Independent on Sunday - safe seats and expenses scandal correlation - 2 mentions

The only papers we get delivered here are the Independent on Saturday and Sunday (I read the rest online).

Having gone through the IOS this morning I was very pleasantly surprised to see two references to the correlation I seemed to have uncovered between the safety of an MP's seat and the likelihood of having been involved in the expenses scandal which I detailed here.

The first is in a piece entitled "Politics: The only way is up" where thay have asked various of the great and the good to give their views on what needs to change. One of the questions asked is "Would electoral reform improve perceptions of MPs' probity?" and Vernon Bogdanor, the constitutional expert and Professor of Government at Oxford replied:

Yes. Many of the worst abuses have been committed by MPs in safe seats. Primary elections would ensure that MPs were chosen by a wider group than the small unrepresentative cliques who often now act as an electoral college. In the long run, the single transferable vote method of PR would give every elector the chance to combine a vote in a general election with a vote in a primary election.

He is clearly referring to my apparent findings at the start of his answer and using it as part of an argument for moving to Single Transferable Vote exactly as I did.

The second reference is in regular commentator John Rentoul's comment piece entitled "If Esther's the answer, the question is wrong". In it he argues that having lots of independent MP's in parliament after the next election would not solve the problems and investigates other potential ways to improve things. A paragraph towards the end says:

Some of these ideas are good. Some of them even appear to be connected to the expenses issue. It would seem, for example, that MPs in safe seats have been more likely to make questionable claims than those in marginals. But is electoral reform the answer? It is claimed that voters in multi-member constituencies can choose between candidates of their preferred party. So they can, but has that made Irish politics spotless? And if we had fewer MPs, that would just mean The Daily Telegraph ran the story for 14 days instead of 16.

So he uses my apparent findings but then questions if electoral reform is the answer. I think the answer is yes but at least the debate is happening now! As I already blogged, Ben Bradshaw quoted my research in an answer on BBC Question Time on Thursday.

This proper debate is exactly what I had hoped for and it is nice to see my work contributing to it in some small way. I will certainly keep blogging about reform and I hope others will too, both for and against. It is the first time I can remember proper reform being debated so widely. My findings are still preliminary but I think they speak to a wider feeling that there is something very wrong with our current system and things need to change radically if politics is to once again properly engage people in this country.

Cameron will say anything to avoid electoral reform

Aaaaaaagggrrrhhhh! I'm really busy today but David Cameron has forced me to take time out in order to address a bunch of canards he has come up with in a column for the London Evening Standard about proportional representation.

I was going to do a full on fisk but I don't have time so just to address his main canards:

"Canard number one please!"

Proportional representation may sound like a fair and effective system but it's anything but. Let me explain. First it removes the link between one MP and one constituency. PR comes in many forms but more often than not you find yourself voting for a party rather than just one person.

Under our current system, when you put your pencil to the ballot paper you're putting your cross against someone's name — one person to represent your interests, to go to if you have a problem: one person whom you feel a direct link to. A move to faceless politics would sever this local link and damage voter engagement.

Single Transferable Vote (the system favoured by most electoral reformers) still allows you to vote for a candidate directly. In fact you can rank them in order of preference to ensure that even if your favourite candidate does not get in, your views can still affect the outcome and no need for tactical voting.

"Canard number two please!"

The second problem with PR is that it gives smaller parties an unfair and disproportionate boost. This may sound good but what you'll find is that more often than not, PR turns politics into a beauty contest between various fringe parties — either peddling niche concerns or ugly extremist views.

This Thursday Britain votes in the European elections. If just eight per cent of the electorate votes for the BNP then as a result of the PR system that Labour forced on us, that party is guaranteed a seat in the European Parliament. Imagine the same thing happening in national government. Not only would the BNP get in — they would also wield influence out of all proportion to their numbers, for the simple fact that in coalition governments, it's the smaller parties that are the power brokers.

Frankly, this is rubbish. Single Transferable Vote would make it almost impossible for extreme fringe parties to get in because the second, third, fourth and so on preferences of people are taken into account. Cameron is taking the worst sort of PR system, a straight list system (which nobody is advocating for Westminster) and extrapolating from this what could happen but it is a straw man argument. NOBODY IS ADVOCATING A PURE LIST SYSTEM MR CAMERON.

"Canard number three please!"

That feeds in to the third weakness of PR — so much of the evidence from abroad shows that it leads to weak, unstable governments. Between 1947 and 1993 Italy's parliament was voted in through a system of proportional representation. During that time the average government lasted just nine months. Why? Because when you force together a number of different parties, each with different outlooks, philosophies, priorities, you're bound to get indecision and division over decisive action and unity.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no as Miles Hunt might have said. He has picked the most extreme example where arguably PR has not been a huge success. What about Ireland, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Australia and many more countries who have proportional systems and who seem to function just fine? What about Scotland where the SNP are managing just fine as a minority government. Of course they have to win the argument each time in order to pass legislation but isn't that a good thing? The Poll Tax, the Iraq War and countless other policy disasters have been rammed through by governments with Commons majorities all of whom did not get a majority of the popular vote. Every political party is a coalition anyway. Is Mr Cameron really trying to claim that Kenneth Clarke, Liam Fox, John Bercow and David Davis all agree about everything? Of course not. Having to win the argument would ensure a much more rigorous process was applied before law could be made.

"Canard number four please!"

The fourth major problem with PR is that the coalition governments it inevitably creates inevitably descend into backroom deals that betray the will of the people. Instead of voters choosing their government on the basis of the manifestos put before them in an election, party managers put together a government that suits them after rounds of horse-trading and bargaining for power.

This is just not true. Any coalition discussions would be open to massive scrutiny by the media and people like me! They would not get away with dodgy deals in back rooms. Instead, the larger party would get the majority of their programme through and the minority party would get some of their programme through. In a few years time, both parties would be looking for re-election so they are still going to be very responsive and receptive to the needs and wants of the electorate. They will not be insulated from the public by massive and undeserved majorities on the back of a broken electoral system.

I have said it before and I will say it again. You cannot rely on the word of someone who has such a massive vested interest in the existing system. If the polls are right then David Cameron will have a 3 figure majority as Prime Minister within the next 12 months under the existing First Past the Post system. He will likely be in power for a decade or more with untrammelled power to do within reason whatever he likes. THAT is why he is calling for a General Election right now, because he wants that to start as soon as possible. Any change to the electoral system would reduce the power he would have. He would still almost certainly be Prime Minister but he might have to compromise on things and win the argument on issues before being able to legislate.

