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.