Proportional voting would stop us holding politicians to account

Published on Thursday 18 June 2009 23:13

ONE of the currently fashionable laws of behaviour is the law of unintended consequences. A recent example arises from the so called "expenses scandal" at Westminster.

One of the astonishing features was the dramatic way that individual MPs were seen to be accountable to constituents, who organised petitions and special meetings. Some constituency organisations have suggested a formal recall process, like that in California.

All of this presumes MPs continue to be elected by unique geographical districts, an arrangement arising from our electoral system of "first past the post". So it is ironic the affair has simultaneously produced a call for electoral reform spawning hosts of articles, particularly the alternative vote system.

It is doubly ironic that the Lib Dems have both lauded a recall system and continue to advocate the single transferrable vote form of proportional representation (PR). Now that real democratic accountability – where an MP represents a specific area – has been demonstrated dramatically, we should reject change.

This accountability is true democracy, not the PR schemes that are the subject of persistent calls for an increasingly arithmetically exact correlation between votes for each party and its number of MPs. Systems of proportional representation result in less and less accountability of individual MPs the more proportional they become.

I recently visited Macedonia for a meeting on democracy, where they have a pure PR system with a national list. It results in the almost exact correlation between votes and MPs that PR purists worship, but MPs are not elected for individual constituencies and all key decisions are made in the capital, Skopje. Nearly all MPs live there to keep in touch with the centre of power of party and government. They have no constituency to which they must return, work in and be accountable to.

We now have an extra powerful argument to stick to first past the post for House of Commons elections. We already know it is much more likely to result in stable governments with overall majorities. Small parties, representative of narrow minority interests, are less likely to hold the balance of power – and racists and other extremists are much less likely to get a foothold.

The Scottish Parliament has a hybrid system with 73 constituency members and 56 regional members. As a result, we have two types of MSPs.

List MSPs have the luxury of cherry-picking casework and campaigns. Very often, they use their election as a list MSP to campaign for a constituency seat. That implies that a constituency is a great prize to be won and promotes the notion that list MSPs are somehow the lower of two tiers.

I have often described myself as the "accidental MSP." My election was a consequence of a poor result for Labour rather than its success. However, my Lothians list colleague, Shirley-Anne Somerville, could best be described as the "incidental" MSP. She came third to Sarah Boyack in Edinburgh Central and was fifth on the SNP's Lothians List.

She was the first choice of no-one, including the SNP's own internal elections. How is that democratic and to whom is she accountable?

The Scottish Parliament has become more proportional, but the consequence has been a coalition and a minority government, neither of which has proved satisfactory. As a result, I believe the campaign to maintain first past the post for the Commons needs to be strengthened and urge democrats in all parties to regroup in support.

&#149 George Foulkes is a Labour MSP