Chapter Six: The Single Transferable Vote
92. We therefore come to the two main families of reformed and more proportional systems, of which the first is the Single Transferable Vote (henceforth STV) in multi-member constituencies. It is a system which has several substantial advantages. It maximises voter choice, giving the elector power to express preference not only between parties but between different candidates of the same party. It achieves a significantly greater degree of proportionality. It avoids the problem of having two classes of member, as is the case with the Additional Member System. It also avoids the likelihood of fostering a proliferation of small splinter parties, and does this without the need for setting any arbitrary threshold. It has long worked with on the whole beneficial results in the Republic of Ireland (as we have seen), a country which had previously shared at least a part of the British parliamentary tradition. It has also just produced a clear cut change of government in Malta. And STV is in addition the system which commands the enthusiastic support of most of those who have devoted their minds and their energies to the cause of electoral reform.
93. The Commission has therefore given it the most serious consideration. Out of this consideration it has become aware of a number of counterbalancing disadvantages, none of them individually decisive but which are fairly formidable in combination and even more so because they lead in to what in our view is the fatal objection to our currently recommending STV for Britain.
94. In Britain, with a population of 58 1/2 million as against Ireland's 3 1/2 million, the constituencies (unless there were to be a massive increase in the number of MPs, which the Commission regards as unacceptable; see paragraph 69) would need to be approximately four or five times as large as the Irish constituencies. This would make them geographically far-flung in rural or semi-rural areas, and, even in concentrated urban areas, constituencies of about 350,000 electors would entail a very long ballot paper and a degree of choice which might be deemed oppressive rather than liberating.
95. Lest this point should be thought contradictory to one of the favourable points listed above, and indeed given as one of the desiderata in our terms of reference, it should be stated that the Commission sees the extension of voter choice as highly desirable up to the point at which the average voter is able and eager meaningfully to exercise choice, both between and within parties. But that where the choice offered resembles a caricature of an over-zealous American breakfast waiter going on posing an indefinite number of unwanted options, it becomes both an exasperation and an incitement to the giving of random answers. In voting rather than in breakfast terms exasperation may discourage going to the polls at all and randomness lead to the casting of perverse or at least meaningless votes. Some people want to be able to choose between candidates of the same party, but many are interested only in voting for parties, and would not appreciate being forced into choosing between candidates of the same party about each of whom they know little.
96. It is however the counting rather than the casting of the votes which is excessively complicated under STV. The Irish seem to have no particular difficulty in filling in their ballot papers. They have a somewhat but not vastly higher proportion of spoilt papers than in Britain, and they have recently had a somewhat but not much lower turnout. This latter factor is worth noting in view of the Irish tradition of almost excessively high voting. The differential is not nearly strong enough to erect a theory that STV discourages voting, but it is sufficient to cast doubt on any theory that the greater voter choice of STV positively encourages participation in the democratic process.
97. The counting is incontestably opaque, although this is of course different from saying that it is haphazard or unfair. It may be doubted whether many Irish voters could explain exactly how it is done, but there are even fewer who complain about its lack of transparency. It is also the case that different systems of counting can produce different results for the candidates who are not elected in the first two or three for each constituency, but there can be an element of this in all systems which seek to correct the crude clarity of FPTP. This complexity (and consequent slowness) of counting should not be elevated into a fatal bar to STV, but nor can it be counted as an advantage.
98. Apart from its inherent complexity it is also the case that STV suffers from the accidental disadvantage that it is a different system from those which are to be used for the European elections, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the London Assembly. This is however to some extent counter-balanced by the fact that it is a system which Northern Ireland has used for over twenty years for filling its three seats in the European Parliament and has just successfully used for its own new Assembly. The Commission does not take the view that it should automatically follow what is already in place. It has, for instance, already rejected as unsuitable for the Westminster Parliament the list system which is now in place for the European Parliament. There is nonetheless an obvious disadvantage to burdening large parts of the voting public with getting used to several new systems within a short time-scale. It is also an odd quirk of STV that it has never been tried in a country which has not within this century been subject to British rule. Some might regard this as a qualification rather than a demerit, but it has the consequence that the polities in which experience of it has been gained are all relatively small. This is obviously true of the Republic of Ireland, of Northern Ireland and of Malta. The nearest approach to an exception is Australia, where STV is used in a modified form for elections to the Senate, a more powerful second chamber than the House of Lords. But even here Australia's population of 16 million makes it barely a quarter the size of Britain.
99. There was also a point critical of STV which was put to us by a number of leading Irish politicians - although with one or two voices the other way - whom we saw on our visit to Dublin, and which left us with the impression that STV in Ireland is perhaps more popular with the public than with the politicians. If this be so it is difficult to know whether to score the point in the favourable or in the adverse list. Many would think that the opinion of the sovereign people is much more important, and that if an electoral system is a shoe which pinches the politicians that is all to its credit. Nevertheless it is at least possible that the politicians may be better judges of what conduces to effective government.
100. The point, for what it is worth, is that multi-member constituencies with MPs and candidates competing in them not merely against other parties but against members of their own party too, so far from producing remote representatives, produces excessively parochial ones. They are much keener on being in their constituencies pursuing local issues than they are on attending to their legislative and other national duties in the Dail. And, even when they are in Dublin, they are very loath to vote for a necessary but potentially unpopular measure until they know that their rival/partner from the same party in the same constituency is doing so too. There thus develops what may be described as an 'after you Cecil, after you Claud' mentality.
