...

One thing I find difficult to get my head around is how so many people consider Cameron to have been a loser in 2010.

The argument goes that Gordon Brown was a terrible Prime Minister, that a solid majority was ripe for the picking for the Tories and Cameron totally screwed it up.

I'm afraid I don't really buy it.

Yes, Brown was dreadful but for all kinds of complicated reasons it was always a big ask for Cameron to get a majority. In 2005 they were still way behind. The way Labour's vote is distributed across the country makes it hard for the Tories to get enough seats even in a bad year for Labour (indeed 2010 was the red team's second worst vote share since WWI). UKIP shaved some of the Tory vote away, enough to perhaps cost them a dozen or more seats by some calculations. The Lib Dems were surgent in a way not seen in previous elections. Etc. etc. etc.

I'm not trying to make excuses for Cameron. I am not a huge fan of his. It's just that the narrative that it was there for the taking and he bollocksed it up does not stand up to serious scrutiny. He actually got a larger share of the vote than Blair did in 2005 (which delivered Labour a solid majority) but it wasn't enough for him to get over the line.

Many across the political spectrum and within his own party really do consider the Prime Minister a loser though because of this lack of a majority. His own side mutter darkly about how if he does not win a majority next time then he will have twice failed the electoral test and will be forced out as leader, even if the Tories are still the largest party and can form a government. They cite Thatcher and Blair with their thumping majorities and highlight how by comparison Cameron came up woefully short, but that wilfully ignores how the political landscape has shifted over the decades.

Other countries where their Prime Ministers and Chancellors regularly have to share power and often go on to win successive election victories (i.e. remaining in power, not having a majority!) must look upon our hung parliament discourse with bemusement. For them, the dynamics of compromise and coalition are completely normal.

Many psephologists now think that hung parliaments in the UK will become the norm despite us retaining First Past the Post for the foreseeable future. The vote share of the two main parties combined has gone from around 97% in the 1950s to around 65% in 2010. The trend is clear, people want to vote for alternatives to red and blue. Whether it is Lib Dem, UKIP, Green, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Mebyon Kernow and a multitude of other smaller parties, in the consumer and internet age we like to be able to exercise a much wider choice. This is not Cameron's fault and the idea he can somehow reverse all of these trends is completely unrealistic.

I think the analysts are right and we will see more coalitions/minority governments. Politics is now much more volatile and unpredictable than it once was. If I had to put money on it I would wager that in the next 20 years we will see at least half of the governments being led by someone who was unable to muster a majority at the ballot box.

If Cameron is a "loser", I suspect we're going to see many more such losers walking into 10 Downing Street in the not too distant future.

First Past the Post helps elect extremists like Collin Brewer

During the AV referendum campaign a couple of years ago great play was made by the "No" campaign of how a preferential system would "allow BNP voters to dictate the result".

This was always a highly dubious claim. Indeed the BNP actually opposed AV, presumably because they realised that under a system where a candidate needs to get broad support they would likely get no seats at all. At least under FPTP they can occasionally win, usually where the barrier is often considerably lower than 50%.

One of the results from the recent local elections amply demonstrates this point.

Collin Brewer was an independent councillor in Cornwall who before the elections attracted a lot of publicity having made some highly offensive comments about disabled children and how they cost too much money so should be "put down". He resigned at the time but decided to stand again for the Wadebridge East ward and to the consternation of many was actually re-elected.

There is an online petition at the moment trying to get him to resign again which has gathered hundreds of signatures.

But it is worth bearing in mind how he managed to get re-elected. Here is the breakdown of the 2013 results for Wadebridge East taken from the Democracy Cornwall website:

Wadebridge East - results

Election Candidate	Party	Votes	%
Collin William Brewer	Independent	335	25%	Elected
Steve Knightley	Liberal Democrat	331	25%	Not elected
Roderick Harrison	UK Independence Party	208	16%	Not elected
Adrian Darrell Jones	Labour	161	12%	Not elected
Brian Aubone Bennetts	Conservative	150	11%	Not elected
Sarah Hannah Maguire	Independent	146	11%	Not elected

As you can see Collin only got 25% of the vote. Now I don't know how many of those who voted for him were aware of his remarks but even if most of them were, 75% of voters voted for a candidate who does not have those views. And yet because of First Past the Post Collin was allowed to take the seat on only a quarter of the vote.

Far from preventing extreme candidates from being elected, FPTP actually allows it to happen by simply taking the candidate with the plurality of votes and giving them the seat no matter how low the vote share is. Elsewhere in Cornwall another candidate was elected on less than 20% of the vote.

We aren't going to get AV or any other form of electoral reform any time soon I suspect but we have to accept that keeping FPTP means as a country we reap what we sow.

The Tories made their FPTP bed - now they must lie in it

Disappointing piece from Daniel Hannan today in The Telegraph which essentially boils down to:

"Don't vote for UKIP, you'll let Labour in".

Please forgive me if I am somewhat unsympathetic to the current Tory plight. If UKIP do surge and get as many votes as polls are suggesting then yes, it is very likely that eventually it will cost the Conservatives a number of seats that they would otherwise have won and yes the vote on the right could be split in a number of places allowing a more centrist or left-wing candidate to come through the middle.

