David Torrance: PR would bring Tories disproportionate benefit

THERE is nothing new under the sun. "Self-preservation is the fundamental rule of political life," observed the Scottish Tory MP Noel Skelton of the Liberals in 1931, "and it is in an effort to obtain the Alternative Vote that their energies are now concentrated.

That is to be the prize that reconciles them to the huckstering and juggling of which they are at heart ashamed."

Fast forward nearly 80 years and those words, also written in the context of a global financial crisis and a hung parliament, could as easily describe the Liberal Democrats of the early 21st century.

Then as now the prize of electoral reform may ultimately elude them, but then as now the party has resorted to "huckstering and juggling" in order to secure it.

On the face of it, there is no clear appetite for electoral reform, or at least for any particular system. Sure, polls show majority public support (just) for the AV, which is hardly PR at all, but this reflects disillusion with first-past-the-post rather than any clear swing behind an alternative electoral system.

Not only that, but the events of the past few days have, if anything, weakened the case for PR elections. What seems so unusual now would, after all, become the norm following each election.

The uncomfortable truth is that the Liberal Democrats, the main advocates of reform, lack the momentum that everyone believed they would have just a week ago. Then it was assumed that the party would poll about 30 per cent but win just 100 seats, enraging the electorate and placing the "old parties" in an impossible position. That did not happen. Instead the Lib Dems barely increased their share of the vote and actually lost seats.

Bewildered and defensive, the party quickly reverted to type and demanded PR anyway, branding the electoral system "rotten" and resorting to backroom deals in order to achieve it.

So that is where we are, but it offers scant comfort to a Conservative Party that lies 20 seats short of an overall majority.

Although a clear improvement on recent elections and, as David Cameron has said, the party's best result since the 1920s, it was patchy and with only a 4 per cent increase in its share of the vote, hardly decisive.

In 75 constituencies the Conservatives' share of the vote actually fell. Only, it seems, by spending lots of Lord Ashcroft's money did the Tories manage to gain seats, and even then not all of their so-called key marginals.

In Scotland it was even worse. Close analysis reveals that the party actually performed worse in constituencies it actively targeted, while its biggest increases came in seats abandoned at the last minute by Central Office or which were never paid much attention in the first place.

The result was no change on 2005, just one MP – David Mundell – with, against the general Scottish trend, an increased majority.

So for its long-term prospects, I would argue, as well as for reasons of political credibility, the Conservative Party has to embrace PR, whatever the short-term costs.

These might be considerable. A portion of backbench opinion finds even a low-risk referendum on AV unpalatable, so goodness knows what they would make of a proper PR electoral system.

But in continuing to resist the many reasonable arguments that exist in support of a change, the Tories risk ending up on the wrong side of the argument, just as they were over devolution in the 1980s and 1990s. Whatever the rights and wrongs of constitutional reform in Scotland, public and political opinion clearly supported a change, yet the Conservatives resisted, weakening the party as a result, and arguably creating an electoral backlash which persists still.

Support for PR is not alien to the Conservative Party, although it does ebb and flow depending upon elected power.

The "Conservative Action for Electoral Reform" group, for example, was founded in 1974 – a year now so full of pertinence for current events – following an election in which the Conservatives won more votes than Labour but fewer seats. There was also significant Conservative support for the planned Scottish Assembly to be elected by PR, chiefly to prevent Labour domination.

Tories argued then that first-past-the-post was not in their best interests. The 1997 election was a case in point. Then, New Labour's Commons majority extended well beyond its support in the country, to the extent that even had Labour and the Conservatives polled the same, Labour would still have been 79 seats ahead.

Similarly, in 2001 a modest swing to the Tories and a decline in the Labour vote saw virtually no seats change hands.

Under the current system Labour needs only 35 per cent of the vote to win power yet the Tories require at least 40 per cent, due to inefficient voter distribution, tactical voting, differential turnout and electoral strategy. In Scotland, the arguments for first-past-the-post almost disappear. According to the Electoral Reform Society, under the single transferable vote system the Tories would have won seven seats rather than just one, while Labour's 41 MPs would dwindle to 28.

Under the current system, however, Britain's electoral map has a blue south, a red north and a few spots of yellow in between. It is clearly unsustainable, not just for the UK's political culture but perhaps for the Union itself. A consensus could most likely be built around the single transferable vote. The SNP is in favour, as is Labour (at least in terms of Scottish local government), the Liberal Democrats and, just perhaps, some Conservatives.

The Conservative Party is many things, but a party of radical constitutional reform it is not. On almost every issue, be it the House of Lords, devolution or electoral reform, it has – with occasional exceptions – sought to resist change rather than lead; maintain the status quo rather than innovate.

The so-called "natural party of government", a party whose appetite for power is obviously undimmed, would do well to have a long hard think about how it deals with its electoral future.