Tesco cheeses start sporting the English flag!

Imagine my surprise and delight when I went into my local Tesco last weekend and found that several of their English cheeses had been re-packaged to display the English flag, not the British! My quick random survey suggested that this applied to their ‘regional’ cheeses (Cheshire, Leicester and Wensleydale); their own-brand cheddars made in England; and David Stow cheddars.

I wondered at first if this change was related to Tesco’s status as the ‘Official Supermarket‘ for the World Cup. However, it seems as though this re-branding is a genuine reaction to the campaigning efforts of groups such as Fair Flags, if Toque is to be believed. Let’s hope that the ‘offence’ taken by some Cornish people to Tesco’s switch to the English flag, reported by Toque, doesn’t lead them to revert to the Union Jack – unless they want to apply it to all British produce, including Cornish (e.g. Ginsters).

I did notice that the same shelf that proudly displayed and correctly labelled the English cheddars also contained a ‘British cheddar’ with a British flag. But that’s fine if that product is made in different countries throughout the UK and / or from milk originating from all over Britain.

Now let’s see if Tesco start replacing all those horrid Union Jacks plastered over their English milk, apples, meat, veg, etc. etc. It’s a promising start – and there are a few more food products I can start buying again now.

The Alternative Vote: Count me out!

I’m not a fan of the Alternative Vote (AV): the option for voting reform that the coalition government plans to put to the people in a referendum. As the saying goes, it doesn’t do what it says on the tin.

AV’s advocates maintain that it ensures that the winning candidate in an election always obtains a majority of votes cast. Not true: the winning candidate always obtains >50% of the votes cast for all the candidates still in play in the AV counting system – i.e. the two or three candidates that are still in the race after the losing candidates have been eliminated – not >50% of the votes of all those who have cast a vote, although the two are often the same. There may, however, be a sizeable minority of voters who have not indicated any of the leading candidates as their second or subsequent preferences. So their votes are simply ignored: left out of the count, literally counting for nothing.

In my view, then, AV adds insult to the injury of First Past the Post: it makes out that all votes matter; but in fact, if your first and only choice is for one of the smaller parties, not only is that vote as impotent as before, but also it is effectively discounted – eliminated from the final tally. To me, this seems a greater disenfranchisement than FPTP.

Supporters of AV might riposte that the point about the system guaranteeing a true majority is academic and that, in most actual instances of AV polls, the ‘winner’ does obtain over 50% of all the votes cast and not just of those remaining in play. That may be so, but it seems at very least somewhat disingenuous to make such a big thing about AV producing true majorities when this is far from guaranteed. In any case, the point about disenfranchisement is the more substantive one, in my view, as it is this that electoral reform is mainly intended to overcome.

AV is not fit for purpose with respect to addressing that wider concern. Nonetheless, it looks as though AV is what’s on offer for the time being. So my question would be: is there a way AV can be ‘tweaked’ to make it more proportional and less disenfranchising? This would also involve preventing candidates from winning on a minority of all the votes cast while appearing to have gained a majority: the more the result in each seat reflects a true majority, or the largest real plurality, of the votes cast, the more the national election result should be proportional, in that it would reflect the real level of support for each party across different parts of the UK.

My proposal would be that in instances where no candidate wins a true majority under AV, the votes should then be re-counted using the Approval Voting system. I’ve advocated Approval Voting on the pages of this blog before. What this involves is counting every single preference indicated by voters as one vote for that candidate, with all such votes being given equal weight, i.e. with no attempt being made to rank the choices. To objections that this gives disproportionate weight to voters’ least preferred choices, I would reply that this is only what AV does in any case: AV assigns the same weight to some voters’ second, third or subsequent preferences, which it counts as of equal importance to the first preferences of voters who have chosen the leading candidates. This is itself insulting and disenfranchising: some voters’ first preferences are literally given preferential treatment to others’.

The ‘winner’ in an Approval Vote is simply the candidate obtaining the most votes, i.e. the one whom most voters have indicated they are prepared to support in some degree or other. In many, perhaps most, instances, a candidate winning on a minority of all votes cast under AV would also be the winner if the vote is re-counted using the Approval Voting system. But this is not necessarily the case. For example, it is theoretically possible for all candidates to obtain 100% of the vote under the Approval Voting system: if all voters choose all the candidates. However, if those choices are ranked and counted using the AV system, there will be only one winner.

