If I were Prime Minister for one day, do you know what I would do first? I would change the electoral system. There seem to be so many problems with our democracy at the moment that it’s difficult to know where to start. This isn’t just a problem for us here in the UK. What gives our government the right to criticise pseudo-democracies? People like Putin could simply point out the flaws in our own system — he already did that to George Bush. This isn’t a small matter.

Postal votes

Most recently there has been the scandal of postal voting. You don’t need me to tell you that if the main story on May the 6^th is not the result of the election, but about possible electoral fraud, then that is a very serious situation indeed. Everybody now knows that postal votes are highly susceptible to fraud. The Electoral Commission said that postal votes are “hopelessly insecure.”

Short of writing ‘Steal Me’ on the envelopes, it is hard to see what more could be done to ensure their coming into the wrong hands.

Not for the first time, the Labour government has ignored the advice of the Electoral Commission. Fair enough, perhaps. Maybe it was too close to the election to make substantial changes to the system. But that doesn’t make things any better for the General Election on May the 5^th. In the meantime, all three parties are bending the rules, going against the spirit of the Electoral Commission’s code of conduct. None of the major parties will come out of this well. Postal voting should be urgently looked at after the election. It is a farce.

The West Lothian Question

Then there is the small problem of the constitutional mess that is the West Lothian Question. I am in favour of devolution. It simply makes sense to me for UK-wide issues to be legislated on at a UK-wide level, for national and regional issues to be legislated on at a national or regional level, and for local issues at a local level. Add the fact that Scotland has always had a separate legal system and a separate education system, amongst other things, I believe that setting up a Scottish Parliament was the right thing.

But now that we do have a separate Parliament for Scotland and Assemblies for Wales and Northern Ireland, the result has been a constitutional nightmare. In Blair’s cabinet John Reid — a Scottish MP elected in a Scottish constituency — is Health Secretary. Health is a devolved issue. As such, he isn’t being held to account for his actions as Health Secretary, because his constituents are not affected one jot by them. The same goes for Alistair Darling, Transport Secretary. I admit I have been very surprised that more hasn’t been made of this. It is a scandal.

There is the more high-profile case of Scottish MPs voting on English matters such as fox hunting and tuition fees. This is more of a grey area in my opinion though. Tuition fees can still be said to be a Scottish issue, because it affects Scottish students who go to study south of the border. Nevertheless, it is inherently unfair that Scottish MPs can have a say in these matters whilst English MPs have no say over devolved Scottish issues.

You could just say it’s simply a matter of banning Scottish MPs from holding ministerial jobs that affect England only, or banning Scottish MPs from voting on English-only issues. But this would create a whole array of problems itself. For one thing, English MPs would have more power in Westminster than Scottish or Welsh MPs. We would have one set of rules for Northern Irish MPs, then another set for Welsh MPs, another set for Scottish MPs and yet another set for English MPs. That cannot the most desirable solution.

Infact, the only solution, in my mind, is for regional assemblies or a national assembly to be set up in England, and for all of the devolved assemblies to have the same powers. Voters in the North East had their chance to take us further in this direction, and they scuppered it. I have had less sympathy for England’s argument since then. Something must be done though.

There are those who would say that they would rather have a national English Parliament. Certainly, these are the people who make the most noise about it. Personally I wouldn’t have thought that that would be the best option — England is almost as wide and diverse as Great Britain, and it’s difficult to see how and English Assembly would be more effective that the UK Parliament. Not to forget that Cornwall has its own nationalist movement. Nevertheless, this is a decision for the English to take. Hurry up and get on with it please, so that we can have an end to this current mess!

The voting system

The votes themselves are equally problematic. We don’t live in a Presidential democracy. But inevitably the national campaign focusses on political parties and their leaders. People often talk about “voting for Blair,” but the only people who can do that are the people of Sedgefield. I might talk about voting for the Liberal Democrats, but I don’t think that’s a good way to think about things either. But this is unavoidable. I certainly can’t think of a solution, bar banning political parties, which probably wouldn’t be terribly helpful either.

I am concerned about the way people think about their vote though. There are a variety of things to take into consideration when voting, and yet we only have one vote. What does the vote do? What is it for? Am I voting for a Prime Minister? Am I voting for a particular party? Gordon Brown is standing in my constituency, so should I be voting on the basis of his work as Chancellor? Should I vote on the basis of whatever cabinet position he might have after the election? Or should I just choose the candidate who I think will be the best at representing the interests of me as a constituent?

It’s a lot of things to consider, which means that it can be a complex decision to make. And yet I’ve got just one poxy vote. To make matters worse, the voting system is so ridiculously perverse that it waters that one vote down so much that it becomes almost meaningless — especially in a safe seat like Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath.

The current voting system used in the General Election currently benefits the Labour Party only. It is simple to demonstrate this. Take a seat calculator such as this one from the BBC and try to give the three major parties 33% of the votes. As you can see, Labour end up having about 120 more seats than the Conservatives, and a disgusting 250 seats more than the Liberal Democrats, despite the fact that all three parties have exactly the same number of votes.

This has led to people not actually voting they way they would like to. Tactical voting isn’t pretty. And 38% say that they would vote for the Liberal Democrats if they thought they had a chance. 38% was higher than Labour’s contemporary poll ratings. What kind of a democracy is it when people are put off from voting for their party of choice? The two-party system created by First Past the Post is abhorrent, and must be smashed. I believe also that First Past the Post was designed to be so simple so that illiterate people could understand it. So we have a deliberately stupid voting system.

It’s not just the UK Parliament voting system that is problematic. Here in Scotland we have no fewer than four different voting systems — First Past the Post for Westminster; Additional Member System for the Holyrood; party lists for the European Parliament; and Single Transferable Vote for local councils.

Not only this, but we now have four different sets of boundaries to get to grips with. I’m not for a second suggesting that local council boundaries should be the same as Westminster boundaries, and the European boundaries aren’t too difficult to get to grips with (Scotland, and… yeah). But despite the Westminster boundary changes, Holyrood will be sticking with the old ones. That’s pretty confusing.

In my mind, it ought to be absolutely clear to everybody that this is an intolerable situation. We need to choose a system, use them for all elections if possible and stick with it. So what system should be chosen? A party list system is undesirable, as it gives political parties too much of a say in who gets voted in. Representatives become answerable to party leaders as opposed to the voters. The Additional Member System is undesirable for the same reasons, not to mention the fact that it creates ‘two tiers’ of representatives.

In my opinion, the Single Transferable Vote system is the least-worst system. It’s more proportional, reducing the need for tactical voting. People will be able to actually vote for the candidates they want in. And it maintains a constituency link.

In 1997 Labour promised electoral reform. When the Electoral Commission got back to them, Labour ignored the advice, deciding to carry on with the unfair system. After all, turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

There is hope on the horizon though. After the Scottish Parliament’s then Presiding Officer, David Steel, criticised the AMS system for creating two tiers of MSPs, there was talk about switching the voting system to Single Transferable Vote. But some Scottish Socialist supporters saw this as a deliberate attempt to reduce the number of SSP MSPs, and I’ve not heard anything about it for a long time. While they’re at it they can sort the boundaries out. If they really must keep having 129 MSPs, they could at least just bung in an extra MSP for each STV constituency.

Meanwhile Labour are said to be looking at electoral reform once again. Frankly I’ll believe it when I see it. It takes the prospect of a Conservative victory in 2009 / 2010 to kick-start Labour into action, but that’s fine by me — so long as reform happens.