The Government has today published its much delayed review of voting systems which examines the experiences of the different forms of elections introduced over the last ten years in the UK.  The 1997 Labour Party manifesto committed the party to holding a referendum on the voting system for the House of Commons. They have broken this promise. 

 The Government have come up with excuse after excuse for their delays. The latest one, set out in a written ministerial statement by Justice Minister Michael Wills today, is: “At this point, it would be premature to seek to reform the electoral system for the Commons while the voting system for a reformed and substantially or fully elected House of Lords is still to be determined.”   So the Government’s excuse for delaying action on electoral reform is their continuing delay of Lords reform. As Nick Clegg says, “It takes a peculiar kind of genius for ministers to spend a decade deciding what to do with our voting system before reaching the conclusion that we should wait a bit longer.” 

The only ‘proportional representation’ used for any election in Littlehampton is the ‘D’Hondt’ system used for elections to the European Parliament. The D’Hondt system gives an incredible amount of power to political parties, and because the EP elections are held on a regional scale, gives an immense power to ‘central office’ within those parties. I have no doubt that the D’Hondt system undermines the PR argument, I even would question whether it’s better than ‘first past the post’. 

The government press release and ministerial statement (and, consequently, most media coverage) on the review give a misleading picture of the actual contents of the 197 page review. Despite being a government report, prepared by civil servants and issued by ministers, the truth is that the review is reasonably balanced. Its conclusions back up many of the arguments used by pro-fair votes campaigners and undermine much of the case made by those who are against reform.