Mr Cameron does not want to have to do this so he will employ all the arguments he and his researchers can muster to obfuscate this issue and make sure he gets his unopposed 10 years in number 10.

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?

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.

Five reasons to cheer the timing of the AV referendum

So if the unofficial comments from the government are correct, the referendum on changing the electoral system to the Alternative Vote will be held on May 5th next year to coincide with the local, Scottish and Welsh elections.

If this is true then it is good news for a number of reasons:

1) It will demonstrate that the referendum has not been kicked into the long grass and hence that the Lib Dem section of the government has real clout when it comes to the issues that it got into the government's programme. This is especially true of the AV referendum because so many Conservative MPs and activists are against any change.
2) The fact that it will coincide with the local and Scottish/Welsh elections will increase turnout. This will be a good thing however the country ultimately votes.
3) It will be easier for the Lib Dems to get out the vote for a "Yes" vote as they will be out campaigning all over the country anyway. This of course will also be true for the "No" campaigners but they will be better funded than us so would have had a headstart whenever the vote was called and hence the differential between resources in the two camps will be more equal.
4) It will ensure that the Labour leadership candidates have to properly address what they would do and whether they will support a change, after all the referendum will be held only a few months into their leadership, whoever is elected. In my view it will look pretty cynical if the winning candidate does not campaign for a "Yes", after all it was in their manifesto and they were willing to go even further than the Conservatives during coalition negotiations.
5) It will give us 4 years to get the necessary changes in place if there is a "Yes" vote which should be more than enough time to ensure that the next general election in the UK (in 2015 or even if it was earlier) is held under the new system.

The fact that this is being announced so soon makes me wonder if the rumours that Cameron may not campaign for a "No" and that he may even back a "Yes" vote (perhaps tacitly) may indeed be true. If the Conservative leadership was dead against it you would expect they would have found some way to nudge it forward a bit to suppress turnout and make their lives easier.

Just one last point. I am still in favour of a proportional electoral system which AV is not. However this is the referendum that was politically possible and it can be used as a stepping stone to a more proportional system later. In the meantime it would remove tactical voting, ensure that in individual seats people were not forced to choose the least worst option and may even reduce negative campaigning by encouraging candidates to appeal to their opponents' supporters for second and third preferences. It will also get people used to preferential voting which is of course the method used for Single Transferable Vote, my preferred (and much more proportional) system. And if we can increase the Lib Dem share of seats in future parliaments, then we have a good chance of getting a referendum on STV at some point.

So I will be campaigning for a "Yes" vote.

Interview with Douglas Carswell MP about "The Plan"

I recently read "The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain" by the Conservatives Douglas Carswell MP and Daniel Hannan MEP. I found it an interesting read and whilst I did not agree with all the ideas proposed within it I certainly think it is a welcome addition to the debate on reform in the UK.

Douglas Carswell who runs a good and frequently updated blog here has been kind enough to grant me an interview about the content of the book which I have included below.

Particularly noteworthy for me is where he confirms that he would be willing in principle to campaign for electoral reform to Single Transferable Vote with multi-member constituencies for Westminster. There aren't many Tories who would do that!

Interview below. My questions are in bold and the responses are in italics:

How many copies of the book have been sold so far?

Over 14,000 - and rising.

I was quite impressed to discover whilst reading it that the book is "Print on Demand". Do you think that eventually most books will be produced in this way?

Yes - and it won’t just be books that’ll be manufactured on demand.

As Dan and I were writing The Plan, I was reading Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. It gave us a eureka moment. Having written various books with various publishers previously, we realised that if we switched to print on demand, we could leverage off internet distribution ourselves directly.

We were convinced that the themes in our book would sooner or later become central to the political debate in Britain - we just didn't know when.

Then along came expensegate. The Plan suddenly seem prescient and demand took off. Print on demand meant that we were able to meet that demand 100%. The Plan wouldn't have been a bestseller had we published conventionally.

In Part One of the book you bemoan “declamatory legislation” based on emotive rather than proportionate evidence based responses to issues or events. What would you suggest is the best way to debate against this sort of political tactic?

The best way to ensure that the laws that are passed deal with real problems is to ensure that our law-makers are made more directly answerable to local voters. If we had a right of popular initiative, plus recall and open primaries to decide who gets to be the MP in the first place, we'd have wiser, more judicious people in our legislature, passing proportionate laws.

Part of your “Cleaning up Westminster” section suggests that select committee chairmen should be elected by the Commons in a secret ballot rather than appointed by the whips office. Wouldn’t the fact that the governing party generally has an inbuilt majority within the house restrict the effectiveness of this approach?

Not at all. That's what happens today. And its one of the reasons why the executive controls Parliament - rather than the other way round.

Using secret ballots to decide who gets to chair select committees would take power away from party whips. The executive would no longer be able to decide the shape of the legislature.

Even more profoundly, it'd change the chemistry of the Commons. Today advancement in Westminster comes through party whips. This encourages MPs to behave primarily as cheer leaders for the executive or shadow executive. It helps explain why the Commons generates much heat and noise, while at the same time being quite so supine and spineless.

Once you use free and fair ballots to decide who gets promoted, advancement would come from the degree to which an individual MP could command support and respect from across the chamber. It would encourage the fair and independent minded.

Another idea from the “Cleaning up Westminster” section is open primaries. You spend some time explaining how this would improve representation but you completely dismiss proportional representation saying: “it would make the problem even worse: a party list system concentrates yet more power in the hands of the whips”. This strikes me as a very selective and misleading representation of PR. Single Transferable Vote using multi-member constituencies, the PR system favoured by most electoral reformers requires no party list and many would argue actually puts even more power in the hands of the voter than open primaries as part of the actual election. What are your thought on this?

I'm increasingly open-minded about multi-member constituencies. Choice and competition are good in politics as well as business.

The key thing, however, is to recognise that with 7 out of 10 MPs coming from safe seats, we don't have enough choice and competition in our politics. I fear that some PR proposals would mean we ended up with a system where 9 out of 10 MPs stood zero chance of losing their seats.

But as I said, STV with multi-member constituencies avoids the list problems. I am very encouraged to see you being receptive to multi-member seats. Would you be willing to update a future edition of "The Plan" to include consideration of this?

Not sure there's going to be a Plan B! In October, I introduce a Bill in the Commons to allow open primaries in every constituency - and the right of recall. That's my number one priority for reform because it's a change we can bring in right now. And it'd change our rotten political system for the better right away.