This section of Hannan's piece leapt out at me:

..consider the recent Eastleigh by-election. Two Right-of-Centre candidates stood on virtually identical platforms. Both wanted an In/Out referendum, and both would have voted to leave. Between them, they secured 53 per cent of the vote, and lost, handing the seat to a Euro-integrationist Lib Dem with 32 per cent.

That is indeed exactly what happened in Eastleigh. It is also exactly what those of us who campaigned for a Yes vote on AV repeatedly tried to explain is one of the major weaknesses of First Past the Post which is eliminated with a preferential system.

But of course the Conservative Party were dead against changing from our current system. So they have to take the consequences under FPTP. If this means they end up losing lots of seats because of a surge to UKIP then so be it.

They've made their bed. They can now lie in it.

The Majoritarian Muddle

There's an interesting piece from Dan Hodges yesterday in which he suggests that many Tories are so sick of having to govern in coalition with the Lib Dems that they may actually prefer to be in opposition.

This is a phenomenon that I witnessed first hand in the run up to the 2010 general election. At the time I was doing a lot of media and in one of my radio studio appearances I was chatting to a right-wing commentator who I knew from previous conversations was considering a potential future career as a Tory MP. The subject of electoral reform came up and he stated in blunt terms that if first-past-the-post was ever abandoned for Westminster he would quit politics. For him it was not enough to have power, it had to be absolute power for his party alone.

As a long-standing pluralist, I find this attitude hard to understand. Some might suggest that as a Lib Dem I would say that. But I thought this long before I joined the party. Compromising with colleagues is something that almost everybody does all the time in the "real world". Extending this across party boundaries within politics should not really be controversial and yet, somehow, it is. Well, in this country at least. Most other countries have political systems that ensure the most likely outcome is the sharing of power in various ways. Very few have such a brutal winner-takes-all system as the United Kingdom.

Even under first-past-the-post, it seems likely that the smaller parties will continue to eat away at the long-term vote share for the big two. Indeed, across the world the "Westminster model" is now usually returning hung parliaments. This could well lead to more opportunities for coalitions in the UK. If this is correct, Conservative and Labour MPs and activists are going to have to get used to sharing power. The sort of monumental strop that numerous backbench Tory MPs are now throwing will be utterly counterproductive.

The idea of working with one's political opponents has been anathema to the main parties for the last 60 years. The "winner" of the election gets a majority of seats and pushes through what they want. That has been the basis of our politics for so long that it is a genuine culture shock to find ourselves in a world where constant compromise is necessary. That is as true for the Lib Dems as for anyone else, which is perhaps surprising given they are the party of electoral reform - but that shows how deeply embedded our previous settlement was. We need to see a culture change in this country's body politic. Instead of compromise with political opponents being seen as weak, we need to accept it as an inevitable part of policy making. No one party has a monopoly on good ideas and our country can actually be strengthened by ensuring that more than one political philosophy and tradition has input into that process.

And if we can all accept this, then maybe next time we have a coalition the MPs that form the backbenches will have a slightly more realistic expectation of what can be achieved and perhaps be grateful for the opportunity to contribute, rather than equate compromise with betrayal of their principles.

This post was first published in the New Statesman online

FPTP makes coalitions more fragile

One of the main things the Lib Dems have to do during the current coalition government is to prove that coalitions can work. The reason they need to do this is because one of their main long term reform policies is to change the electoral system to a more proportional one. This would likely result in more coalitions in the future. Ergo the Lib Dems have to prove that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

The problem is that they have to do this whilst still under our old friend First Past the Post.

The Lib Dems got 23% of the vote at the last election and got 57 MPs. Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that 57 is only about 8% of MPs. We all know that is not proportional of course but let's take that as a given.

So 57 MPs from 23%. Since being in government the Lib Dems have had to take a lot of "tough decisions". That's political speak for "things that are really going to piss some people off". When you add those to the number of former Lib Dem voters who were really only in it for the protest and are not happy that the party is now in government we see the sort of vertiginous falls in the polls we have seen recently with the Lib Dems down to as low as 8%.

Now in reality as we get closer to the next general election I expect that number will pick up. Although I am pretty damn sure the party will not poll anything like as much as 23%. But let's go with that 8% figure for a minute.

According to projections by UK Polling Report 8% would see the Lib Dems with 7 seats. But hang on a minute, they had 57 seats on 23%. Now they're only getting 7 seats on 8%!?

I'll illustrate the reason for this using this graph I produced (on the old/current boundaries*) which uses the UK Polling Report swing calculator to show how as the percentage of Lib Dem votes tick down by 1% point at a time, we see the number of seats reduce by more than that as we progress. I went as far down as the 8% indicated by the worst poll so far. The red line shows what would happen if the seats decreased linearly with the vote (roughly what you'd expect in a proportional system).

Iniquity: Now in graph form

It's not just that FPTP is disproportional that is the problem for the Lib Dems. It's that it gets even more disproportional the lower the vote goes.

This means that as the party takes the "tough decisions" the hit that they take is much much harder than that of their coalition partner. Not only are the Tories not seeing their vote drop as much as the Lib Dems (their core voters are happier with them as the austerity measures are more in line with what they want to see) but even when it does drop, the punishment they receive in terms of proportional loss of seats is much less. On the UKPR projection, a loss of 15 percentage points reduces the Lib Dem seats by a factor of more than 800%! The worst projections we see for the Conservatives at the moment on a reduction of around 5% or 6% see only a reduction of maybe 25% of their seats. Still enough to see them out of power but nowhere near as bad as the sort of pummeling the Lib Dems could be facing.

