New all party group set up to defend First Past The Post

Daniel Kawczynski MP is leading efforts to create an All Party Parliamentary Group devoted to defending the FPTP electoral system against the possibility of Brown pushing a new system through Parliament. If he did, a system like Alternative Voting would wipe out the Tory majority, as predicted in the latest ICM poll.

A copy of his letter to Labour MPs has been copied below. Twenty-five Labour MPs joined straightaway (especially those with experience of PR in Scotland) and three to four times that number are expected to join in the coming months - a sufficiently high number to make Brown think twice when he already has so many other rebellions brewing.

Dear Colleagues

Thank you so much to those who have replied to my invitation to join our All Party Group to fight for the retention of First Past the Post in Commons elections. I have been greatly encouraged by some of the comments made and the strong support given.  I know that the only way to prevent the unfairness and confusion of Alternative Voting System is to ensure that enough resistance to this within the Labour Party is identified.

With this in mind when we hold the first meeting of our group later this month we will be hoping to have a joint Labour and Conservative Chairmen of the group elected to show that this issue is very much shared between both Parties.

I have not written to the Liberals as yet as I cannot see any of them seeing beyond the narrow self interest they are so famous for and rejecting something which will help their party in elections.

Interestingly the greatest support from Labour MPs to my group (full list of members to be announced at our first meeting) is from our colleagues North of the Border where they have experienced the confusion and frustration from this new type of voting to Holyrood Elections.

I am greatly concerned by the way in which Jack Straw is conducting this debate. He says he is minded to support Alternative Voting as things stand but is content to let the media chew over the details rather than Parliament being involved from the start. When he announced his new constitutional changes I asked him whether he would agree with me that the only way for the government to bring in a new voting system is by putting it to the people in a referendum or by Labour having it in their next manifesto and winning the General Election of 2009/10. He refused to answer which gives me the impression that he has not ruled out trying to push this through Parliament before end of 2009. Watch out for the Queens Speech in November.

To behave in this way is simply wrong and I know many of you share my concerns about such conduct. Regardless of who wins the next election nothing is as important as the sanctity of our election system and the solid reputation it has. For Jack Straw to trash all that is wrong and will alienate the British people even more.

If you have not joined our group yet please send me an e-mail as soon as possible and I will add you to our list.

I am trying to secure a Westminster Hall debate on this issue as well to challenge Ministers on their views as this issue has not been aired at al in Parliament  just in the Guardian newspaper and in today's Telegraph. Please support me by putting in for such a debate as well.

I feel so strongly about this that I feel like going on a hunger strike outside Number 10 if Jack Straw tries to ram this through against our wishes and those of our constituents. Lets hope it doesn't come to that!

Yours ever

Daniel Kawczynski MP
Shrewsbury and Atcham

Comments

[Jack Stone]

Brown is not totally stupid he knows he can`t change the voting system without the British people first voting on the issue.
This new interest in voting reform by Labour should send a clear message to all those malcontents you get on this site. If you don`t vote Conservative this time and help the party regain power all that you say you believe in will be lost forever because Labour with there Liberal bedfellows will be in power forever.
There will be a thousand years of Labour rule!

[Iain]

So Mugabe Brown is going to gerrymander the electoral system to benefit the Labour party? Well we shouldn't be surprised, after all they gerrymandered the constitution, gerrymandered the voting system (postal votes), so why should the electoral system be exempt from their gerrymandering. In this the Labour party a going down the well worn path to despotism that all left wing Governments tread to stay in power.

[John Strafford]

Perhaps Daniel can explain why FPTP is a fair system of representative democracy.
The House of Commons is not representative of women. It is not representative of ethnic minorities, and it is not even representative of political parties. So just who does it represent?
For the last hundred years in General Elections there has been no correlation between the percentage number of votes a Party gets and the percentage number of seats it gets in the House of Commons. It is a lottery. Does Daniel think that is democracy?

[activist]

if he has 25 Labour MPs already, this is dead - if it was ever a runner.

[Ben Stevenson]

John Strafford,
Your right that the number of female MPs and the number of MPs from ethnic minorities does not represent the general population. But if this should be changed, it should change by encouraging people to stand for office, not changing any rules.

Apparently in the 1997 UK General Election, the Labour Party gained 43.2 per cent of the total votes cast and won 63.6 per cent of seats at Westminster. In the 2005 General Election, Labour won 37 per cent of the vote and 55 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons. Obviously this means the system is not perfect. But I don't see a better alternative. More standardised constituency sizes might help.

[MrB]

No electoral system is perfect. Even though it is a controversial statement to make, I believe that often the more "fair" an electoral system tries to be, the worse it is for government.