So if there was to be a referendum for electoral reform to STV multi-member, would you support it and help to campaign for a "Yes" vote?

Yes - I think so. I'd want to see the detail first, but if done properly, I would campaign for change.

Part of the “A return to law, order and accountability” section focuses on the idea of locally elected Sheriffs (which I think would be a very good idea – I am certainly a fan of devolution). This reminded me of a book I read a few years ago by Jonathan Freedland called “Bring Home the Revolution” which coincidentally includes a 10 point plan for Britain too. Freedland includes radical ideas for devolving real power along the lines of the USA and popular sovereignty (as you do in “The Plan”) but he wants to go further than you wishing to change the UK to a Republic and creating a written constitution amongst other things. There are many potential changes like this that are not covered at all in your 10 points. Do you think “The Plan” is really radical enough?

I'm an admirer of Freedland. Like him, I also admire the United States greatly. But it is, as Freedland reminds us, an English system!

Public disgust with the political status quo in Britain is now so great, we stand a real chance of achieving some significant reforms. But the one way to guarantee that nothing changes, however, would be for the reformers to be overly ambitious. Rather than utopia, let’s actually achieve some bankable changes.

Instead of far reaching electoral reform, why not have open primaries right away to ensure our self serving politicians are held to account? Instead of a written constitution, why not do some pretty simply things that would ensure that those we elected held government to account properly?

The whole point of writing The Plan was to show what can realistically be done right away.

Some would argue that one of the reasons we are in such a mess now is partly because we do not have a written constitution and successive governments have been able to fiddle with no need for a blueprint or even a coherent idea of where they are heading with their changes. Isn't it therefore important that any changes that are made are at the very least properly codified as Freedland suggests?

I don't trust the kind of people who'd inevitably dominate the process. They'd be leftists and Guardianistas. So no.

We need to radically change our constitution in order to achieve the revolutionary aims that English radicals like the Levellers sought. It's not the American revolution we need to bring home - but the English revolution that we need to complete.

Starting from scratch with a written constitution wouldn't complete the English revolution. It'd put the vile elites - the quangocrats, human rights judges, Europhiles, remote technocrats and latter day Whigs - in control.

There are sections of the book where it seems to get dangerously close to describing what could be construed as right-wing revenge for perceived left-wing impositions. An example is in the section “Parliament should be supreme” where you claim that a “genteel coup d’etat” has been wrought on Britain by judges. You describe it as “Slow moving, genteel and from the Left.” There is also a list of right-wing dictators who have been subject to international indictment against left-wing dictators who have not. Do you recognise the potential problem here in trying to garner wide consensus (which you would surely need for the fundamental changes you propose) when the motivation for some aspects of your programme appear to read like this?

Actually the one thing The Plan never reads as is a narrowly Conservative work. Re-read the first few pages. It simply isn’t written as a Conservative book. It is very specifically not just aimed at a Tory audience.

It is aiming for something bigger than that. It is not saying this is what Conservatives need to do. It is saying this is what our country needs.

But it does recognise that the Left – as Gramsci recognised would happen - has captured key institutions. The Left’s long march through our institutions explains the leftist disposition of so much of the quango state – from the criminal justice system, to the BBC to the educationalists. The default settings of the quango state are well to the Left of the British people. That is why we need direct democracy – to recalibrate the state and undo the left’s creeping victory.

I think there is merit in a lot of your ideas in the “True localism” chapter. However some would argue that a land value tax would be a more fair and equitable way to raise local finance than a local sales tax. What are your thoughts on this?

How one localises control over tax revenues is less important than the fact one does it.

Fed up with old guard Tory centralisers, who said “it can’t be done”, “remember the poll tax” blah blah, I wrote an academic paper called Paying for Localism to show that it is possible to devolve control over finances. In my paper, I suggested turning VAT into a local sales tax. Doing so would ensure local councils became more or less self financing – and it’d not mean any new tax.

Have a look at it and let me know if you can come up with an even better model.

(Note: Link opens PDF document)

I found your ideas in the chapter “Putting patients in control” very interesting and I think they make a useful contribution to the debate which Mr Hannan has recently made ultra topical. However there are some (for example here) who say that the Singaporean model only works there because of its unique political situation where the government owns or very tightly manages most aspects of their economy and society. How do you respond to this?

I disagree. It’s not Singaporean exceptionalism that explains their better survival rates. Their system is better at ensuring that finite resources are allocated in a way that ensures everybody gets the medical care they need.

I particularly liked the part in the “Neighbourhood Welfare” chapter where you point out that benefit cheats would be much less likely to be as tolerated as they are by neighbours if the effect was felt in a local tax bill; I had not heard this expressed in this way before. Do you agree that if you want to try and sell your message more widely that you need to zero in on points like this that will resonate with people?

Yes. We need to keep showing that big, remote, central government actually harms the most vulnerable folk most of all. It’s made our country less compassionate and tolerant that it ought to be.

I think your “Direct Democracy” chapter where you call for the ability for referenda to be triggered by petitions of enough citizens is the best one in the book. However I feel that you do not go far enough. You spend time explaining how it will all work but you then pull back and say that parliament would retain an ultimate veto. If this was implemented, why should parliament be able to override the will of the people?

Because I still think you need a legislature. I want radical change to that legislature – so that you have citizen lawmakers, not professional politicians. I want the voters to have the ability to sack lazy, self-serving MPs by triggering by-elections. I want the people to help set the Commons agenda, and veto politicians and their endless folly. But I still think you need a legislature.

Once you’ve made the Commons properly accountable to the voter - and government properly answerable to the Commons – good luck to any MP who ignored what their local voters thought.

Ignoring voters is the default setting within our present rotten Commons.

I appreciate what you say and certainly agree with your final point about the Commons ignoring voters but you are still saying that ultimately parliament should be able to override the will of the people. There are places where a model similar to what you advocate is already used (such as Switzerland) where the legislature has no veto and it seems to work perfectly well; the government has to bow to the wishes of the people clearly expressed. Why should we be any different and instead have a compromised system?

The Swiss model allows referendums to veto what politicians want to do. As such the job of holding the executive to account has been democratised - its not just the legislatures role, but the citizens'. That is something I'd like to see in the UK, too. I'd also like people to be able to propose new laws - a right of initative.

But what I don't believe is that you can have a legislative process that starts with a right of popular initiative, followed by popular referendum - without the legislation passing through a legislature at some point.