In practice, particularly in two-way or three-way marginals, there could be two or more candidates that would obtain over 50% of the vote if the AV ballot were counted as an Approval Vote; and the candidate obtaining the highest >50% share under Approval Voting could be eliminated using AV. For example, a three-way marginal won by the Conservatives under FPTP with a narrow majority over Labour but a minority of the overall vote, and won by Labour with a thumping ‘overall majority’ under AV (because the second preferences of Lib Dem first-choice voters were mainly for Labour), could well be won by the Lib Dems if the preferences of all voters were counted equally (as an Approval Vote), i.e. if the second preferences of Conservative and Labour first-choice voters were added to the Lib Dems’ total.

Not only could the outcome of elections in marginal constituencies be materially affected by re-counting minority results using the Approval Voting method, but also voters’ actual choices could be altered. If all the preferences of all voters are counted, then they also count for something: there is a point in indicating support for candidates that you know cannot win, because at least your views will be registered and the parties will have to take note.

For example, there is often no point in listing third, fourth or subsequent preferences in an AV ballot, as your first choice is likely to be the party you’d genuinely like to win while the second choice, if any, is your tactical vote: the only candidate with a chance of winning that you are prepared to support. However, you might actually prefer other candidates to your ‘second’ choice; and if there’s a prospect that these choices will also be counted, using the Approval Voting method, then you can carry on listing as many preferences as you like. In fact, ballots could be counted in both ways simultaneously, so that both sets of results can be presented and compared, and the full range of voters’ real preferences can be taken literally into account.

If this meant that winners under AV obtaining a ‘real’ majority of all votes cast were seen to have ‘lost’ under the Approval System, then I’m not suggesting that those results should be reversed, as I’m proposing Approval Voting only as a modification to AV in cases of minority winners as well as to re-enfranchise voters disenfranchised by AV. But if there were many instances of sound AV ‘majorities’ being overturned by the Approval Voting result, then this would add pressure to reform the voting system further, which could only be a good thing.

So what would I call my version of enhanced AV, given that the name ‘AV+’ already exists and refers to another system that seeks to mitigate AV’s disproportionality? Perhaps we could call it ‘AV on approval’! I for one would return it to the manufacturer with a resounding no vote!

South-East Cambs candidates’ views on the Power 2010 pledge

I’ve had a couple of replies from my local candidates on the Power 2010 Pledge, which I wrote to them about on St. George’s Day. Their responses are basically in line with their parties’ manifestoes, which I suppose is no surprise.

First, the incumbent Tory MP, Jim Paice:

“My Party is a Unionist party – and so we will not put the Union at risk. However, having said that we are supportive of devolution and have committed in our Manifesto to rebalance the unfairness in the voting system for devolved issues in Parliament (the so-called ‘West Lothian Question’). We have pledged to introduce new rules so that legislation referring specifically to England (or to England and Wales as is also often the case) cannot be enacted without the consent of MPs representing constituencies of those countries. The Labour Government has refused to address this situation, and it is not a Manifesto commitment of the Lib Dems.

“You can read the Manifesto here http://www.conservatives.com/Policy/Manifesto.aspx and the relevant section is pages 83-84.”

Firstly, Jim Paice is right about Labour and the Lib Dems on this issue. Indeed, the Lib Dems have indicated elsewhere that they are prepared to tolerate the continuation of the WLQ until more fundamental reforms of the constitution, parliament and voting system are enacted – which is highly convenient if they actually need the votes of Scottish Labour MPs to pass English legislation in the event of a Lab-Lib coalition after the election.

This emphasis on resolving the West Lothian and English Questions within a broader context of constitutional reform – again, consistent with the manifesto – is what emerges from the reply I received from the Lib Dem contender in South East Cambs, Jonathan Chatfield:

“Thank you for writing to me about the English question and wider Power 2010campaign.

“I am delighted to support the campaign for a reforming Parliament and have signed the pledge. Liberal Democrats have been calling for wholesale reform of our Parliamentary system for a long time and I am pleased to say that it is already our policy to:

“Introduce a proportional voting system

“The Liberal Democrats will change politics forever and end safe seats by introducing a fair, more proportional voting system for MPs, and for the House of Lords. By giving voters the choice between people as well as parties, it means they can stick with a party but punish a bad MP by voting for someone else.

