It’s one of the great scandals of Welsh politics, but the Liberal Democrats, everlasting proponents of electoral fairness and proportional representation for once never mention it.
The Lib Dems are in control of Cardiff council, – despite being the third party in terms of votes attracted from the electorate.
The party with the highest vote in the city at the last council elections was the Conservatives. They racked up a clear majority.
The Tories gained 28 pc of the votes but won only 27 seats; the Lib Dems attracted only 26 pc of the votes, but streaked ahead with 35 seats; and Labour was on 27 pc and managed to plonk their candidates’ bottoms on a mere 13 seats.
Rightly did retiring MEP Jonathan Evans (he expects to swap Brussels for the Westminster seat of Cardiff North) point out to a Electoral Reform Society fringe meeting at the Tory conference in Cardiff that the issue would never have been allowed to lie politically quiescent if the Lib Dems had been the ones who suffered.
Mr Evans also pointed out that the parliamentary system is also seriously stacked against his party.
The Tories could be 10pc ahead in the opinion polls – and yet Labour would till sneak an overall majority. It would be of only two seats, but that would be enough for Mr Brown to retain No 10.
This happens because at the last big boundary reassessment, the Tories slept while Labour scooped the pool. I think that Labour carried out a policy which at the time they called “dough-nutting”. This seemed to consist of redrawing boundaries throughout Britain so that large towns and cities (which are more likely to vote Labour) were all surrounded by rural areas (more likely to go Tory).
The result was that in quite a few areas Labour voters exceeded by a small margin the Tory vote. The seats which that party won were inclined to be concentrated in deep-Tory areas which Labour would in any case have had no chance of victory.
I am surprised that the boundary commissioners at the time were taken in by this undemocratic con. I am surprised that none of the commissioners were wide awake enough to have heard of the policy being followed by Labour. After all, if I heard it being semi-openly discussed, so should the commissioners.
So it is no wonder that proportional representation – using single transferable vote, as the Electoral Reform Society prefer, although some Tory PR-advocates prefer other systems – has very much sneaked onto the Tory agenda.
The reform society held their second lobbying meeting at a Welsh Tory conference. Afterwards, they reckoned it a fair-enough success.
The issue is clearly – but only just – back on the agenda for the party. Once an unmentionable, the party has been forced to change its mind following PR’s adoption for the devolved assemblies. In Cardiff Bay, PR has been the method by which the party has hauled itself back from nothingness.
The party is admittedly hardly going to go overboard in the next few months to back PR for local elections – which is the next staging point, after its adoption for Scotland. But the road now seems to be open.
Mr Evans made clear however that when his party returns to No 10, he expects a far-more democratic form of PR to be adopted for the European elections..
Currently, they are decided on the basis of a closed-list PR system, similar to the one in use for the Welsh Assembly. This means that each party decides itself and centrally the order by which the party candidates on the list are elected.
Mr Evans reminded us that the closed list was adopted by Mr Tony Blair’s Labour party in order to be rid of previously-selected MEPs who possessed too-independent a frame of mind – such as David Morris, of Newport, a democratic and Christian rather than Marxist-inclined left-winger.
Mr Evans’s preference is for an open list – which means that the electorate, through their votes, decide the order in which a party’s members are elected. That is the system which was imposed on Ireland by the Government of Ireland Act 1914 – Westminster at the time thought that it was the fairest system which could be adopted.
Now the Tories are likely to go back to that system, at least for Brussels.
Perhaps, also, after the Cardiff council electoral mess, for local authorities, as well.
And what about ending the closed lists for the Welsh Assembly’s regional members ? The problem here might be persuading Plaid Cymru. That party found closed lists far too convenient for imposing women on the electorate and for locking out a man who would too easily have topped the list.
I am referring to Dafydd Wigley. But then some Pleidwyr would argue that Wigley was just too good for the Assembly; much better to get along with some mediocrities rather than be faced with real quality.
Youi should not accept the Tories propaganda so readily. Jonathan Evans is right about Cardiff but he is wrong that the Liberal Democrats have not mentioned it. On 11 June 2008 I moved an LCO to give the Assembly the power to change the voting arrangements for local government. In the course of my speech I said:
“We should be clear here, this proposal is not driven by self-interest on the part of my party. Here in Cardiff for example the Welsh Liberal Democrats emerged from the local elections with 35 seats, just short of a majority and with twice as many Councillors as the Tories. Yet in terms of the popular vote we were narrowly in third place. Because of the way that the first past the post system works there was an unfair outcome in the Capital City. In Swansea we would have ended up with fewer Councillors whilst the Tory group would grow from 4 to 11 and there are similar outcomes elsewhere.”
Despite this and despite their own manifesto commitment to give local government electors a choice of voting system, a measure that would require these powers, the Conservatives refused to support the LCO. In these issues they are masters of double standards.