New Times, October 1999
Paul Anderson talks to David Lipsey, journalist turned Labour peer and chair of the campaign for electoral reform for Westminster
“Electoral reform is still an elite issue at this stage,” says David Lipsey, the new chairman of Make Votes Count, the campaign for a more proportional electoral system for the House of Commons. “But at root it’s all about giving power to the people and taking it from the politicians.”
Acting as a figurehead and spokesman for a campaigning pressure group is something of a novelty for Lipsey. But he has been a player in Labour politics for a long time. I’m about as old Labour as you can be while still being new Labour,” he says with a grin. “I’m essentially a Croslandite egalitarian.” His main role to date have been policy adviser, journalist and sympathetic intellectual. He worked as an aide to Labour prime minister James Callaghan between 1977 and 1979, was on the Sunday Times from 1980 to 1986 and edited New Society from 1986 to 1988. After spells on the ill-fated Sunday Correspondent and The Times, in 1992 he became political editor of the Economist, a job he relinquished this year after being given a peerage. It was Lipsey who coined the phrase “new Labour”, in a 1992 Fabian Society pamphlet, The Name of the Rose. In 1997, he was an obvious choice as a member of the Independent Commission on the Voting System, chaired by Lord Jenkins, set up by Tony Blair to come up with a recommendation for an alternative electoral system for the Commons to be put to the country in a referendum.
Lipsey is taking to his new role with Make Votes Count with an almost boyish enthusiasm and some confidence – even though the Westminster rumour-mill has for some months been buzzing with stories to the effect that the Labour leadership has decided to abandon the promised referendum on electoral reform. Immediately after the publication of the Jenkins report electoral reformers were a little over-optimistic about the ease of the task ahead,” he says. “We had come up with an agreed system, which in itself was no mean feat, the press coverage was favourable and most electoral reformers accepted the Jenkins recommendations.
“But anyone could have foreseen that there would then be a very difficult period – first of all because some members of the cabinet were unpersuaded and secondly because of the impact of the new electoral systems for the Scottish parliament, Welsh assembly and European Parliament elections. We live in a very conservative country: people always look for the downside of things. For a variety of reasons, there were a lot of people saying that they didn’t like this very much.”
Lipsey is now optimistic that the campaign to change the electoral system for the Commons can regain momentum. Those first elections are now behind us – and in retrospect, they were an advertisement for changing the electoral system, though I’m not a fan of the closed lists used in the European elections. If the European elections had been held under first-past-the-post, the Tories would have won 15 extra seats, Labour’s representation would have been unchanged and there would have been no seats in the European Parliament for the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. I think the consequence of a result of that kind would have been a wave of rampant anti-Europeanism and headlines in the papers declaring that William Hague had bounced back. It would have been very bad for politics. A minority of people with hostile views on the euro would have been given far more influence than they deserve.
“As far as Scotland is concerned, if the elections there had been fought on first-past-the-post, we’d now be facing a choice between two ghastly options: permanent Labour hegemony, which would reproduce on a larger scale everything that is wrong with politics in the great Scottish cities, or the emergence of the Scottish National Party as the only feasible alternative, with the prospect that it would at some point lead Scotland to independence even though it had the support of less than half the electorate.”
The main priority now, he says, is to make sure that the case for the Jenkins proposals is made loud and clear in the Labour Party and in the Liberal Democrats.
Jenkins recommended a system known as “AV-plus”, under which all voters would have two votes, one for a constituency MP and one for a party. The constituency MPs would be elected by the alternative vote system, in which voters number candidates in order of preference. If nobody won 50 per cent of first preferences, the second preference votes of the candidate with least support would be redistributed to other candidates – and so on until one candidate secured more than half the vote. The party votes would elect up to 132 “top-up” MPs on the basis of proportions of the vote won by parties in 80 sub-regional areas.
Labour is holding a consultation on the Jenkins proposals that lasts until the end of the year, and Make Votes Count is making every effort to ensure that the result is favourable. The consultation is important not only in itself but also because of its influence on MPs,” says Lipsey. “The biggest obstacle to electoral reform has always been the difficulty of getting a bill through parliament. Reform potentially threatens the job of every single MP.”
He is nevertheless convinced that the reform lobby can prevail. There are two key arguments to get across in the Labour Party. The first is the “electoral deserts” argument – in other words, pointing to the way in which so many people live in places where they never get an MP from the party they vote for under the current system. The second, which is even more important, is the “inner cities” argument. Under AV-plus, inner city votes would count once again. Politicians could not afford to concentrate their effort just on a handful of affluent “swing voters” in marginal seats. Already, he says, there is evidence that Labour’s grass roots see the need for change.
What, though, of the prospects of support for electoral reform at the top of the party? Robin Cook, Mo Mowlam and Jack Cunningham are strong supporters of the Jenkins proposals. But John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and Jack Straw are equally strong opponents – and, crucially, the positions of Labour’s two most powerful politicians, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, are unclear.
Lipsey is optimistic about Blair’s position. “He was as warm as anyone could have expected in his response to Jenkins, and -although I don’t have any inside source – I think that he was convinced by the report’s arguments, particularly those on ‘electoral deserts’. I don’t think he’s interested in proportionality as a concept, but neither is the Jenkins report. AV-plus is a more proportional system than the existing one, but proportionality is not the whole story.”
Some have criticised Jenkins precisely because AV-plus is not a genuinely proportional system. Because of the small size of the constituency clusters from which the “top-up” MPs would be elected, they argue, a party winning, say, 15 per cent of the vote across a region would be lucky to win any representation. Although the Lib Dems would benefit from AV-plus, they would not do as well as under a pure PR system – and the Greens and other small parties would be lucky to win any seats.
Lipsey counters this line of argument with characteristic candour. “It is absolutely deliberate that Jenkins isn’t really proportional. It is not an accidental side-effect. Any electoral system has to strike a balance between conflicting interests. Perfect proportionality gives tremendous power to small parties – witness the Free Democrats in the Federal Republic of Germany for most of the post-war period – and makes it very difficult for the people to throw the government out. I think it’s very important that the electorate should be able to cast the rascals out.
“There’s also a Realpolitik argument, which is that real proportionality is not saleable because MPs would not stand for it. I think the best way of making the case for electoral reform is not to say, look, this is a brand new continental import. It has to be sold as an evolution of our traditional British constituency-based electoral system to suit a country that no longer has two-party politics, preserving the best of that system while introducing the best features of other systems.”
Lipsey dismisses the claims of the first-past-the-post lobby that AV-plus would result in permanent coalition government. “If you look at past results, only two elections since 1945 would have had different outcomes under the system recommended by Jenkins. Ted Heath would not have won an overall majority in 1970 and John Major would not have won an overall majority in 1992. Otherwise, the results would have been the same: Labour majorities in 1945, 1950, 1966 and 1997, Tory majorities in 1951, 1955, 1959, 1979, 1983 and 1987, and hung parliaments in 1964 and both 1974 elections.”
Lipsey is an articulate and persuasive advocate. He would make an excellent spokesman for the reform camp during a referendum campaign. At this point, however, the battle is to make sure that the referendum takes place.