Why do I think so? Well, look at my wiki-Bill experiment. I've used the wisdom of the internet to allow everyone to help me draft a Great Repeal Bill. It has been a tremendous success so far. A real Bill has been drafted by hundreds of citizens on-line - and the wisdom of the crowd has exceeded that of Westminster.

But even so, I think the wiki-Bill would need to be debated and scrutinised by a legislature in order to iron out one or two inconsistencies. Have a look here to see for yourself.

And my final question – if the Conservatives are in power after the next election, how much of your 30 point plan do you think will have been implemented after the first 12 months?

David Cameron has taken various ideas straight out of the book – open primaries or elected police chiefs, for example. His recent Milton Keynes speech about the need to decentralise power borrowed not only from the books ideas, but read as if it took from the actual text.

So far, so good. But never underestimate the power of the Sir Humphrey Appleby-types.

Hattip to Wikipedia for the image of Douglas used above.

LDV readers vote for AV over FPTP!?

Acronyms!

A surprising result from the Lib Dem Voice poll on whether we should back Alternative Vote over First Past the Post (assuming it was to be on offer). Apparently 51% (out of 345 votes overall) think that we should.

As I have blogged about before I want Single Transferable Vote. I was dubious about Alternative Vote Plus (AV+) as are a number of other Lib Dem bloggers (e.g. here and here) but at least that would be more closely proportional than FPTP. There's no such guarantee with AV. It may even end up being less proportional than FPTP. It can exagerate landslides if the second placed party is unpopular. It would have given Labour an even bigger majority in 1997 for example.

So why would LDV readers support it? Here are a few theories:

1) They think that it would be a "step in the right direction". AV does at least have the distinction of ensuring candidates get 50% of the vote in their seat after all the transfers are made. And it gets the electorate used to listing preferences. The reasoning would be that after this move, it would make campaigning for a further move to STV easier. I think this is completely wrong. The electorate would not stand for further changes after a change to AV for a very long time probably decades. It would actually set back the cause of those of us who want a proportional system.

2) Perhaps lots those who responded are not Lib Dems. This would make sense as I am sure LDV is much more widely read than just the party membership and there was no restriction on who could vote. It would be interesting to see what the results of a similar poll that was only open to party members (as LDV have the ability to do I think) would be.

3) Lots of Lib Dems favour a system that would likely work against the party's interests. Whilst I like to think that we Lib Dems are not as brazenly partisan as other parties but I very much doubt they would actively vote to make the situation any worse for us!

4) Perhaps not all respondents understood the distinction between AV, AV+, STV etc. It can get very confusing and sometimes politicians deliberately obfuscate by for example saying AV when they mean AV+.

Or maybe there are other reasons. What do you think?

Cameron thinks current electoral system is unfair

I read in the Sunday Times yesterday that David Cameron is planning changes to the way MPs are elected if he becomes Prime Minister.

He says that the current system "under which constituencies such as the Isle of Wight have tens of thousands more voters than others such as Orkney and Shetland - 'neither fair nor efficient'."

He goes on to say: “We should start by looking at the way MPs are elected. At the moment, some seats have many more electors than others . . . it means there are more MPs than there need to be,” he said. “I believe every vote should carry the same weight, which means levelling up the size of constituencies. That would help reduce the number of MPs, save money, and give people confidence that their vote really mattered.”

Right, well I completely agree that the way MPs are currently elected is unfair. I think there are more MPs than there need to be and I absolutely agree that every vote should carry the same weight and that every vote should count. However, levelling up the size of constituencies will not achieve this. There will still be marginal seats and safe seats under this system. Does Cameron seriously think that his scheme will enfranchise a Labour voter in Kensington and Chelsea or a Tory voter in Sedgefield?

What Cameron has done is to identify the problem and then reach for a "solution" that is still grossly unfair but will have the effect of increasing the Tory representation in parliament. At the moment there is a bias in Labour's favour, but the solution cannot surely be to retain the old unfairness but just nudge it back in favour of the Tories a bit to compensate?

If David Cameron was serious about reform of the electoral system he would be looking at the sort of ideas advocated by the Electoral Reform Society and Make Votes Count. Their ideas would enfranchise everybody in the country with real reform using a system such as Single Transferable Vote.

I welcome Cameron's contribution to this debate but only in so far as it will allow us to open up the discussion to include potential reforms that will actually make everybody's vote count, not just benefit the Conservative party as his proposals would.


UPDATE1: Malcolm Clark from Make Votes Count has also posted on this today.

UPDATE2: I have now sent e-mails about this to both The Sunday Times and David Cameron himself. If I get any response from either I will post it on this blog.

Rebutting Iain Dale's STV criticisms

Iain Dale has popped his head above the parapet today and highlighted some of what he perceives as the problems with the Single Transferable Vote system. He also briefly touches upon AV and AV+.

I tried to leave a comment on his post but it got so long that the system rejected it! Instead I thought I'd interweave my thoughts on here with his. Iain's post is in italics and my responses are in bold:

Several commenters in the previous post have taken issue with my assertion that Proportional Representation, and most especially the STV system, weakens the constituency link - and this is the reason why I cannot support it. Let me explain.

The proponents of STV deny that STV weakens the constituency link. In their view, if you have bigger constituencies with 10 or 12 MPs you still get the constituency link because seats are awarded proportionate to the votes received. Well, in the sense that you have constituencies and MPs who represent them, the constituency link still remains. Sort of.

The trouble is, that in 3, 6, 8, 10 or 12 member constituencies no one would really know who their MP is, just in the same way that no one now knows who their MEP is. The second effect is that when they eventually find out who their MPs are, which of them do they contact with a constituency issue? The probability is that they will contact the MP representing the party which they voted for. Nothing wrong with that, you may say, but I think it is a good thing that current MPs represent ALL their constituents, not just those who put a cross against them on the ballot paper.

This point about STV "weakening" the constituency link is one that can be debated. It depends what you consider a good link between MPs and constituents. Having one MP per constituency is of course one way to do it but there are disadvantages to this way too, for example someone who is say viscerally opposed to Labour may have to deal with a Labour MP. It is also possible that you want your MP to represent your views about something to which they themselves are diametrically politically opposed to. Now in both of those cases it is possible under a single member system for the constituent to be represented in a way that satisfies them but I would argue that under a multi-member system they would have a better chance of being well represented. Not least because if one of their MPs did not do a good job they could try one of the others. Conservatives relish competition in most other areas. It seems slightly odd how opposed they are to that same competition when it comes to the political sphere.

One other minor point, most advocates of STV do not suggest seat sizes of more than 6 MPs. Between 4 and 6 is the optimal amount. I just raise this because you lead with an example of between 10 and 12 which is basically double what would be likely to happen and is therefore potentially a bit misleading.