Given all of this it is no wonder that Nick Clegg is pushing the "differentiation" line so much harder nowadays. I understand that some Conservative activists and MPs are aggrieved about this. But they should try to put themselves in the place of a Lib Dem activist or MP for a few minutes.

If they did they might see that there is a huge difference between being out of power for a few years with a solid base to rebuild from and an existential threat that could see their party all but disappearing.

It is indeed ironic that in order to prove a more proportional system could work, the Lib Dems may have to face the worst excesses of a totally disproportionate system.

We may find in the end that the party simply cannot take that sort of pressure and it ends up leaving the coalition in an attempt to ward off the electoral Armageddon scenario.

But that wouldn't necessarily prove that coalitions cannot work. It would however prove something all Lib Dems already know.

First Past the Post sucks.



*The slight disparity between the 7 seats figure and that seen in the graph is due to UKPR's use of the new expected boundaries in their projection

What if this is as good as it gets for the Lib Dems?

In the recent local and devolved elections, the Lib Dems polled around 16% of the vote. This was down around a third on the 23% the party polled at the last General Election. Lots of very hard working councillors lost their seats and as a result of this the party's local base has doubtless been damaged. Of course I feel desperately sorry for those people. Fighting against a national trend is very difficult and can feel like one hand is tied behind your back before you even get started.

However what I wanted to focus on today is how the national political picture is likely to pan out over the next few years and to put this into historical context.

Since 1945 there have been 17 General Elections and of the 16 up until 2010 the Lib Dems or Liberal Party achieved precisely 0% of the power in the aftermath of each of them. There was a brief period of influence at the fag-end of a Labour government in the late 1970s with the Lib Lab pact but that was a mere blip and did not result in ministerial office for any Liberal MPs. So effectively we were looking at 65 years when the third party had no executive power to implement its policies.

That historical trend was well and truly bucked last year however when the Lib Dems formed a coalition government with the Conservatives. They got a little over 20% of the cabinet positions including Deputy Prime Minister and a chance to implement all sorts of policies across the political board, even in departments where they did not have the Secretary of State. Indeed recent BBC research suggests that so far the indications are that 75% of the Lib Dem manifesto is being implemented in the government programme vs 60% of the Conservative manifesto! That is an incredible achievement when you consider that the Lib Dems have 57 MPs against 307 for the Conservatives.

But that context is thrown into sharp relief by the opinion polls which regularly have the party in single digit or low double digit figures and the local election results in May which were not quite that bad but still well down from last year as I mentioned at the start.

I suppose there are a number of reasons why the party is doing so badly in the national polls now. Amongst them will be the way Lib Dem MPs mostly signed a pledge promising to vote against a rise in tuition fees and then as a governing party did the opposite (although plenty of individual MPs kept that promise of course), the fact that the party has signed up to a deficit reduction programme that is rather at odds with what was said during the election campaign and so on and so on. The party is in coalition and has had to make compromises but some of them have been hard for Lib Dem inclined voters to swallow.

This would have been the case whoever the Lib Dems had formed a coalition with though. Even if a Lib/Lab coalition had been feasible (and from what I have read I remain convinced it was not for various reasons, both political and mathematical) the Lib Dems would have ended up in a similar position now as well. Lots of people who had voted for the party as an anti-Labour protest vote would have been disgusted that it had "propped up" Labour and would have gone off to vote for another party or not voted at all.

And I think this is the crux of the matter. We have to face up to the fact that a decent chunk of our support in 2010, and for many years before then was made up a protest vote of various kinds. Anti-Conservative certainly, but also Anti-Labour and perhaps even anti-politics. After all, people could vote Lib Dem safe in the knowledge that they would never be in power to do anything about it. Couldn’t they?

Because of the vagaries of the First Past the Post system for Westminster, a drop in support of a third can produce outcomes whereby the number of MPs lost is much more than a third. On some projections, current Lib Dem polling could see us with 15 MPs at the next General Election or perhaps even less. Now in reality there are likely to be local issues and incumbency factors at play that mitigate this somewhat but if the polls stay roughly where they are (even assuming a bit of a bounce if the economy improves by 2015 and the Lib Dems get some credit for this) the number of MPs the party has the next time the voters are asked could easily be half or even less than now.

For the individual MPs and the local parties they represent this will be very difficult. In many cases decades of extremely hard work will have been put into winning and retaining the seat.

But to put this into the historical context I mentioned at the start, all those decades of work, the long, long march from fringe party with only enough MPs to fit in the back of a taxi, never being able to execute any of the 16 manifestos since 1945, to a position where 75% of the 2010 manifesto is actively being implemented is worth considering very carefully. In a way, the investment that those who put all that effort in over all those years is now being realised in terms of political capital, power and policies.

So what if this is as good as it gets? Maybe the party gets one shot at power when the electoral cards fall in a certain way under FPTP and it has to make the most of that when it happens. And that will never be easy for all the reasons mentioned previously. There will always be some voters who will feel betrayed by a party of protest becoming a party of government. And maybe also, the party will lose seats at the next election even if things go very well for the economy and the strong influence the party had had on the government produces very positive outcomes. Nobody ever said life, or politics was fair!

I have talked a lot about positive outcomes of policy but I still think there are plenty of things the party in government could do much better. I certainly think as I have said before they need to make it much clearer to the public what difference they are making (which to be fair to him, Nick Clegg seems to have belatedly realised). And we should certainly keep fighting for as much of our programme as we can get.

