 | 'This is the last chance. It is very difficult to see, if we fail in this referendum, how the home rule movement can be resurrected for a long period of time.' Nigel Smith, pro-home rule businessman 10 th April 1997. |  |
| 'This is the last chance. It is very difficult to see, if we fail in this referendum, how the home rule movement can be resurrected for a long period of time.' Nigel Smith, pro-home rule businessman 10 th April 1997. | |
The new Scottish Parliament offers the first stage of a brave experiment. It will serve as the ideal platform for the SNP - and spare it those long sojourns at Westminster, which has subtly corrupted many a nationalist in its days. After a generation of impotent whinge, responsibility will return to us all, in a measure, north of the Border. You never know but the day might come when England again win the World Cup and Scots, to a man, shrug and say, "So what?"
It would be foolish, though, to deny reservations about the scheme the Government seems set to offer. It is frankly absurd to create a Scottish Parliament without a sensible reduction in the number of seats at Westminster. Its lack of autonomy in raising revenue - it will remain, tax-varying powers or no, monied largely by a bloc-grant from London - does not encourage political discipline. Important areas of Scots life - like fishing negotiation in Europe - will not come under the remit of Edinburgh.
My biggest worry, though, is the voting system. The Government is pledged to a form of proportional representation. This was essential at two political levels. For one, the Liberal Democrats insisted upon it. For another, there is still - always - that fear of the SNP.
Our present first-past-the-post voting system is cruel to the SNP, whose support is in general terms evenly spread: it thus (as the late election demonstrated) requires a much higher level of support - about 30% to match the 10 seats won by the Liberals on 13%. But an arithmetical point does not come when a party of such flat, steady performance as the SNP wins heavy rewards under traditional polling.
Some 37% of the vote would give the Liberal Democrats barely 20 seats. It would leave Labour just short of a majority in Scotland. The Tories, on that base (whose vote has collapsed most of all in their old suburban and rural heartlands) might win 30. But the Nationalist would win a clear majority. It is for that very reason that the Government is determined to outwit them by electoral reform.
The trouble is that the Government seems set on a very bad PR system. In arithmetical and practical terms, the best form of proportional representation is the Single Transferable Vote. Its beauty lies not just in its recycling of second-preference votes for candidates who poll very poorly, but in also deploying the second or third preferences for candidates who have more votes than they need.
The STV system, based on multi-member constituencies - for example, a Highlands seat would be one division with five members - also allows candidates to oppose each other from within the same party. It allows the voter to use his vote exactly as he wishes to stress it: for men over women, against Europe or for Europe, or so on. It is easy for a voter to operate: simply numbering candidates on the form in order of preference.
STV, for many years, has been the voting system of choice to the Liberals and for the Electoral Reform Society. Traditional parties, though, like Labour, dislike it - because it gives candidates considerable freedom and minimises the power of party machinery in selection.
There are good reasons for the thoughtful to dislike STV. I do not think our culture enjoys the notion of five MPs for the same constituency. There is the feeling that a certain accountability is lost. More seriously, the system of counting votes under STV is extremely complicated. (All second preferences, and further as necessary, are counted, using a fractional equation which maximises incomprehensibility for those who failed Higher Maths.) Unless you have some kind of computerised voting system, it takes two or three days to count an election result under STV, as the Irish have just demonstrated.
Labour have not gone for quite the worst PR system, that operated in Italy or Ireland, where the whole country is one seat and the luckless voter goes to the polls to mark the box for a party, which not an opinion sought at all about candidates. Labour offers instead a supplementary vote system, where you will vote twice: first for a candidate under first-past-the-post as normal, then for a party. The party votes are then translated, as cast into top-up MPs selected from party lists, with an idea of achieving rough proportionality.
It is a very bad system because it will create two classes of MSP. There will be those who have won a real seat in a real place against real opponents and can therefore claim a personal endorsement from the public. And there will be those off the party lists, inevitably tainted by the insinuation they only won top placing because they licked the right boots. For each Calum MacDonald or Menzies Campbell, returned on personal merit, there will be a Dannie McOrrupt (Lab) or Murial McRame (Lib Dem) or whatever.
The system will certainly restore a credible Scottish platform to our native Tories. And it should return a healthy SNP contingent. For all that, assuming a re-run of the General Election vote, it is likely that the Parliament will have an overall Labour majority and a good many members scoured from party bargain basements.
The real question here is philosophical: do we endorse the central tenet of PR? That is, do we really believe that electing a Parliament is about electing parties, and that if the Radical Social Liberal wotsits win 8.1% of the poll they therefore deserve as of right 8.1% of the seats?
Few bother to debate this point. It is assumed to be an unassailable moral fact. It ignores the reality that politics is about people, not parties; and that the parties which presently suffer under the present voting system suffer most from a cruel fact: they do not get enough votes.
I am not a fan of proportional representation. The one reform for which I see an overwhelming case is that a Member of Parliament should know he has been returned with the support (or at least the tolerance) of a majority of his constituents.
I prefer the alternative vote system, as used in Australia, where you retain one-member seats but vote preferentially - 1, 2, 3 - and to be elected you must gain 50% plus one of first or recast preference votes.
It is not a proportional system, but it retains the best features of our present democracy while eliminating one of its most repellent. Its one drawback is that it tends to favour - if marginally - parties of the centre, the least offensive. Its great virtue is that it would eliminate the cynical horror of tactical voting.
Had the General Election been decided in Scotland on this basis, it would have made but little difference. The Liberal Democrats would probably have won Aberdeen South. The SNP would have taken East Inverness and perhaps, just, Glasgow Govan.
We need more informed discussion of these issues, and a little more awareness of the tricks our politicians like to play. - June 10
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