Have I decided yet?

I got my AV postal ballot last week. I’ve been saving it till after last night’s Intelligence Squared debate (which you’ll be able to watch online here, or read my tweets here).  I’ve been reading and thinking and listening. And I confess I still don’t really know.

My first thoughts are that it really doesn’t matter, as having AV isn’t going to make a huge difference. And giving people more choice and allowing them to really get into who they want to represent them is, of course, a good thing. But given that it’s probably not going to make a big difference, would changing to AV only give an illusion of greater voter choice and voice?

I don’t agree with people who say that X would have happened in Y year if we had had AV; people behave differently depending on circumstances. I do think we have a problem in our democracy, as David Aaronovitch said, when only 65 per cent of voters vote for one of the two main parties and 35 per cent vote for parties which largely have no chance of winning. And yet… Politics is about persuading people – if those minor parties aren’t persuading people then that’s their problem, not a fault of the system, and as I’ve said before, there are more substantive changes such as recall elections, proper seat boundaries and open primaries than could open up politics much much more.

I couldn’t care less that people whose first preference is for a minor party then affect who ends up the winner – it doesn’t matter. Again, it’s about persuasion.

Even I, political geek, do not relish the prospect of finding out enough about all the candidates standing in each election to make my rankings meaningful. Does that encourage people to vote irresponsibly further down the list? I think so, despite one speaker reassuring me that beyond the third candidate, my ranking was irrelevant.

I don’t think we should change (or not) our democracy in order to stuff one or other parties – whether it’s Peter Mandelson saying ‘vote yes to stuff the Tories’ or both campaigns saying ‘vote for us to stuff the BNP’. That’s emphatically NOT how we should decide.

I do worry that parties and candidates would  end up blurring their edges in order to appeal to a majority; and conversely I worry that some will make parts of their platform more extreme in order to pick off certain types of voter (Max Wind-Cowie has an interesting post on this – I was at that meeting and he’s described it perfectly).

One of the speakers last night in particular (who I also spoke to afterwards) was vehemently convinced that all politicians were lying liars who ALWAYS got things wrong. He was unpleasantly self-satisfied that he was always right. I don’t think AV will make a difference in the way that he believes; he seemed to think that there should be no representative democracy and everyone should vote all the time on every issue. Now in an ideal world this might seem attractive,  but I don’t think we’d ever take any real decisions, and can you imagine the dullness of constant votes? I am so unengaged in this AV debate that I really don’t want to have to decide on the minutiae of what our poor MPs have to work on every day.

I was very taken with his argument, however, that this AV referendum is a strange thing to be having a referendum on given that there are many more substantive constitutional issues. But that’s irrelevant as we ARE having one on AV, and we do have a representative democracy.

I was also nearly convinced by the argument that stability and majority governments under FPTP has seen us through any number of crises. But then I think about the fact that this coalition government was formed out of FPTP and seems to be doing ok – though as I’ve argued before I think the way the Coalition Agreement was worked out was an opaque process, and if we are to have AV I suspect that there would be tough questions before an election to all parties, as to what their red lines are, who they’re willing to talk to and what they would and wouldn’t accept. Which I think would be a good thing.

Another speaker was very clear that the big advantage of FPTP is what he called ‘removal van government’ – that overnight you could kick out an unpopular government; given that there were suggestions that Labour could have remained in power in 2010, this is an enormously valuable argument for a clear and decisive system. Yet I come back to the point that people vote for what they want, and who they’ve been persuaded by.

Overall I still don’t really know. I’m so underwhelmed by the arguments on both sides. I find the zealots for PR are actually not even arguing for AV but merely see this as a step towards something else. I find that the people against AV were, at the beginning at least, not interested in making sensible arguments about our tradition of fair and equal votes for everyone, but more concerned with things like the ‘cost’ of AV – I think our democracy is important, and if we come to the conclusion that we need something better, then it’s got to be worth spending a certain amount on making sure it works properly.

I’m probably marginally edging towards voting no, because few people seem to think AV will actually make much difference; because I am so put off by much of the Yes campaign’s ‘MPs are lazy and corrupt and stupid’ rhetoric; and because I think the Yes campaign have failed to make their case in a coherent and sensible way (‘safe’ seats are safe because people vote for them to be so; MPs with over 50 per cent of the vote at the moment are not noticeably ‘better’ than MPs in marginal seats; and they have made the assumption that if they just say ‘fair’ enough, people will flock to them).

On the other hand, I don’t have a problem with coalitions (other than I want more information beforehand about how the parties would handle the negotiations); I do want to be able to express that I think certain issues are important by, for example, voting Green occasionally (and can I just repeat again, I don’t agree with their solutions but I think we need to be more environmentally concerned); I do want voters to engage more in politics because it’s important; and I do want politicians to reach out to gain the broadest possible support and not just focus on shifting a few swing votes.

So I still don’t really know.

A postscript: What I think will be very interesting but which few people (apart from the Times this morning £) have focused on is, what does either result do to the Labour party?  We’ve all been focusing so hard on what yes or no does to the internal dynamics of the Tories or the Lib Dems, and how either result will affect the balance of the Coalition (though I suspect in large part, both parties – centrally at least – have had those discussions already and are already moving beyond the immediate). But we’ve generally ignored the one party that is genuinely split on AV – Labour.

Related posts:

1. Is Oldham a national or a local election?
2. I voted Conservative today