But if this is as good as it gets for the Lib Dems when they are in power then I suppose the party has a choice. It can, perhaps after another round or two of bad local election results (which seem inevitable, certainly as the cuts bite) decide it has had enough and withdraw from the coalition, maybe even defenestrating the public face of the Lib Dem compromises on the way in an attempt to shore up its political position. And let’s not kid ourselves that that route would be a panacea. Electoral meltdown could easily follow then too.

The other choice available to the party is to take the long view that this is its chance to make a real difference for the remaining years of this parliament. That difference might not yield immediate political dividends and might leave the party having to rebuild its local base for years to come but at least all the years of hard work in achieving those Westminster seats would have resulted in a very heavily Lib Dem influenced government in the first half of the decade that started with such a remarkable General Election result and one which the party embraced in the national interest.

That is the route I would choose.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

FPTP is *more* complicated than AV in reality

Excellent post here from Anthony Smith highlighting how under First Past the Post, the tortuous decision process you have to go through in order to make your vote actually count makes it more complicated than it would be under Alternative Vote.

Here is his flowchart that explains it all:

Paint and the Alternative Vote

This clip from Auf Wiedersehen Pet has being doing the rounds sparked by a post from Mark Wallace where he claims that it shows how AV is not a good system.

The clip shows the lads trying to decide what colour paint they should use to paint the hut. Because they can't agree on a colour Barry suggests they use a preferential voting system whereby everyone gets 2 choices, their first is weighted with two points and the second is weighted with one point. They then total them up to decide which colour wins. The result is yellow which was apparently nobody's first choice. Cue much hilarity from Mark and others who claim this shows AV is unfair. Mark does concede that the system is not AV but that the same result would have happened under AV too*.

According to Barry in the clip, of the 6 who voted, none of them chose the same first choice colour. Three of them chose yellow for second place so it wins with 3 points vs 2 for all the others that were first placed. We also need to assume that all the other second placed colours were different from those that came first, otherwise at least one of them would have had 3 points and hence it would have been a tie.

I am not so sure that this clip shows AV as being wrong or unfair. Mark implies that AV has chosen the wrong winner as yellow was nobody's first choice but in such an election with such a disparate variety of views amongst the electorate, how else were they supposed to choose the colour? Surely allowing preferences like this is fairer than just one person imposing their first choice view on everyone else despite it only being the first choice of under 17% of the electorate?

In fact, if anything a proper AV system would have been even more fair allowing each voter to express more information about their preferences and hence having an influence on the outcome.

Let's just move this scenario into the voting world for a minute. Let's imagine a constituency with a very diverse range of views amongst its electorate like this. Let's also imagine that like in the example from AWP above that first choice vote is very close, say around 16% to 17% for 6 parties. Something like:

Conservative 17.1%

Labour 16.9%

Lib Dem 16.7%

UKIP 16.6%

Green 16.4%

SNP 16.2%

This is about as close to the AWP example as the real world could ever get (it's never going to be an exact 1/6th split amongst all parties) and it is an extreme example but useful to work this through.

In a real world scenario it is statistically highly improbable that 0% of the electorate would opt not to choose a specific party as its first choice but that 50% would choose that party as its second choice as in the AWP example. Far more likely is a party that did not come first in first preferences overtakes the one in first place (but well short of 50%) after the second (and third and so on) preferences are taken into account.

Under First Past the Post the Conservative would take the seat with less than a fifth of the vote. Even if most of the supporters of all the other parties would prefer to have had a Labour MP, no account is taken of that.

So far from "proving" the case for FPTP, this example actually highlights the pernicious effect of First Past the Post.

*Incidentally, Duncan Stott in the comments on Mark's post refutes this claim in that if yellow had received no first preferences it would have been eliminated after the first round.

Tom Harris hearts AV (but only for the political classes)

That's right. Tom Harris, that stalwart of First Past the Post has a blogpost this morning which makes the case for the Alternative Vote. You should read the whole post as I have only included snippets below. He specifies the circumstances in which he thinks it can work well:

AV is a good system for filling a single position. If Britain had an elected president, for example, he or she would probably be elected by AV, or at least in a run-off ballot. That would make sense.

Similarly, if a local party is choosing a parliamentary candidate, AV is the best system to secure the maximum amount of support for the victorious candidate from party members. And, yes, when electing the leader of a party, AV’s the system to use.

That's quite a few situations where he thinks it is a good thing. Of course there's a but coming:

But when you’re electing 650 people from across the country, you’re not just electing 650 individual MPs – you’re electing a government.

...

And that’s why FPTP remains the best system for the Commons and AV is the better system for electing party leaders. Horses for courses, see?

I'm afraid I don't see. Surely a general election consists of 650 individual races where the voters are choosing their individual MP. If AV is good enough for all the other situations that Tom lists then why is it not good for people in a constituency choosing who represents them? Proponents of FPTP often talk about how that system maintains a "strong" link between the MP and the constituency. The arguments mainly revolve around this link and how bad it would be to lose or "weaken" this through a more proportional system (of which just to be clear AV is not one). There is a case to make that AV actually increases the strength of the link between the MP and their constituents, after all it means that they have to get over a certain threshold within the seat (50%) rather than as at the moment some MPs getting elected with a lot less than that often through the votes of their opponents splitting the opposition to them. There are some pretty unpopular MPs out there even in their own constituencies.