You will rarely end up with a government with a strong majority, so it will be constantly forced to make concessions or deals with other parties. This produces a weak government with diluted policies. It also means that extreme parties like the BNP (who would gain representation under "fairer" systems) could, in some circumstances, hold the balance of power.

The Labour Party have tinkered far too much with our constitution, and have rarely got it right. Also, thinking back to the postal voting farce, how can we have the slightest bit of confidence that this latest loony idea would be anything else but a complete disaster?

[Malcolm Dunn]

I wish Daniel the very best of luck with this venture. FPTP is of course not perfect but in my opinion it is far better than any other system I'm aware of. If there is anything a humble foot soldier like me can do to assist please let me know.

[Diversity]

This supports my feeling that there are a lot of instinctively conservative Labour MPs, Councillors and supporters; and they are all at odds with both Brown and the Blairites. Tory long term strategy should be geared to making it easy for then to ally with the Conservative Party - as has aleady happened in a few local Councils; and tactics should be geared to making common cause with them when opportunity offers.

[Iain]

"The House of Commons is not representative of women. It is not representative of ethnic minorities, and it is not even representative of political parties. So just who does it represent?"

I am sorry but you have bought into the Marxist view of 'representation' who dictate which group are supposed to be 'represented' in Parliament, who dictates which group should be represented in Parliament? Is there going to be a commission to decide if enough blond hair people are in Parliament, Left handed people, people from Wilshire, married people?

Parliament is not supposed to be representative of skin colour, tribe, religion, or anything else, it is only supposed to represent POLITICAL opinion, and when if we start down the path of group representation we enter into the very dangerous world of tribalism, a corruption of Parliament we should avoid at all costs.

[Adam-]

Anything we can do? Perhaps create a grassroots media-oriented FPTP advocacy group in the spirit of the TPA? If Gordon thinks he'll lose more votes than he'll gain by rigging the electoral system in his party's favour, he might think again.

[Tony Makara]

Having lived in Denmark and Sweden I can assure people that PR-type systems of voting lead to endless horse-trading, a mish-mash of coalitions with MPs hopping from party to party and forming factions, the end result being very little by way of consistant government. FPTP may not be perfect but a switch to PR will lead to patchwork government and even more voter apathy as the eletorate suffer from the fatigue of regular elections as coalitions break down and governing parties seek a fresh mandate.

[Joe James Broughton]

One of the most undemocratic things about PR is co-alitions are cobbled together after the election, a program emerging that was never put before the electorate.

Parties have their splits but these should be hammered out before the electorate have their say.

Secondly, the principle of allowing second choices to be used is fundamentally flawed. There can only be one result, the point of voting being that one has already weighed up the pros and cons. And it's worse - the second choices of losers are distributed.

[Inamicus]

So not an all party group then...

[S Jamieson]

Gordon Brown is confident he can get all-party support to change the First Past the Post System.

He has decided to adopt for future UK Parliamentary elections a varient of the system recently used by the Conservative Party in the process for the selection of their candidates for the European Parliament

[Margaret Hemmings]

Let's see now... FPTP... that would be the system of elections we have lost the last 3 elections under?

FPTP only favours us when the two left wing parties split their votes and allow us through the middle to take a disproportionate number of seats.

So long as tactical voting persists and the Lib Dems and Labour can martial their voters we will lose everytime under FPTP.

Daniel Kawczynski MP needs to think outside the box.

Clinging to FPTP may consign us to eternal oppostion.

Remember we are all coalitions and we all horse trade . It is not a feature of PR systems!

Need to step very carefully here guys!

[Malcolm Dunn]

Oh do go away and troll somewhere else Margaret.You're not even funny.

[Jake]

FPTP not representative of the English either.Thats in addition to the overall weighting of seats via constitiuency size against England .

[Tony Makara]

Margaret Hemmings, its about having the best electoral system in place to provide government for our country, not about the best system to suit any particular party. I lived under PR and I know it leads to poor government and voter fatigue. What our country needs is government not incertitude.

[Jake]

Of course Tony . However ,I have long believed that 5 years is too long in this day and age for a government to be in power without a vote . How about 4 yearly parliaments or even 3 years?

Not strictly about FPTP of course but in the same stable of reform .

[Yet Another Anon]

Brown is not totally stupid he knows he can`t change the voting system without the British people first voting on the issue.
It's more complicated than that, a lot of Labour MPs are very suspicious of the Supplementary Vote System and STV systems seeing them as potentially giving the Liberal Democrats a boost into semi-permanent power, Jim Callaghan had such problems in the 1970s with the parliamentary Labour Party - Gordon Brown also knows that the Liberal Democrats will not be satisfied with the introduction of Supplementary Vote, but will want a full STV system so if Labour introduced the Supplementary Vote for the 2009 General Election then he removes a possible concession he can give the Liberal Democrats in any negociations over a future coalition or support for minority Labour government.