Can we also dispel the myth that AV is in any way proportional. The Jenkins proposal of AV+ where you had additional members would be. But it would put a lot more power in the hands of the central party.

AV is indeed not proportional. I have heard a number of Tories using this as an argument against a "Yes" vote. However as you well know the Tories refused a vote on a proportional system. AV is a compromise which ensures a fairer result in each individual constituency and avoids the situation at the moment where nearly 2/3rds of all MPs (in the 2010 election) got in with less than 50% of the vote in their seat.

AV+ is a bit more proportional as you state but that was also not on the table from the Tories.

And of course under STV, the party has even more power and influence over candidate selection.

This final point is just plain wrong. There is no reason why under STV the central parties should have more control over who is selected. That is entirely down to the way the selections are made. They could be similar to now with local parties choosing their candidate(s). It could be instead through open primaries or other mechanisms that allow local people greater control over the candidates. Also, because each party is likely to be fielding multiple candidates to maximise their vote across the constituency there is a built in incentive to field a diverse range of candidates which should lead to more women and ethnic minority candidates standing.

No electoral system is perfect but most proponents of STV think that it is the least worst system available and that FPTP is just about the worst worst! AV is an improvement on the status quo. FPTP has all sorts of problems which I expect will be highlighted during the coming campaign.

UPDATE: It looks like my comment on Iain's post did get through after all (twice!) despite the error messages I received.

Gerrymandering

One of the proposals in the coalition agreement in 2010 was to alter the boundaries of constituencies to ensure more equal numbers of voters in each seat.

As it happens, this policy fell by the wayside in the aftermath of the Tories backing away from reforming the House of Lords. But for a time it looked like the equalisation of constituencies was going to happen.

Labour were dead against this change. They came up with various arguments against it but the term I saw used time and time again was "Gerrymandering". This is a term coined in the 19th century to describe a situation where boundaries are manipulated in order to favour one political party.

I bridle every time I see this word used with respect to the boundary changes. The boundaries in the UK have become so distorted over decades that there are some constituencies with only just over 50,000 voters and some with double that number. The idea that the current boundaries are somehow "fair" is nonsense. The equalisation was intended to ensure that constituencies had roughly the same number of voters (within a tolerance of about 5% around the average).

It was likely that the Conservative Party would have benefitted from the changes. But the current situation is manifestly unfair. How can it be the case that in one area a voter has about twice as much influence in terms of how much their vote counts towards electing an MP? So to use the term gerrymandering in the context of trying to redress a huge historical imbalance is utterly perverse and wrong in my view.

Don't get me wrong. I think there are much better ways of reforming our electoral settlement than tinkering with boundaries under first past the post. But after the debacle of the AV referendum we are stuck with our current system for now. So in that context ensuring the boundaries are more evenly distributed is actually fair. It only didn't happen because of shortsighted Tory MPs assuming they could break one part of the coalition agreement and for there not to be consequences.

One final point. All those Labour politicians and activists who are so quick to cry "gerrymander" at the proposed changes should bear the following in mind (taken from Wikipedia):

Because gerrymandering relies on the wasted vote effect, the use of a different voting system with fewer wasted votes can help reduce gerrymandering. In particular, the use of multimember districts alongside voting systems establishing proportional representation such as Single Transferable Voting can reduce wasted votes and gerrymandering. Semi-proportional voting systems such as single non-transferable vote or cumulative voting are relatively simple and similar to first past the post and can also reduce the proportion of wasted votes and thus potential gerrymandering.

Rather than throwing around inaccurate terms implying political corruption they should redouble their efforts to get behind proper electoral reform. Then any future attempts to gerrymander, perceived or real would have much less effect anyway.

But lots of the dinosaurs in Labour don't want that. Could it be because the current system benefits them so disproportionately? They should be careful about that. They don't want to be accused of gerrymandering now do they?

Open primaries are second best

I read with interest Shane Greer's recent piece in the Yorkshire Post about the benefits he perceives in open primaries. His basic argument is that they give voters in a constituency more power by enabling the local electorate to select the party candidates for elections to the House of Commons prior to that election.

The recent MPs expenses scandal has thrown up lots of issues about MPs and reform of the system is desperately needed to at the very least eliminate the safe seats that give too many MPs secure tenure irrespective of what they do or how good they are. However if we rushed to bring in open primaries, we would be overlooking a more extensive reform we could undertake to our electoral system and that would provide almost all the benefits of open primaries but would improve our representation in other ways too.

As the piece I referred to earlier was for the Yorkshire Post, I thought I look at 5 Yorkshire parliamentary constituencies: Batley and Spen, Bradford North, Bradford South, Bradford West and Halifax. All of these seats are grouped together in the centre of West Yorkshire and all of them returned Labour MPs in the 2005 general election. However when you look at the total number of votes cast across all 5 seats you can see that actually Labour only received 43.9% of the votes, the Conservatives 27.5% and the Lib Dems 19.3% with others on 9.3%. Yet Labour got 100% of these seats and no other party got any of them.

This is as a result of our current "First Past the Post" system which gives the seat to the candidate with the most votes. It led in 2005 to the current government getting 55% of the seats in the House of Commons with only 35% of the vote in the country.

Single Transferable Vote however is a system which would stop this sort of injustice. It allows voters during an election to list their candidates by order of preference. These preferences are then allocated to the candidates and if your first choice candidate is not elected then your second and third choice (and so on) are taken into account. This means that your vote needn't be wasted as under the current system. The crucial difference though is when it is combined with a multi-member constituency system. Those 5 seats listed above could be combined into one seat (called say West Yorkshire Central) and then the likely effect would be to give a fairer result with say 3 Labour MPs, 1 Conservative and 1 Liberal Democrat. At the moment, Conservative and Lib Dem voters in those seats have their vote count for nothing. Under this new system they would get representation. There are a number of other countries including Ireland who already use a system like this.

Electing parliament this way would eliminate the safe seats that both myself and Shane wish to see the back of. In a multi-member seat system like this, there are no safe seats and several members of the same party can stand against each other in the actual election (not in a primary run-off beforehand) thus maximising the number of electors who can express their preference. This way, different strands of opinion within the same party can stand and the electorate can decide whether they want for example a Dennis Skinner or a David Miliband (or both, or neither) rather than have the party foist that candidate on the seat.