Ironically, for someone who is so opposed to proportional systems, Tom actually ends up making quite a strong case for using something more like STV with multi-member constituencies for the Commons. If what we are really doing is voting for a party nationally in a general election (which is essentially Tom's argument) then what justification is there for parties that get 24% of the vote to get less than 10% of the seats? Or parties that get 35% of the vote getting 55% of the seats? He can't have it both ways. In mustering arguments against using AV for the Commons he ends up arguing against FPTP as well.

I think the sort of arguments we see above could become a real problem during the campaign. there are lots of situations where the political classes already use AV for themselves as Tom describes. Trying to then simultaneously argue that voters in constituencies should not have that same system whilst avoiding the trap of inadvertently exposing the big problems with FPTP is quite a tall order. I don't think Tom has managed it here.

For such an advocate of the existing system to be finding these sort of problems gives me confidence that those of us who want to see change can win this argument.

Left Fisk Forward

Will Straw has written a piece for Left Foot Forward today entitled "Electoral reformers should oppose the coalition’s gerrymandering" where he highlights four reasons why electoral reformers should oppose the proposed government bill to change the boundaries and put the AV to a referendum.

I won't reproduce the entire post here for the purposes of fisking but I will take each of the points that Will raises along with a synopsis and address them here:

1) The Bill prevents equal representation

While everyone accepts the principled case for equal-sized seats, time must be taken to ensure that the equalisation is of those entitled to vote rather than those already registered to vote.

This has been the mantra of Labour regarding the resizing of constituencies since Harriet Harman first raised it at PMQs a few weeks back. The redrawing of the boundaries cannot be completed until everyone who is entitled to vote is taken into account, or at least many more of them. The thing is though that all the other times that the boundaries have been redrawn, including the most recent occasions in England Scotland and Wales between 2006 and 2008 this did not happen. And that was under Labour. I agree that we should do our best to maximise voter registration but not at the expense of these other reforms. I see no reason why this issue is suddenly of such critical importance after 13 years of government when they could have done something about it. It is almost as if they are just looking for a reason to oppose the bill.

2) The Bill gives the Liberal Democrats a partisan advantage

Two parliamentary seats – the Western Isles (SNP) and Orkney and Shetland Islands (Lib Dem) – have been exempted from the need to meet new quotas because of their low population density.

Will also goes on to list a few other Lib Dem seats that will be spared from being broken up, all of which are very sparsely populated.

I'm sorry but is he having a laugh!? In 2005 Labour got 35% of the vote and 55% of the seats. the Lib Dems got 22% of the vote and less than 10% of the seats. In 2010 we got over 23% of the vote and got even fewer seats still than 2005. The current system gives a massive partisan advantage to Labour and is hugely tilted against the Lib Dems. I know from conversations with Will that he is not happy about this and wants to see it changed. Even with these changes (including AV), the Lib Dems will likely get nowhere near their proportional share of seats. And Labour will still very likely get far more than theirs.

There are good reasons to exempt the constituencies he lists from the process as they have very low population density and increasing the size of these constituencies still further (without increasing the number of MPs for the seat) would cause real problems.

We are not trying to gerrymander anything.

3) The Bill does not correct distortions in the electoral system

In essence his point is that fiddling with First Past the Post will not help with proportionality.

I agree, it won't. As Will very well knows what the Lib Dems wanted was STV with multi-member constituencies. We were never going to be able to get that. The Conservatives will not go for it (at the moment) and Labour could not have delivered it. There are too many Labour MPs who would not allow even a referendum on this through. So the Lib Dems have got the best deal they could. An agreement to a referendum on a change to AV which is at the very least preferential and ensures that the ridiculous situation at the moment where MPs can be elected on around a third of their vote (or less) in a constituency will be over. It will also reduce negative campaigning as candidates try to appeal for second (and third) preferences from their opponents.

In short it is not perfect and is certainly not proportional but it in some key respects it is better than what we have now and can be used as a springboard to STV later. After all we would already have the preferential voting. We would just need multi-member constituencies.

So I agree with Will on this one but my question to him is, where is the alternative proportional system proposal that can win enough support in the house to get a referendum? He is making the best the enemy of the good. AV is politically possible at the moment. Further change is not.

4) A smaller House of Commons will be be less representative

As Sunder Katwala has outlined on Next Left, “a smaller Commons will almost certainly delay and slow down progress towards gender equality in the House of Commons.”

There are all sorts of measures that can be taken to ensure better representation. The parties themselves have a particular responsibility to ensure they are picking a diverse range of candidates in winnable seats. More encouragement needs to be given to those from under-represented groups to stand. I also firmly believe that if we were to get STV then we would see more diversity anyway as the parties would find it in their own best interests to offer a diverse set of people in each constituency (and as I have said AV is a stepping-stone along that path).

By Will's logic here we should see even more MPs in order to increase the granularity and improve representation. I do not think that is the right way. We have too many MPs and both parties now in government wanted to see them reduced.

I think the thing that disappoints me the most about the attitude of many in Labour, including Will who I very much respect is that on this issue they seem to have approached it from the start-point of "what can we do to scupper this?". If it wasn't these four arguments, they would have found some others to object to it and vote against it.

