Thirteen years after New Labour came to power and three months before an election, the carrot of electoral reform is once again being dangled before us.  Yet what an emaciated carrot it is. By restricting reform to a referendum on the Alternative Vote, the Prime Minister has deceptively conflated the question of whether we should change the electoral system with what type of system we should have.

In attempting to pre-determine the nature of electoral reform from above, Gordon Brown is relying on the old politics to bring in the new. Like David Cameron’s point blank refusal to consider electoral reform, this sends a clear signal to the public over who owns the democratic process.

Proponents of electoral reform are right to insist that our current electoral system is fundamentally flawed. Yet no electoral system is perfect. AV, while offering greater choice and ensuring all MPs are elected on at least 50 per cent of the vote, can lead to even greater distortions between votes cast and seats won than the current system.  The Single Transferable Vote, while directly proportionate, would break the clear link between MPs and constituents by introducing multi-member constituencies.  There are important trade offs to be made in opting for any new system. The key question is who should be making them.

In a felicitous turn of phrase, Ferdinand Mount once described attempts at constitutional reform as “cynical manoeuvres for power decked in the bunting of high principle”. To avoid this charge Gordon Brown should have given the public a direct say in setting the terms of a referendum as well as a vote on the outcome.

This is precisely what occurred in British Columbia, where the Premiere convened a Citizens Assembly to decide on whether there should be a change to the electoral system. Initiated in 2004 following an election promise, the assembly consisted of 160 randomly selected citizens empowered to set the terms of reference on a referendum. The most instructive lessons concern the way professional politicians were screened out of the selection process for assembly members, the direct empowerment of a citizen body to set the agenda and the passing of the final decision to the citizenry at large.

In an era of endemic political distrust, citizens need to be involved at the beginning of the reform process rather than called in at the end to legitimate a decision they had no part in making. To their credit 148 MPs have signed an early day motion calling for a Citizens Convention, along the lines of the BC Assembly, to be initiated in the UK. If Gordon Brown wanted to signal a true commitment to a “new politics” he would follow their lead. 

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