If rolled out across the country, a system like this would mean that the number of seats in parliament would roughly match the percentage of votes cast for each party across the country. This would eliminate the unfairness that is baked into our current electoral system and would mean politicians in every seat really had to fight for every vote rather than concentrate on the marginal seats as happens at the moment. This should have the effect of widening issues for debate at election time.

Things have gone a bit quiet recently from our elected representatives about reform following the expenses scandal. The main leaders made a lot of noise initially in response to the public outrage but nothing has really changed. Reform of the nature outlined here would demonstrate that the politicians really had listened to the public and that they are willing to change how they are elected even if it means their own political careers become more precariously balanced. If politicians had feared the ballot box more, the recent scandal may never have happened.

On that point, Shane and myself are in full agreement.

Fisking the Working Class Tory on FPTP

Working Class Tory has written a post today where he tries to argue that the expenses scandal has actually strengthened the case for First Past the Post.

It's not often when I see a bullet pointed blog post where I disagree with every single bullet point but with this one I do. I thought this merited a quick fisk:

Something you don't hear too often is that the expenses scandal has strengthened the case for the First Past The Post system of voting (our present one), which it undoubtedly has.

Why?

If an individual MP has committed an offence, you can get rid of him/her. How is it that the voters of Luton South now have the choice of Esther Rantzen's sham campaign? Because she can go and appeal to the 75,000 or so constituents (please excuse the back-of-a-cigarette-packet arithmetic, based on voter turnout in 2005), and ask them to vote specifically for her. Not on any lists, but one vote, for one candidate.

There are two things to note here. Firstly, it is not at all easy to get rid of sitting MPs who are in safe seats. The example of Martin Bell in Tatton in 1997 is often cited but Labour and the Lib Dems stood aside for him which is very unusual. The distortions of FPTP militate against change in all but the most extreme circumstances. How many independent MPs have we had in the Commons in the last 50 years for example? Hardly any. Secondly, WCT is using the usual canard that Proportional Representation must mean a list system which of course it does not. The system most serious electoral reformers advocate is Single Transferable Vote in multi-member constituencies which is much more open in terms of candidates than FPTP and allows parties to run multiple candidates in constituencies.

It keeps a link between you and your local MP. Yes, MPs got out of touch, elevated from their constituents by an arrogant sense of self-importance, as shown with the ludicrous expenses claims and the wilfull ignorance towards the wishes of their voters. However, this is not going to happen for a long time - Expensesgate was the watershed. For about a generation, MPs are going to be held under breathtaking, but necessary, scrutiny, and will not be allowed to be self-serving party robots.

STV would keep the constituency link but it would be even better because the voter is much more likely to be able to be represented by an MP that are of the party they voted for, unlike at the moment where there is a less than 50% chance of that happening. As for the charge that we will no longer have party robots, in two thirds of commons seats it is extremely unlikely that the MP will lose their seat as they are "safe". Therefore their loyalties lie with their party who put them in the safe seat, not the voters who the MP knows will re-elect them time after time. Therefore it will be party that comes before constituents in their considerations helped along by the whipping system.

It keeps the nutters out. Let's stick with the example of Luton South. Luton South is a classic example of a "bellweather" constituency - it has elected an MP of the winning party since 1951. In other words, it's also a seat you need to pick up if you're going to win nationwide. So there aren't massive majorities. That means fewer votes here can win than in, say, Camberwell & Peckham. Margaret Moran got 16,610 votes in 2005, out of a 38,918 total, or 42.7% I reckon turnout will be higher in the next election, by 10%, give or take 2%. Let's suppose that Luton South will have a turnout increase of 15%, because of its marginal nature. Again, back-of-a-cigarette-packet stuff, but if we suppose the turnout is now 43,000, and 42% is the amount necessary for a candidate to win, they require just over 18,000 votes. Now, I don't believe that at General Election time, any constituency has 42% of the voters voting for any extreme party, whether it be the BNP or the SWP. I can see the Greens splitting the left wing vote in some places, but not winning.

But STV requires fairly broad support in a seat in order to be elected which would make it unlikely the BNP for example would get in. They may get say 8% or 10% or so of first choice preferences in a small number of seats (as we saw in the Euro elections which under the D'Hondt system allowed them two MEPs) but with a 5 member STV seat they would require around 20% of first choices or enough second, third etc. choices to make the difference. The BNP are widely revilved and are very unlikely to get all these further choices from voters who opted for other parties for their first choice.

However, if the BNP manage to jump the democratic hurdle then why should they not have representation? WCT's argument seems to be to gerrymander the system to make it almost impossible for all but the largest parties to get representation. He high-handedly dismisses parties like the Greens as "nutters". Does he feel the same about UKIP? Why should the system make it impossible for these more minor parties to get in and for this to be seen as a good thing and an argument for retaining FPTP? Can he not see how utterly disenfranchising this is?

MPs owe their allegiance to their voters, not their party whips and party selection boards and the countless other internal bureaucrats. If we brought in electoral reform, somewhere along the line, an MP owes their job not to voters, but to the selection team. I wonder whether this will drive them to be more, or less, independent of their party whips. Hmm.....

Rubbish. Most MPs owe their allegiance to their party and their selection team within their party constituency. Under STV there would still need to be selection but the parties are actively encouraged to select multiple candidates and to have a broad spread of candidates (gender, ethnicity, background, wing of the party etc.) in order to maximise votes. The voter has much more power under STV and that is why many politicians do not like it.

It is simple. One person, one vote, one candidate.

But the simplest argument is not always the best one. Recent polls have suggested that people want more proportionality in the electoral system. When their attention is drawn to how unfair the current system is they do not like it. I did a post a few days ago which examined what could happen if the Tories got 36% of the vote, Labour got 35% and the Lib Dems got 17%. Under these circumstances, Labour could have a small working majority (i.e. more than 50% of the seats) even though the Tories "won" the election. That is completely and totally unfair to the Conservatives and I say that as a Lib Dem supporter.

FPTP is a broken system and it needs to change.

Now that is what I call simple.

Gordon Brown - pathetic performance on Andy Marr's show

I have just finished watching Gordon Brown on Andrew Marr's show. Anyone who followed me on Twitter will have seen how frustrated and annoyed I got as the interview went on.

As Iain Dale points out, he didn't answer any of the questions however Iain seems to think it was an impressive performance and I can see what he means from a technical politician perspective (i.e. Marr could not really lay a glove on him) but the overall impression Brown gave off was woeful in my opinion. At one point he even said about MPs expenses "It doesn't matter how it happened."! How can it not matter and how can someone who thinks that possibly be part of the solution?

