If Welsh Labour wants a two-member-constituency voting system, this is the one they should adopt

In the recent row over possible changes to the voting system used for elections to the Welsh Assembly, one of the alternatives proposed by the Labour Party was a system of two-member-constituency First Past the Post (see the Devolution Matters blog for an overview of the row). In other words, to expand the number of [...]

Forget the pedantry and distortions: the reason the big parties oppose AV is that it will erode their support

Readers of this blog will know by now that I dislike the Alternative Vote (AV) voting system but like First Past the Post (FPTP) even less. But cutting through all the crud and the crap about those systems’ respective merits and demerits, the one big reason why Labour and Tory dinosaurs such as Margaret Beckett [...]

Labour NOtoAV is launched! But the Yes camp shouldn’t celebrate too much!

The Labour NOtoAV campaign was launched on Wednesday, commanding the support of 200 Labour MPs and Peers. What a discredited bunch of has-beens and Westminster elitists! If ever the ‘No’ campaign wanted to boost support for the ‘Yes’ campaign, this was the way to do it! But the ‘Yes’s shouldn’t start celebrating too loudly. Public [...]

Giving second preferences to the Conservatives could be the best tactic for the Lib Dems under AV

If you use the delightful Electoral Calculus to ‘predict’ the 2015 UK general election result using the latest opinion-poll figures from ComRes, there’s very little variation whether you use the First Past the Post (FPTP) or Alternative Vote (AV) electoral systems. According to ComRes, the current voting intentions across the UK would be Labour 40%, [...]

What’s missing?

The BBC has published a helpful word cloud for Ed Miliband’s keynote speech as new leader at the Labour Party conference. Here it is: What word is missing? This passage will give you a clue: “The old thinking told us that for 300 years, the choice was either the break-up of the United Kingdom or [...]

Lessons from the Australian election for AV in the UK

The Australian elections are heading towards an almost perfect tie. At the time of writing, the governing Labor party had won 70 seats, with the opposition Liberal-National Coalition gaining 72, while independents had won four seats and the Greens one. This meant that, with three seats still outstanding, no party would cross the threshold of [...]

The Liberal-Democrat Accession and the English Parliament

You should always be careful what you wish for and be wary of the law of unintended consequences. Although I will probably be voting Lib Dem this time round – unless my Tory MP astounds me by previously unsuspected support for an English parliament – a Lib-Dem break-through could have far-reaching ramifications for the prospects [...]

The SNP would break its self-denying ordinance and support a minority Labour government

I’ve just been listening to an interview with SNP leader Alex Salmond on BBC Radio 4′s PM programme. Towards the end of the interview, Eddie Mayer asked Salmond if the SNP would be prepared to break the self-denying ordinance it has hitherto observed in parliamentary votes on what Mayer called ‘devolved’ matters and what Salmond [...]

Vote hung parliament!

The English tend to resent people telling them what to do. But at the risk of provoking such resentment, I want to set out here why I think the best result for England from the British general election would be a hung parliament, and then discuss how best to bring about that result. In a [...]

The Alternative Vote: An Opinion

Yesterday, Parliament voted to include a referendum on replacing the existing First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) system for UK-parliamentary elections with the Alternative Vote (AV) system in the Constitutional Reform Bill presently being debated in Parliament. For those who still don’t know what AV is: instead of marking a cross beside the name of their preferred candidate, voters rank [...]