101. It was also suggested that the constituent with a grievance does not so much go to the TD of his choice as go in turn to all three or four or five of them, according to the size of the constituency in which he or she lives, thereby wasting a good deal of the time of ministers, civil servants, TDs, and indeed of the constituents themselves. It could perhaps be said that, superimposed on an intensely local political culture, STV in Ireland has turned out to be a system more suited to the style of a good local councillor become a TD than to that of Daniel O'Connell or Charles Stewart Parnell. Nonetheless, of the two former Taoiseachs with whom we talked, one (although a firm upholder of some form of proportional system) agreed with this criticism, while the other was robustly of the view that good individual results under STV could be achieved and maintained just as much by national leadership as by intense local attention, and without any crippling constituency time commitment either.
STV as Part of a Hybrid Scheme
102. Despite these disadvantages of varying orders of seriousness, the Commission regarded the force of the case for STV, arising out of a combination of its intellectual neatness, its unique practical contribution to voter choice, and its place in the hearts of the most dedicated electoral reformers, as sufficiently strong for very serious consideration to be given to whether it could not be found a place (and an opportunity to prove itself) in a hybrid scheme. Some members (particularly the chairman) were attracted by the recommendations of the 1917 Speaker's Conference. This provided, as we saw earlier, for STV in the large towns and cities accompanied by AV in the less urban and more scattered parts of the country.
103. One argument in favour of such a hybrid approach is that it would enable the single member/single constituency link to be preserved in large parts of Britain (and those probably where it has most meaning) while adding an element of proportionality in the areas where it has less meaning (see paragraph 104). If conurbations down to the size of Bristol, Coventry and Cardiff together with some of the most concentrated urban areas of West Yorkshire and South Lancashire were chosen as STV areas it could give a proportionately elected core of approximately 250 MPs, and it could do so without any complicated re-drawing of constituency boundaries. The putting together of the existing Leeds or Liverpool constituencies with perhaps the addition of one or two clearly belonging satellite suburban ones, particularly bearing in mind that STV with its provision for minority representation is an inbuilt corrective to any attempt at a gerrymander, is much simpler - and less controversial - than the re-drawing of parliamentary boundaries within a city which is a fairly frequent feature of the present system.
104. It is indeed this continual re-shuffling of big-city internal parliamentary boundaries which made the Commission feel that such a differential treatment might be an effective way of reconciling points (i) (broad proportionality) and (iv) (a geographical link between MPs and their constituencies). It may be accepted that there can be some sort of special and valuable link between a member and a broad-acred constituency on the one hand (say the Yorkshire Richmond or Huntingdon) or one with a concentrated and distinct community sense (say Blackburn or the old Ebbw Vale) on the other, without pretending that much mystical unity can be attached to the entity of Leicester South-East as opposed to that of Leicester South-West, particularly as the boundaries of 'points of the compass' constituencies (and it is little different where they have changing locality names as in Birmingham or Glasgow) are in a fairly constant state of flux. The example given to us at our public meeting in London of the voter who over an adult lifetime in the same house found himself in five different constituencies may be an unusual one, but it nonetheless illustrates, even if an extreme form, the truth that big-city constituencies are often more floating kidneys than natural communities, that MP identification is lower in them than in the country as a whole, and that, in the experience of the chairman of the Commission who has sat for the largest provincial city of England as well as for the largest city of any sort in Scotland, nearly a half of constituency duties relate to city-wide rather than to purely constituency-contained issues.
105. There would thus be a certain rationale for treating the cities differently. Nevertheless the difficulty of explaining convincingly why nearly one half of the electorate were being asked to vote under a different system from the rest stands like a forbidding lion in the path of such a scheme. It would only be worth facing its fangs for a outcome which was manifestly beneficial from nearly every other point of view. And the Commission was ultimately unanimously persuaded that this would not be the case here. Just as it rejected AV as a solitary recipe on the ground that it would not be fair to those who support the Conservative party, so it rejected the hybrid system on the ground that, in addition to its complication, it would not, in most circumstances, be fair to those who support the Labour party. STV in the cities would let in minority Conservative representation to the Labour heartlands of the industrial centres of England, Scotland and Wales. That indeed would be part of the object of the exercise, and would in the view of the Commission be inherently desirable, for large tracts of one party monopoly are one of the major counts against FPTP. But a necessary corollary is that there should also be minority Labour representation in the areas where the Conservatives have long reigned supreme. This would be unlikely to be forthcoming. A Conservative MP for Liverpool would not be balanced by a Labour one for Surrey or Dorset.
106. The fact that the Liberal Democrats would make substantial strides towards fairer treatment under both AV on its own and a mixture of AV and STV does not answer this point. It is desirable that there should be as much all-round equity as possible, and that involves the two major parties (somewhat complacently though they have long sat upon their privileged treatment under FPTP) just as much as it does the third party against which there has been heavy discrimination. On this ground, fortified by the need for a strong positive justification for a two-tier system, the Commission rejected, with some regret, the eighty-year old solution of the Speaker's Conference which would amongst its other real but insufficient advantages, have restored the parliamentary cohesion of the provincial metropolises.
Conclusion on STV Generally
107. Apart from some inherent disadvantages - but no electoral system, including particularly FPTP, is a stranger to them - STV would be too big a leap from that to which we have become used, and it would be a leap in a confusingly different direction from the other electoral changes which are currently being made in Britain. It would also, particularly in the less densely populated areas of the country, be difficult to reconcile with the fourth of our terms of reference requirements - 'the maintenance of a link between MPs and geographical constituencies'. The Commission therefore does not feel that it can recommend STV in its full form as the best alternative to FPTP to be put before the people in a referendum.
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