“Scrap ID cards and roll back the database state

“Liberal Democrats would scrap ID cards. Getting rid of this illiberal, expensive and ineffective scheme, will free up money for thousands more police on our streets. We will also get innocent people off the DNA Database and scrap the intrusive ContactPoint database which will hold the details of every child in England.

“Replace the House of Lords with an elected chamber

“Liberal Democrats will replace it with a fully elected second chamber with considerably fewer members than the current House.

“Draw up a written constitution

“Liberal Democrats believe that people should have the power to determine this constitution in a convention made up of members of the public and parliamentarians of all parties, and subject to final approval in a referendum.

“The only part of the pledge with which I do not agree is the call to ‘allow only English MPs to vote on English laws’. We need a wider look at the constitution and our electoral system, rather than creating two types of MPs at Westminster. I believe that the better approach to solve the anomalies in the current constitutional settlement is to address the status of England within a Federal Britain, through the Constitutional Convention set up to draft a written constitution for the UK as a whole.

“Thank you again for taking the time to contact me.”

No surprises there, then, and no surprise that the Power 2010 movement itself enjoys the backing and participation of senior Liberal Democrats: the Power 2010 Pledge (apart from English votes on English laws) could almost be taken out of the Lib Dem manifesto!

Of course, from my perspective, it’s highly problematic that the only part of it that Jonathan Chatfield doesn’t agree with is the proposed remedy to the West Lothian Question; and it’s ironic that this is the only bit that the Tory candidate does agree with.

Sort of. Because the Tories’ ‘answer’ to the West Lothian Question is not a real answer. It’s true that they would allow only English MPs to determine effectively the final shape of any England-only legislation, by allowing only English MPs to participate at the report and committee stages of bills. But non-English MPs will still be allowed to vote on those bills at their second and third reading. So if there’s an overall Conservative majority among English MPs (the most likely outcome of the election) but not a Conservative majority across the UK as a whole, there could be stalemate if the other parties and non-English MPs voted down English bills at their second and third reading.

This is another reason why the Conservatives are banging on about being given an overall majority across the UK as a whole (which actually means a substantial majority in England only), because otherwise they would not be able to govern in England if they formed a minority government and still tried to adopt their proposed mitigation of the WLQ. Expect that to be dropped then in such an eventuality.

The Conservatives’ proposal would, however, nicely salve their conscience if there were a hung parliament but they had enough MPs to make a deal with the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the UUP to give them an overall majority. They could then defend themselves against accusations that they were, in effect, using the votes of non-English and, in some instances, anti-Union MPs to pass legislation in the Union parliament that affected only England! They would argue that their ‘English pauses for English clauses’ arrangement effectively gave English MPs – i.e. the English Tories – the final say on English bills.

Equally, the Tories’ tweak to the procedures for English bills could be introduced in the event of a Con-Lib coalition, especially as the Lib Dems seem to have no difficulties of conscience in practising West Lothian voting. So in effect, the Tory and Lib Dem positions ironically dovetail on the West Lothian Question: they’re prepared to continue with that anomaly so long as it suits their political interests and they can appear to legitimise the governance of England by the Union parliament for the Union – as opposed to government of the English people by the English people for the English people.

So should I conclude that I should give my vote to neither the Tories or the Lib Dems? Well, my view, as frequently expressed in this blog during the election campaign, is that, without a hung parliament, there’s no chance of driving through the radical constitutional reforms that could lead to constitutional recognition of England as a nation and to an English parliament. The Tories clearly are not interested in addressing the broader English Question, and their proposal doesn’t even amount to English votes on English laws – partly because of the unworkability of that proposal, at least under present parliamentary arrangements.

The Lib Dems, on the other hand, do recognise the need to address the English Question, even if they are at best equivocal about what the status of England, if any, would be in their federal blueprint for the UK; and even if electoral reform begs the English Question even more critically than carrying on with West Lothian voting in a non-proportionally elected House of Commons, as I argued in my previous post.

So it’s still the Lib Dems for me, as they’re the only party in South East Cambs that could unseat the Tory MP and help towards a hung parliament. But if they do have a share of power after the election, they’d be very much on probation, as far as I’m concerned. Their credentials with regard to real democratic reform will be dependent on the extent to which, if at all, they allow the English people to determine the way they are governed. And tolerating the WLQ isn’t a good start.