I can picture it now. It sounds like a circus act. Two bumbling idiots running around the pit throwing pies at each other and guffawing at the incredibly unamused crowds watching. Unfortunately for the UK, these two clowns are privy to national intelligence briefings and the country's defences. Even more unfortunately for democracy, they've also got the power to fiddle with Great Britain's constitutional machinery.
As we've known for a little while now, Clown Cameron and Sideshow Clegg have been wanting to get their greasy fingers on our electoral system. In some respects, this isn't such a bad thing. If, as is alleged, there are some constituencies which numerically favour one party over another because there are fewer voters, then by all means the constituency boundaries should be amended. When I say "amended" I mean amended. I do not mean "kick out 50 MPs for no good reason". There is no reason why we cannot have 650 equal constituencies. But this goes a lot deeper. Let's skip back 6 months or so.
It's April 2010, next month the country goes to the polls for one of the most important elections of a generation. Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats are coming off well so far in the series of American-style Leaders' debates, namely by pushing forward their credentials as the party for change. The party that will make votes count; the party that will oppose any rise to tuition fees; the party that has never lied. Specifically, Nick and the Lib Dems are very big on the Proportional Representation voting system whereby parties can cash in on their share of votes for an equal share of seats in the House of Commons. It's seen as a very progressive and bold move to make. Over the next few weeks, as an outright majority becomes less and less likely for any party, the Liberal Democrats realise they may have to form an agreement with another party and so they'll begin to promote the benefits of the Alternative Voting system.
Back to November 2010.
So you can see, the Liberal Democrats like to think of themselves as the movers and shakers of the progressive front. They're the ones bold enough to introduce such radical ideas as AV (I'd make a sarcastic remark here, but I don't think it's needed), and greater power to the people.
How very sad then, that after only six months they're backing such regressive ideas as VAT hikes, tuition fee rises and a step backwards in Peoples' representation. Yes, that's right. For all of their talk of a referendum on AV (which will most probably reject the motion), the Liberal Democrats and their puppet leader are actually making every person's vote worth LESS.
The maths here isn't particularly hard, but I will outline it to keep us all on bored.
Welcome to Happyland.
In Happyland there are 4,000,000 people.
They are represented in parliament by 80 MPs. This means that (if we assume the constituencies are of an equal size), each constituency consist of 50,000 electors. Every elector in the country has a vote that is effectively "worth" 1/50000th (0.00002).
Now we cut the number of seats to 40. Every constituency consists now of 100,000 electors. Every elector's vote is now "worth" 1/10000th (0.0001). Simplistic I know, but bare with me.
The problem goes deeper. Proportional Representation was supposed to give smaller parties the chance to get a few MPs in (in fact, one of the major criticisms was that it would give the BNP and other extremist parties a legitimate platform) which can only be good for democracy.
In our original 80 Member House, lets say we have 20 MPs from the blue party, 15 from the yellow party, 44 from the red party and 1 from the green party.
Our one MP from the green party has had to win the most votes in his/her seat. It means that for instance, our green MP has secured 23,000 of the 50,000 votes cast and has a majority of say 2,000.
If we make that seat bigger - up to 100,000 electors, our green MP has to win a lot more votes in order to be returned. It's not likely s/he will be able to do this if the previously neighbouring seats were comfortable blue or red seats with relatively little green support.
Of course, this is primarily a failure of the First Past the Post System that we use, and only exacerbated by the reduction in the number of seats and the subsequent decline of a vote's worth. Would AV redress the balance? No. Because a lot of green voters would still list one of the big parties as their 2nd/3rd preferences, meaning that should the green candidate come last in the first round of voting, the green candidate's votes are redistributed to the two bigger parties.
This paragraph of triviality is indeed unnecessary, however, because the likelihood is that this May, the public will vote against AV. Not necessarily because most of the nation disagree with it in principle, but because most of the nation who get out to vote at the polling station will.
This Government's undemocratic and regressive tendencies don't stop there, however. Clown Cameron and Sideshow Clegg have been performing a few opening tricks for the crowds, you see. Unfortunately, it's all gone wrong for Clegg. He was strapped to a board, and Cameron was throwing knifes around him - demonstrating his infinite ability to cut without hurting the rich - except that last throw went very badly and Sideshow Clegg now has a knife firmly through his back. Cameron wants to stuff the House of Lords with more Conservative peers. 50 more, to be precise. Remember, peers aren't elected. So, what Mr Cameron is doing is removing 50 elected members from the Commons (estimated to be 27 Labour, 12 Conservative and 6 Lib Dem, 5 Other) and replacing them with 50 unelected members in the Lords (50 Conservative).
Now, it may be that our Clown has discovered the joys of slapstick comedy involving aquatic life, but this entire affair smells a bit fishy to me.
and I think the audience want their money back.