What the nation needs at the moment is leadership and Gordon did not do this. He was evasive about MPs expenses. He claimed it was nothing to do with him and insisted that the had been trying to sort the system out for years. Mendacious bullshit in my considered opinion. He has been trying to block the release of this stuff for years and all of the so called "reforms" that he was puffing about today have come to naught. He still doesn't get it either. He seems to think that electoral reform is a fringe issue and that there are much more important issues like votes at 16! Don't get me wrong, I think doing that would be a good thing but is it really more important than re-enfranchising millions of people whose votes currently do not count at all due to accidents of geography under the First Past The Post system.

He also tried to claim that the MPs expenses scandal actually reinforces the need for the First Past the Post electoral system!? His warped logic seemed to be something to do with the ability to kick out individual MPs at an election. This completely misses how hard it is to do this under FPTP and how any voters who wish to vote for the party of the errant candidate and find themselves forced to vote for another party to kick that candidate out are also disenfranchised for that election. Single Transferable Vote would solve all this but Marr did not even put this to him and Marr surely must know that? If he doesn't then someone else needs to be doing the interviewing.

Towards the end of the interview he said that a panel would be convened to look at all these issues and come up with proposals but when pressed it transpired that it would be formed of government ministers. When Helena Kennedy in the post interview sofa bit tried to press him to agree to a Citizen's Convention on these issues he just batted it away and said "wait and see what they come up with" with a big smirk on his face. This. Man. Is. Incapable. Of. Fixing. The. System.

After David Cameron's rather will o' the wisp proposals on reform that seem to promise nothing earlier this week it must surely be becoming clear to people that the only party who are serious about change are the Lib Dems. Indeed Andrew Rawnsley is now on board and writes about electoral reform in today's Observer. Here is a snippet:

A minority of Labour politicians are sincere on this subject, but Labour as a party is completely untrustworthy on electoral reform. It flirts with the idea when it is in opposition or becomes afraid that it is about to lose office. As soon as it has power, Labour forgets its promises.

Only one of the main parties has been a consistent and persistent advocate of a democratised House of Lords, a reformed Commons, fixed-term parliaments and the rest of the menu of truly sweeping constitutional reform. That party is the Liberal Democrats. They have also, incidentally, come out of the expenses scandal much less sleazed than either Labour or the Tories.

And he concludes with:

If you want to maximise the chances of securing serious constitutional reform, then the party to vote for is the Lib Dems.

Amen Mr Rawnsley. You won't get proper change from parties with such a vested interest in the existing system. Full stop.

"How STV resembles the Grand National" or "Why Prateek Buch deserves his FPC place"

I stood in an election recently.

It was for the Lib Dems Federal Policy Committee.

I lost.

The elections use Single Transferable Vote and I was in the bottom quarter of candidates in terms of first preferences. I was eliminated fairly early on during the count. I make no complaints. It was my first time in an internal election like this and I have learnt some useful stuff that will hopefully mean I have a better shot next time.

One person who did not lose in the FPC election however was Prateek Buch. He was elected from the 63 candidates who stood to one of the 15 places available. He is a good candidate and has done lots of high quality work, not least in the area of one of my particular hobby-horses, drugs policy.

However if you look at the election tables which show how the STV count progressed (available here) you would not have guessed at the end of round 1 of counting that Prateek would have been elected. At that stage, after only first preferences were counted he was in joint 27th place, way off the pace.

But this is one of the great things about STV. Of the just over 1,200 voting reps who make up the electorate 19 wanted him on the committee as their first choice. There were more voters who wanted other people on as their first choice. But as the count progressed, something interesting started to happen. As lower preferences from eliminated candidates began to be redistributed and surpluses were also factored in, Prateek started to inch up the pecking order. Slowly at first, but by the time we get to the latter stages of the count he is really piling the transfers on. In this phase he is regularly getting 2, 3 or 4 transfers and this pace keeps him in contention. In the end he just pokes his nose over the finishing line bagging 14th place with 64.05 votes. If he'd been 3 transfers shy of this he would not have got onto the committee.

Tracing this through it does show to me how a transferable electoral system can be a thing of beauty. It actually does take on the auspices of something like a horse race. You can see at each stage who is keeping up and who is falling behind. You can also see which horses have fallen at each stage (I fell at fence 12 for example). Perhaps it is because I am a psephological geek but it was rather exciting to go through the stages and observe how the fortunes of different candidates fared as it progressed.

It is invidious to try and say what would have happened if this election has been run using first past the post. Voters would have voted differently and it is never clear how the final result would have differed. What is clear is that Prateek may only have had the first preferences of 19 voters, but there were many more than that (more than 3 times as many) who preferred him to many of the other candidates. He may not have had as deep support as some of the much higher placed candidates such as Lord Rennard or Evan Harris. But he certainly had a decent breadth of support. Crucially his wider appeal as a candidate put him above most of the candidates who after the first round looked like they were better placed.

During the AV campaign last year, one of the criticisms used by the "No" camp was that transferable systems "allow losers to win". That was always based on a specious reading of how AV works and used an extremely narrow definition of "loser". It was essentially anyone who did not have a plurarlity of votes after round one. AV is effectively just a single member variant of STV but it does also allow a candidate with a breadth of support to win even if a plurality (although not a majority) of voters prefer another candidate as their first choice.

I have to say that I am much happier with a process that allows such sophistication in voting preferences and for all that information to feed into the result.

Prateek Buch very much deserves his place on the committee.

As for me, I clearly need many more first preferences next time I stand to have a chance. It's all very well having a breadth of support, but you have to stay in the race long enough for them to count!

How STV would re-enfranchise voters

With all the discussion there has been in the last few weeks about potential electoral reform, I have found myself discussing and debating the issues surrounding this in various media.

I was having a discussion with someone on Twitter about this last night. He is a Conservative supporter who lives in the Manchester Withington constituency. Currently his MP is Liberal Democrat John Leech and he is not happy about this. I tried to explain how STV would help to re-enfranchise him but 140 characters is not the STV advocate's friend so I have had a look at the numbers and will try and explain what I mean here.

