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As part of the ongoing negotiations between Labour and the Conservatives the Liberal Democrats appear to have won further concessions on voting reform.
The Conservatives emerged from their meeting in the Commons Monday night to announce one "final offer" to the Liberal Democrats, that they would offer the party a referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) electoral system as part of a deal that would place David Cameron in Downing Street.
Cameron had initially offered Nick Clegg an all-party commission on electoral reform as part of his opening deal on Friday.
But the dramatic announcement by Gordon Brown yesterday that he intended to resign as Labour leader in order to facilitate coalition talks between the Labour party and the Lib Dems meant Cameron felt he had to up his offer.
The Labour Party had offered a referendum on AV as part of their election manifesto, and appear to be willing to go even further to appease the Lib Dems.
It has been reported that Labour would attempt to push through a bill introducing the new voting system without putting it to the public in a referendum.
But speaking on BBC News this morning Welsh secretary Peter Hain said Labour would introduce legislation required to hold a referendum on electoral reform.
"There will need to be immediate legislation to bring a referendum in," he said.
Conservative MPs would be likely to oppose any changes to the first past the post system, even if the referendum was introduced on their watch as part of a deal to bring the Lib Dems in to a collation.
Alternative Vote is favoured by many reformers as it maintains the link between constituencies and single members of Parliament, unlike many propositional systems which require the creation of larger multi-member constituencies.
Under the AV system voters still elect one person to represent them in Parliament, but rather than marking an 'X' against their preferred candidate, they rank candidates in order of preference.
If a candidate receives a majority of first votes they are elected. But if no candidate secures more than 50 per cent of the vote, the second choices for the candidate who polled in last place are redistributed amongst the others.
The process is repeated until one candidate gets an absolute majority.
But the Liberal Democrats have traditionally favoured a more proportional system, which would distribute seats in the Commons more based more on the overall proportion of the vote secured.
While the Liberal Democrats got 23 per cent of the vote at the election, they only got 57 seats.
Labour however secured 29 per cent of the vote the won 258 seats. The Tories received 36.1 per cent of the vote and 306 seats.
Their ideal system would be the Single Transferable Vote system, which would see several MPs elected from larger multi-member constituencies when they achieved a pre-set share of the vote – rather that one MP being elected by virtue of winning more votes than any other candidate as is the current system.
Article Comments
It Is The British Electorate Who Are Truly Progressive: http://wp.me/pRHY4-V
Tony Butcher
11th May 2010 at 12:24 pm
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