Although he is in a minority within his own party, I was pleased to see a post from Labour blogger Anthony Painter today entitled "Labour’s tactics driven opposition continues. Disappointingly." who thinks his party are being wrong-headed about this:

“...from Labour’s point of view, that element [cut in number of constituencies] of the legislative package will, in all likelihood pass whatever I’m afraid. It is AV that is up for grabs. Labour has the opportunity to show that it can embrace reform and pluralistic politics. It can show that it is not stuck in the past; a defensive party unable to confront the future. And it is the right thing to do from the perspective of democratic accountability.”

Spot on. I only wish more in his party felt the same way.

Will claims at the start of his post that a "yes" vote on AV should be supported, but the truth is as Anthony points out that the tactics being engaged in now could wreck the whole thing.

As I said in a brief Twitter conversation with Will on this subject earlier today, every time there is a chance for electoral reform, Labour do something to prevent it. We saw it in 1998 when Jenkins was kicked into the long grass. The pattern is continuing. This is one of the reasons why I could never have considered joining Labour. As a party their heart is not in any change to the electoral system.

Turkeys might just vote for a deferred Christmas

It is a relatively exciting time to be an electoral reformer. The one major party that has always supported reform is actually in government. We know we are going to get a referendum on changing the voting system for the Commons, albeit only to Alternative Vote but many reformers think that would be a step in the right direction. Politically it was the only possible option and an acceptance of that seems to be sinking in. The fight will now be to win the referendum as a staging post for something better and much more proportional later once people are used to preferential voting.

But another thing should be taken into account. As I blogged about yesterday, even under First Past the Post, hung parliaments are more likely these days. Under AV I think they would be even more likely because although it is not proportional, it will tend to favour the Lib Dems more than FPTP does. So if AV passes we can expect similar situations to that we were faced with on May 7th 2010 ever more frequently.

And this brings me to this crux of this post. What will the Lib Dems do next time they find themselves in hung parliament negotiations? This time as I said it was a political impossibility to get PR on the table from either of the parties. Even if Labour + Lib Dem had just pushed us over the magic 326 number there are far too many Labour MPs who would never vote for even a referendum on PR and almost all Tories would be against too.

I think that if we ever want to get PR we need to be more pragmatic about it. What I am about to suggest I am sure has some problems, indeed I can think of a couple straight away. However I think that something like it might be necessary if we are ever to get proper reform.

Some MPs who are against PR are against it in principle. They think it would be bad for the country. That is fair enough and although I will strongly argue against those who think that they are unlikely to change their view. There are however some MPs who I think could be persuaded except for one thing. If PR came in they may well lose their job. It's the old "Turkeys never vote for Christmas" argument. I can completely understand this by the way. Most people would find it difficult to vote for something that may threaten their job. So we need to do something to mitigate this threat and allow MPs who fall into this category to put those fears to one side and vote on the principle.

My idea is to make it so that any change to the voting system to a proportional system would be delayed by 10 or 15 years from the date of a referendum. On this sort of time-frame many of the MPs who may be persuadable of the positive benefits of a more proportional system but who worry about being out of a job in 2 or 3 years time would find it much easier to allow a referendum.

There may actually be some arguments for implementation of any positive referendum result to be deferred anyway. For example if we have only just changed to AV then making any further change probably should be deferred for a while. Also, there could be other constitutional changes being implemented in the next few years such as a reformed and elected House of Lords which could even be under PR itself. Those other changes may also need to bed in too.

Like I said, I know this proposal is not without its problems. I understand the issues about binding a successor parliament and about how a future parliament could reverse the decision or even just refuse to implement the result of the referendum. I am sure there are other problems too.

But the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that without some pragmatic move like this we will struggle to ever get PR for the Commons. The votes just won't be there.

Turkeys however may just vote for Christmas if it is far enough into the future that it would not affect them very much anyway.

Hung parliaments are now more likely than ever

Fascinating bit of research here from top psephologist John Curtice who makes the point that hung parliaments are now quite likely to keep happening, even under First Past the Post.

He cites three preconditions for FPTP to be able to regularly deliver overall majorities:

If first past the post is to be a reliable instrument for delivering single party majority government to whoever comes first in votes, three conditions have to hold. First, the system should dissuade most voters from backing third parties on the grounds that doing so constitutes a wasted vote. Moreover, when votes are cast for third parties they should indeed receive little reward in terms of seats.

Second there needs to be plenty of seats that are marginal between the two main parties so that when the nation swings a point or so in one direction of the other, many seats change hands. That way, even a party with a relatively small lead in votes should still be able to establish a clear lead in seats.

Third, the system needs to treat the two largest parties equitably. If one of those parties would secure an overall majority of, say, 30 seats if it had a two point lead over the other in votes, then the same should be true of the other party if it had a similar lead. Otherwise the system could deliver a majority to the wrong winner.

None of these conditions now hold with sufficient force to ensure that hung parliaments could not become a regular feature in Britain even if the first past the post system were to be retained.

He then goes on to explain how those preconditions no longer hold. It's well worth reading the full article for the details underpinning this but he concludes:

...the system can no longer be relied upon to give either Labour or the Conservatives an overall majority if they only have a narrow lead in votes. Meanwhile the Conservatives cannot secure a majority even if they secure quite a substantial lead — such as the seven point lead they obtained on 6 May.