If there were a parliamentary vote then most Labour and Conservative MPs would oppose a change to Supplementary Vote or STV making it improbable that such a change would get through. One thing he could do is have a referendum on the day of the General Election with the options of Keeping the Current System, moving to Supplementary Vote or moving to STV and then have a 2nd preference vote on the referendum and effectively whatever the result effectively diffuse Liberal Democrat attempts to use it as an election issue for a considerable time to come.

I think though that STV for English Local Elections may well be put through without a referendum in the coming year ready for Local Elections in 2009, probably moved to 11 June 2009 to be on the same day as European and what still seems likely to be the General Election date.

[Yet Another Anon]

For the last hundred years in General Elections there has been no correlation between the percentage number of votes a Party gets and the percentage number of seats it gets in the House of Commons. It is a lottery. Does Daniel think that is democracy?
The favoured alternatives of Supplementary Vote and STV don't relate to percentage votes either - if you wanted a system based on percentage vote it would be possible to construct one with STV and supplementary seats to give a given percentage of seats for a given percentage vote - this could include some kind of weighting towards the party with the most votes to increase the chance of a clear result or not. It is usual in proportional systems for there to be a threshold below which a party doesn't get seats - 5% normally.

For example it might be decided that no party with less than 35% of the vote should get an overall majority, but that the party with the most votes who also got 35% or more should - some kind of formula would decide how many seats the first party got and then other parties would end up with seats proportional to their vote in relation to the remaining seats - this might mean that the constituency seats would result in a hung parliament, but that after adjustments for the party with the most votes Labour or Conservative would end up with a majority, or if they had less than 35% perhaps close to a majority - this would even things out between the 2 main parties although the Liberal Democrats would say such a system was even more unfair than FPTP, but it would almost guarantee a clear result and could also be set to stop the 1906, 1945, 1959, 1966, 1983, 1997, 2001 and 2005 situations where one party wins a large majority on less than 50% of the vote.

[Yet Another Anon]

In the 2005 General Election, Labour won 37 per cent of the vote and 55 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons.
35.3% of the Popular Vote actually, the lowest percentage vote of any party winning a majority based on contesting every mainland seat - the only lower one was the Conservatives in 1918 who however were running a coupon election in coalition with Liberals and National Labour and so pretty much were only standing in safe Conservative seats, so it really doesn't count.

[Matt Wright]

Whether or not to get rid of FPTP should be nothing to do with who takes what advantage from any change. I tend to agree with those that say FPTP is the least worst method. PR leads to deals behind closed doors, to party lists and to other schemes such as multi-member seats etc. They all tend to less accountability and less tranparency and all this at a time when the public want more accountability and more transparency!! I do however think we need major reform but that should be in where power lies at which tier of Govt and how many members we have at which tier of Govt. Far too much power has been centralised.

[John Broughton]

Matt

never mind the eu dimension!

[StevenAdams]

I understand that different people will have different views on the "right" system, but what angers me most is that this PM may believe that HE has the mandate to even attempt to push though this reform - this from a PM with no mandate leading a party with a poor mandate (in terms of turnout) neither of whom showed any prior interest in making these changes.

Surely the electorate will see though this??

[Yet Another Anon]

PR leads to deals behind closed doors, to party lists and to other schemes such as multi-member seats etc
Multi Member seats can be used as a means of representing areas with diverse local populations in a constituency system so that communities with a larger population don't need to be broken up and aren't disadvantaged in terms of seats per head compared to for example those with a smaller population.

They can be used under any kind of voting system including FPTP and many wards in Local Elections use Multi Member constituencies.

The main party to benefit if Multi Member constituencies were introduced would probably be the Conservative Party at the moment, Labour's majority is based largely on urban seats with small populations - in addition for example allowing extra seats based on percentage of the vote in seats where there are large majorities would benefit Conservative rural representation where currently huge majorities piled up only yield a single seat. A Multi Member constituency system probably would have resulted in a hung parliament in 2005.

[Umbrella man]

This is a good initiative from Daniel Kawczynski MP.

He should spend more time doing things like this and less time defending the dictators of Saudi Arabia.

Correction: He should stop spending time defending the desert kingdom dictators.

[James Maskell]

Such consitutional changes as changing the voting system would require a referendum. Jack Straw was blowing smoke to try to entice the LDs. It failed pretty miserably.

[David Jones]

Daniel Kawczynski, who is my MP, is a true gem. I hope he keeps his seat (Shrewsbury isn't as Tory as you'd think) and rises further.