Single Transferable Vote works with multi-member constituencies. In the case of Manchester Withington, here are the figures for the last General Election in 2005 when the seat was last contested:

General Election 2005: Manchester, Withington
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Liberal Democrat	John Leech	15,872	42.4	+20.4
	Labour	Keith Bradley	15,205	40.6	-14.3
	Conservative	Karen Bradley	3,919	10.5	-4.8
	Green	Brian Candeland	1,595	4.3	-0.1
	UK Independence	Robert Gutfreund-Walmsley	424	1.1	+1.1
	Independent	Ivan Benett	243	0.6	+0.6
	Independent	Yasmin Zalzala	153	0.4	+0.4
	Their Party	Richard Reed	47	0.1	+0.1
Majority			667	1.8
Turnout			37,458	55.3	+3.4
	Liberal Democrat gain from Labour		Swing	+17.3

So there were just shy of 4,000 votes for the Tories on a turnout of 37,458 meaning a vote share of about 10.5%. Under FPTP it looks very unlikely that my friend will find himself represented by a Tory after the next election. Indeed he was talking about perhaps voting tactically for Labour to get Mr Leech out (this was under a hypothetical AV system we were discussing which shows that AV does not stop tactical voting and which further disenfranchises people, anyway I digress).

I then had a look at this page on Wikipedia which shows the Greater Manchester constituencies and had a quick look at how an STV 5 member constituency could be created. I plumped for a merging of Manchester Withington, Wythenshawe and Sale East, Cheadle, Hazel Grove and Stockport. These are all contiguous and would make up a reasonable 5 member constituency I think.

I won't list all the data from these seats but the salient information (taken from the 2005 election results) for this exercise is:

The way that seats are calculated using STV is a little bit more involved than just a straight percentage read-across however if the 2005 election in these seats had been run as STV it is fair to assume that the Conservatives would have got about 25% of first preferences. We cannot know for sure due to second third and so on preferences but it is likely that the Tories would have got one MP under such a system (as 5 members would be elected here and 25% should give them one of those) whereas at the moment they have no MPs in any of these seats.

This would enfranchise my friend in Manchester Withington whose vote would have counted for something in the 2005 election.

Perhaps Conservatives should bear all of this in mind when they are discussing electoral reform in the future and not just dismiss it out of hand. "PR" covers many systems but STV is the fairest one that gives rough proportionality and still maintains good (some would say better than under FPTP) constituency links.

MPs Expenses and safe seats correlation - update

Since my blog post yesterday about the MPs expenses scandal and the correlation that I seem to have discovered between the likelihood of an MP being caught up in this scandal and the safeness of their parliamentary seat, I have gone through the data again. This is because I discovered there was an anomaly in that Margaret Hodge had appeared in my source data twice (not sure why this was). Also, the Telegraph list here was updated at about 3:00pm yesterday so there are a few more people added to the list.

The new result is a value of 262.4 with 94 MPs implicated. We would have expected if there was no correlation between safeness of seat and implication in the scandal for this figure to be 323 (646/2). So it is still a long way from the median and implies a link between safeness of seat and likelihood of being involved in this scandal.

The quartile graph now looks like this:

As you can see there is still a clear gradation in each quartile indicating that the safer the seat, the more likely the MP is to be implicated.

UPDATE1: This post has now been linked to by Polly Toynbee of The Guardian in this excellent rallying call for constitutional change.

If I am right about this correlation then there are surely very serious questions to be asked about our electoral system. Advocates of First Past the Post always claim as one of their main arguments that the constituency link needs to be maintained (even though Single Transferable Vote, a much more proportional system with multi-member constituencies that the Electoral Reform Society and Make Votes Count advocate also has a constituency link). However looking at the above analysis it strikes me that FPTP does not serve its constituents well at all when it comes to this scandal.

When the dust of this scandal finally settles, I think we need a full "drains up" job in Westminster where everything is looked at in close detail. Proper analysis should be performed on the question I have posed, whether there is a correlation here and action taken to address this. I personally think an electoral system where there are no safe seats and the electorate can give their verdict without needing to vote tactically and where every vote counts towards the final result is needed.

UPDATE2: WARNING - From here on down it gets very technical!

Andy Hinton who blogs here has done some statistical analysis on this data now. Andy is not a statistician himself but has some experience of running stats tests from his degree (and he certainly knows more than me!). I have all the details he sent me but here is a synopsis of the two tests that he has run:

Firstly, he performed a "t-test for unequal sample size/variance" which he suggests is the best sort of test for this sort of data. I will let Andy take it from here:

It gives us ample grounds to think there's something in your hypothesis. The effect is significant at p<0.001.>

However, disclaimer: The t-test is only strictly valid for normally distributed populations. It is fairly robust for large samples like the one we're looking at, but... The problem is that it is impossible to have a majority of less than 0, so there is a cut-off point which skews the distribution of majorities somewhat, especially for the innocent MPs (whose average majority is closer to that cut-off). I don't think this completely invalidates the test, but if someone who was more of a stats geek than myself wanted to have a look, they might have some ideas about getting round it.

So it would appear that there is a 1 in 1000 chance that the effect we have seen would happen by chance, albeit caveated with what Andy says towards the end.

Andy then ran another test. Again, over to him:

I have added a sheet where I do a Wilcoxon Rank Sum test (also known as a Mann-Whitney test), which looks at the rankings rather than the absolute values. That should make the test more valid, and help us get around the skew problem. This time, I get p = 0.0003! ie. A 0.03% chance of getting that result randomly.

I think we're on pretty safe ground to say that this is a statistically significant effect.

So with this test there is a less than 1 in 3000 chance that the effect would have been by chance. Andy's overall view on the two tests when I asked him which one was best is:

As I understand it, as long as the assumptions are not violated, the first test is the more sensitive and preferable, since it is the one looking at the actual data rather than simply the ranks, so it is taking account of more of the information we have.

However, if the skew of the data is sufficient to invalidate that test, the second is, in technical terms, non-parametric, and therefore it's the more widely applicable. As long as I have performed it correctly, there shouldn't any problems about the second test. BUT, the second test is the one I have the less experience in performing, so I would be less surprised if I had made a mistake in doing that one.

So.. no simple answer, really. I think, probably, I'd go with the second one, but would be much happier saying so after some peer-review!

My feeling is that I have now had someone who is fairly knowledgeable about statistics run two different tests and whilst there are caveats, it is looking like the effect I have discovered is statistically significant.

Any statisticians reading this who want to offer their opinion or get hold of the data and run your own test(s) and/or peer review Andy's work please let me know.

UPDATE3: I have been invited onto Radio 4's "More or Less" to talk about my findings regarding this correlation this week. It's broadcast at 1:30pm this Friday afternoon (22nd May) and repeated this Sunday at 8:00pm.  See this post for more details.

UPDATE4: Government minister Ben Bradshaw has now referenced this research on national television.

UPDATE5: I have done an updated version of the analysis here.