Doubtless those who campaign in the forthcoming referendum against switching from first past the post to the alternative vote will do so on the grounds that the change would make hung parliaments more likely. That is undoubtedly true. The only problem is we are likely to be stuck with them in future anyway.

I think what is fascinating about Professor Curtice's final point is how it may well undermine one of the major planks of opposition to proportional electoral reform, never mind AV. Even defenders of FPTP will often concede some of the major drawbacks but then counter with the crucial "fact" that it produces overall majorities. Earlier this month that was shown not to be the case and the research above shows that that is probably not a freak occurrence but instead a likely regular feature in future elections.

The proponents of change can quite credibly claim that if we are going to have hung parliaments anyway then we might as well have a fairer system.

I await the counter arguments to this with interest.

Hattip to John Rentoul for drawing my attention the the research.

What if First Past the Post kept throwing up hung parliaments?

Something James Graham tweeted during election night intrigued me. It was along the lines of "I can't see a second election unravelling this".

I was doing the paper review on 5 Live last night and one of the other guests was Professor Jon Tonge, head of politics at Liverpool University who suggested that another election in 6 months or a year could very well throw up another hung parliament. I agreed with this and suggested that even further, if Labour were starting to recover that we could even see a "doubly hung parliament" with the Lib Dems in a position to be able to form a majority with either Labour or the Conservatives (unlike now where that is only possible with the Conservatives).

Professor Tonge also made the point that were this to happen, it would be the end for First Past the Post. He said that in 1974, it was lucky (or unlucky depending on your point of view) that the second October election resulted in a majority (just) for Harold Wilson's Labour Party.

I think that FPTP is already hanging by a thread anyway. Despite what its proponents say about it producing "strong" government and regular overall majorities it is largely historical accident that has caused that in post-war Britain. The system itself is not guaranteed to do it and with the continuing diminution of the combined vote share for Labour and the Conservatives (now down to less than two-thirds as of last Thursday) and the increase in vote share of other parties I think it is increasingly likely that this will happen. The last three parliaments in Canada for example where First Past the Post is used have led to no overall majority for anyone.

I expect David Cameron will be aware of this possibility and it may well factor in his deliberations as he continues to negotiate with Nick Clegg. He may calculate that a deal to change the system will look statesmanlike and magnanimous whilst simultaneously knowing that something may well have to change quite soon anyway so he really has nothing to lose to be seen as part of that change.

Can we please, PLEASE make this the last election where we get this:

• Don't vote Lib Dem here, you'll let the Tories in.
• You can't vote Labour here, they've got no chance, you'll let the Lib Dems in.
• Tories can't win here.
• Vote Conservative to keep Labour out.
• SNP are the only ones in this seat who can keep the Tories out.
• A vote for Plaid Cymru is a vote for Labour.
• You do realise don't you that if you vote Lib Dem you could let Labour in here?
• Vote tactically for us to keep them out.
• Only Lib Dems can keep Labour out.
• Only the Conservatives can keep Labour out.
• Only the SNP can keep Labour out.
• Etc.
• Etc.
• Etc.

Are you sick of it yet?

It is the First Past the Post system that forces all parties (yes, yes, I know including my own) to indulge in this very negative way of campaigning. A change to Single Transferable Vote which allows voters to list their preferences would transform all of this. Instead of scaring voters with the possibility of them "letting in" the candidate they fear most, candidates would suddenly find the way to win is to appeal for people to vote *for* them rather than *against* someone else. It's built into the system and comes for free.

Please let's make this the last election under this sort of relentlessly negative system.

Lib Dems and "proportionally earned seats"

I was having a look at data from previous elections recently with a particular focus on the number of seats and percentage of votes gained by the third party in the last few decades.

The first thing that is clear and which I already knew is that in the last three general elections, the Lib Dems have consistently increased their number of seats. The figures are:

1997: 46 (+26)

2001: 52 (+6)

2005: 62 (+10)

The huge leap in 1997 is often put down to our improved targeting campaign techniques championed by Chris Rennard.

There is something else interesting in the figures which I had not realised. I wanted to see what happened when you compare the percentage of seats we had won with the percentage of "proportionally earned seats" we would have got in a proportional system. I was particularly interested to see if and how this had improved over the years and indeed it has.

In fact when you look at the figures since 1970, this is what you get:

This chart shows vote share plotted against seat share:

As you can see there is not much correlation between the two. The vote share bounces around all over the place but the share of seats is clearly trending upwards with a few small interim falls.

This graph shows the "proportionally earned seats" share on its own though:

In every general election since the second one in 1974 (so the last 8, coincidentally every single one since I was born in July 1974) the proportion of seats won with respect to the share of the vote has increased.

The fact is that the third party has consistently got better and better at fighting first past the post elections.

Whenever I have been asked how I think the Lib Dems will do at the next election I have always said that I think our share of the vote will be higher than last time (22%) but that our number of seats may well fall. A number of other Lib Dems have taken me to task on this suggesting that I am not taking into account how difficult it is for our opponents to shift us once we win seats and that I am being too pessimistic. The data above backs up their view.

The history of elections in my entire lifetime would suggest that if the Lib Dem share of the vote goes up then our number of seats will too. If this doesn't happen then it will be bucking a 36 year trend.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that we will not lose seats at the coming election.

This has been cross-posted from Lib Dem Voice.

Why does Daniel Hannan want UKIP to die?

Junius on UKIP has drawn my attention to a recent blog post by Tory MEP and arch Euro-sceptic Daniel Hannan entitled "A response to my UKIP-supporting readers".

