Why is 'spiked-online' pro PR?

Does Brendan O'Neill read this blog? It seems uncanny that his latest article on spiked almost feels like a direct response to my previous post "Not A PR Stunt". Avid readers will recall that in that post I railed against the PR threat to democracy that could undermine the unmediated relationship between the citizen and his or her political representative. In his article O'Neill echoes my feelings almost to the word. Under a system of proportional representation, he argues, "people’s ability to directly vote for the person whom they want to represent them – someone whose views, passion and flair they genuinely support – is diminished". But if this is the case, why on earth does he give PR one of its biggest endorsements by declaring that "spiked likes the idea of proportional representation"?

Why should even the idea of PR appeal to spiked? That's the one question that Brendan hasn't answered in either of his articles. In his previous article he referred to 'fairness' and this time he's given us a vague reference to 'clarifying political debate' and providing a better 'democratic snapshot', but no explantion of any specific problem or any specific solution. Has he really thought it through?

For a start, the 'fairness' argument is potentially anti-democratic. The key complaint levelled at majoritarianism is that it is unfair, that it does not give the minority voice its due. All of which is simply another way of saying that the views of the majority are suspect and that their weight should be moderated. OK, in many cases these views might not be right-on, but thence begins politics. The ideology underlying these ideas needs tackling by head-on argument; not by tacitly accepting but electorally sweeping aside. The annoying thing is that O'Neill totally accepts this argument which is what makes his article so confusing.

The whole idea of enforced fairness in politics should itself be treated with suspicion. There is nothing automatically democratic about the percentage of seats a party receives closely mirroring the percentage of votes it won. This is an especially empty view today when the dividing lines between the mainstream parties are more blurred than ever (and there is now no fundamental difference between Lib Dem and Conservative). But even, say, 25 years ago when divisions where clearer, the call to ensure proportionality in Parliament would have:

• made MPs more accountable to their parties' ruling executives than to their electorates.
• made it harder to get rid of an unpopular MP.
• confused the issue of exactly who it is that represents me in Parliament, and who I need to be keeping on their toes.
• destroyed the idea that the winner in a FPTP election actually represents those who didn't vote for him as well as those who did (yes - let's bring back magnanimity).
• given party manifestos greater prominence than the records and statements of individual candidates (while at the same time making it less likely that any manifesto commitment would be adhered to because of the need to make coalition compromises).
• thwarted the progressive development of political ideas from confused local ones to clearer national ones (PR promotes political ideas to office before they have run the gauntlet of seeking a mandate).
• viewed the entire electorate as a specimen to be measured, not as a sleeping lion that ought to be feared.

Against all this is the view that PR is, well, fairer. But in a fight you don't want fair - you want to win. And if your first move is to complain that the fight isn't fair then you'll never win. Spiked should drop all its references to supporting even the idea of PR, and continue the noble art of politics with its gloves off.

Not A PR Stunt

Brendan O'Neill raises some very important points in a recent article on spiked-online about proportional representation. Anyone who feels the urge to defend democracy in the months to come must be on the look-out for coalition-government parties and their intellectual also-rans arguing for a form of PR to replace the first-past-the-post system for electing political representatives. Anything to moderate the 'madness of the majority'. Bang on, Brendan! But why have you moderated the impact of your article by giving proportional representation an unfair share of your word count?

All the strongest ideas in O'Neill's article relate to how everyone who campaigns for PR these days is really motivated by a fear of what ordinary people might think and do if allowed to come together, collectively, especially in a political forum. All that pissed-up, racist, paedophilophobic behaviour that the political class imagines originates in the (bare-chested) man in the (city centre) street would be writ large across the face of Britain, and a permanent state of Saturnalia would be declared. Rather than tackle anything they don't like with a political argument, our PR reformers would rather it not appear at all in the House, or at least confine it to the margins. O'Neill shows the clear parallels between today's view and those much less-constrained views of the scabrous 'multitude' that were around in Victorian and Edwardian times (before the same multitude were required to sacrifice themselves in their millions for the sake of Empire).

But our Brendan takes the wind out of his own sails by prefacing his blowing with the remark that "There is no doubting that Britain could do with electoral reform" and claiming that the campaign for proportional representation has been a force for good. You could have knocked me down with a Charter 88 petition when I read this. What exactly needs reforming? He explains technically..."As a result of Britain's peculiar voting system, if the three main parties got exactly 30 per cent of the vote each, still Labour would end up the winner". So what? That's as profound as saying that if I went to the pub with a couple of friends and we all drank the same amount, Dave over there would be asleep before closing time whereas Chas over here would still be jabberin' on about Margate wiv all ver famerlee. Lay a blanket over the country and you'll still see peaks and troughs.

Having provided a technical explanation it's a bit of a disappointment that O'Neill does not provide any historical explanation as to why reform might be needed (despite his referring to the "genuinely democratic" push for PR). The outlawing of gerrymandering and the abolition of rotten boroughs - if this is what he has in mind - were never campaigns for proportional representation. Where the masses were involved they were campaigns for political representation. The point needs to be made that political representation is not reducible to a form of arithmetic, according to which some expert can declare a person representative or not. I choose someone to represent me in Parliament (or rather I didn't this time) because I believe they will largely think, say, and do the right thing; not because they are from the same demographic or because they will express 30 per cent of a view that 30 per cent of the people believe. The political is personal; it cannot be expressed in a transferable vote.

I'm not saying that wider issues should not be taken into account, or that one should only vote for a candidate whom one knows personally (although I would not vote for anyone I had never actually seen). I am saying that political representation is an unmediated personal relationship that no third party can declare invalid, but in his article Brendan O'Neill seems to display a hint of that third-partyism. This is, of course, unsurprising when you consider how the main political parties are discussed, in terms of their official policies and particularly with regard to their leaders. No doubt countless voters entered the polling stations yesterday with only a political party in mind, not a Parliamentary representative as such. Of greater concern is that a more countable number of these representatives banked solely on their party credentials, avoiding any potentially embarrassing face-to-face showdowns with the 'bigoted' punters.

If any political party ever hopes to make contact with the great mass of people who actually live in Britain, then politics needs to begin with an unmediated personal relationship and widen out from there. For this to happen there needs to be a wholesale reform of political ideas, concerning economic crises, middle-east wars, school discipline, and everything else from Andrew Sachs to zero-tolerance policing. This is the reform we need; not electoral reform.