Tom Harris & Electoral Reform

There’s an interesting (ish!) post from Tom Harris about why Electoral Reform is a rubbish idea:

http://www.tomharris.org.uk/2010/01/18/take-your-pick-a-sense-of-proportion-or-electoral-reform

Naturally, I demurred and posted the following comment that I reproduce for you here as the first of an irregular series of comment reposts…

Sadly, Tom, you oppose electoral reform for two, partisan, reasons:

1) The FPTP system locks things down to basically two parties. The Labour party spend 40 odd years from the 1880s to the 1920s trying to elbow their way into that two party relationship, greatly helped by both the implosion of the Liberal party and the Conservative adoption of Gladstonian Liberalism.

2) It keeps out the BNP and other ‘minority’ parties

Leaving aside 2 as clearly being about denying people representation because you dislike their representatives, point 1 is enough, even as a probably Tory voter this year, to convince me that electoral reform is VITAL.

The correlation between, for a topical example, expenses abuses and ’safe seats’ should also be lighting a rocket under the anti-reform camp. In point of fact, safe seats under FPTP effectively disenfranchise up to 70% of people.

I hold no special brief for STV or ATV or any other acronym, except, perhaps, UAV (unmanned aerial vote – an experimental democratic system to run alongside Gordon’s ‘vertical farmers’) but I do know that when we have governments, blue and red, elected to rule us with under 40% of the national vote, we don’t have a functioning democracy. They rule as well as they would as if they had a 100% mandate. We live in elected oligarchy, I fear, and Tom is ensuring that we remain there!