In it he suggests that because the only people who are likely to be PM after the general are either Gordon Brown or David Cameron and that UKIP cannot win seats, UKIP supporters should vote Conservative.

He goes on to say:

What I’d ideally like – and what I assume my UKIP readers also aspire to – is a situation where UKIP no longer needs to exist: where it can award itself a medal and retire with honour, job done. Obviously, we’re not at that point yet. But I worry that every activist who deserts the Tories for UKIP is retarding the prospects of a Euro-sceptic Conservative Party without taking his or her energies to an alternative party of government.

On the issue of Europe which appears to be vital to him, Hannan does not agree with his own leadership and instead agrees with UKIP. The only reason as far as I can tell that Hannan has not already defected to them is because he thinks he has more chance of getting what he wants on this by staying in the Conservative Party. The reason for this is because of our first past the post electoral system. It forces people like UKIP supporters into a position where they have to choose either to vote for their principles (and hence effectively waste their vote) or vote for an option that they don't really want to win but is the least worst option.

In the European elections last year, UKIP came second nationally with 16.5% of the vote. That was under an electoral system that is more proportional (although I personally do not like the D'Hondt system used and favour STV for Westminster). It shows that on this issue there is broad support for UKIP.

If we had a more proportional system for Westminster it is reasonable to assume that UKIP's Westminster vote (2.2% in 2005) would go up significantly as one of the main barriers to people voting for them is that one that Hannan mentions, they can't win seats. But it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They do so badly because people think they can't win. If suddenly there was a system that would give them their fair share then suddenly all bets are off.

I suspect that one of the reasons most Tories oppose any sort of electoral reform for Westminster is because they are afraid that it would lock them out of power permanently. They seem to fear that there would be some sort of permanent Lib/Lab coalition. I am sure this would not happen. There is no reason why we could not see a combined Conservative and UKIP administration under a system that gave fair votes.

To be fair to Hannan, he is one of the few Tories I have seen being more receptive to the idea of electoral reform (along with his close political ally Douglas Carswell) but it is situations like this that for me test how strong the principles are.

Instead of arguing for tactical voting against UKIP, he should be shouting as loud as he can that it is the electoral system that is causing this and trying to persuade his colleagues in the Conservative Party of this fact.

Arguing for the death of a political party that he largely agrees with just because the electoral system is unfair to it is not the right way to try and get the change our electoral system needs. It Is in fact an attempt to lock in perpetuity the binary choice that increasing number of people in this country are sick of and UKIP's showing last year confirms.

Some MPs are more equal than others

One of the main arguments that opponents of electoral reform to a proportional system use is that some forms of PR create two classes of MP. Now firstly, this is not true for Single Transferable Vote with multi-member constituencies, the system that the Lib Dems and most electoral reformers favour. However it is true for systems like Alternative Vote Plus or Additional Member System. Those systems have a "top-up element" to allow proportionality but that does generally mean that some MPs have constituencies and others don't. In other words some MPs have constituents to answer to and others from the list only have their party to answer to.

Just to reiterate, I (and many like me) do not support these top-up systems but the fact that they exist and in the case of AMS have been used in the past gives supporters of the status quo an opportunity to blur the issue and making this claim of two classes of MP against all variants of PR.

But it is worth just taking a few steps back here and looking at our existing electoral system, First Past the Post. I was struck by the following passage in Chris Mullin's excellent Westminster diaries "A View from the Foothills" when I read it recently:

Friday 11th May (2001)

Much speculation about which members of the New Labour elite will be parachuted into the safe seats vacated by MPs retiring at the last moment. Ed Balls and David Miliband are among the names being mentioned. Not for them the cutting of teeth in hopeless seats or the long, wearying slog around the selection circuit. A few high-level phone calls, a quiet word in the right ears and ... Bob's your uncle ... a safe seat for life. And who knows, within two or three years a foot on the ministerial ladder, first steps on the inevitable rise to the Cabinet.

As we now know, both Balls and Miliband were indeed selected for very safe seats. Miliband in 2001 (he was in the government by 2005 and the cabinet by 2006), Balls in 2005 (he was in the government by 2006 and the cabinet in 2007 as soon as Brown became leader). There are plenty of examples over the years of favoured candidates who are parachuted into safe seats like this and hence their political career is put on the fast track. Because they are gifted a seat where there is virtually no chance of them losing it they don't have to worry too much about what their constituents think. They will not have to have spent years slogging away at getting to know the constituency and their constituents before election and they will have to pay little attention to them after election too. Whereas MPs in less safe or marginal seats will have to pay much more attention to their electors and indeed spend much more time on them.

So we already have MPs who on a sliding scale have to take less and less notice of their constituents as we go up the list of safe seats. That sounds to me very much like a two (or even more than two) classes of MP that we have already.

Under Single Transferable Vote this would not happen. The seat of every single MP would be at risk in every election and they would have to earn re-election. There would be no safe seats. But of course if we had this, how would Blair have been able to secure an easy passage for Miliband and Brown likewise for Balls into the Commons and ultimately the cabinet?

Also, the seats of even the most senior politicians would need to be tended to properly and the electors engaged with.

This is why the decision on how they are elected cannot be left up to the MPs themselves. They have already proved that they cannot be trusted with their own remuneration. Why should they be any different when it comes to the terms of their own employment?