Tony Page

One single vote has been transferred from NuLabour to the Lib-Dems: mine. Two actually as the wife is no happier with the idea of Tony Page as MP than I am. Tony Page has been selected as candidate for Reading East, replacing the sitting MP, Jane Griffiths. Jane tracked me down when I was on the radio talking about the ludicrous situation with schools around here, and we corresponded fairly frequently while she was my MP. We met for the first time when she invited some of her constituents to her 50th birthday party. Given the imperfect nature of the British Parliamentary system, the best you can really hope for is that your MP will respond to your correspondence, put questions to Ministers if appropriate, and at least acknowledge your point of view if they disagree with it. Jane exceeded all these and was, for me anyway, a model constituency MP. Tony Page has two convictions for gross indecency, the more recent in 1995. To suggest as he apparently does that cottaging was the only available way for gay men to meet in the mid 1990s in Reading is self-evidently absurd. Anyone who raises his convictions is accused of homophobia; to that I say: rubbish. One conviction perhaps is youthful indiscretion. Another, some years later, while seeking to carve out a career in public life, demonstrates a singular lack of judgment. And judgment is a key attribute for an MP. I do not want an MP who has casual sex in station toilets, thanks all the same.

Geeky PR stuff
Few people will be surprised to hear that the massive Labour majorities of the last couple of general elections have been delivered with a minority of the popular vote. It has been calculated that, present voting patterns being maintained, if the two main parties were to poll the same number of votes in 2005 the result would be a 70-seat Labour majority. And of course there have been elections where the party with most seats polled fewer votes than their rivals. Actually it came as a major surprise to me that nearly half the MPs in Britain (32 Tories, 272 Labour including the Speaker, 15 Lib-Dems and 7 others) polled over 50% of the votes cast in their constituency. But that means over half the MPs in Parliament were actively opposed by most of those who turned out to vote. Turnout being what it is, not one single MP in Parliament polled a majority of the electorate in their constituency. Why is this important? Simple. The British system is supposed to be a representative democracy - we elect an MP to represent our views in Parliament. That's one reason why we have the candidates' names on the ballot paper. What happens in practice is that if you live in a safe seat - which most of us do - and you do not agree with the policies of the party which holds that seat, you might as well not bother voting. The inequity is pretty plain. In the 1997 election it took 32,336 votes to elect a Labour MP, 58,199 for a Conservative and 103,590 for an SNP MP. I think Lib-Dems were about the same, I've lost the figure. So far from being representative, the individual MPs who represent most voices nationally have the least voice in parliament. Remember the fuss about the 2000 US election, Florida and Bush polling a minority of the popular vote? Labour, in 1997, polled under 41% of votes cast, only 24% of those eligible to vote. And, remember, 1997 was a landslide - there was a massive popular move to oust a Tory government which was widely seen as sleazy, incompetent, arrogant and out of touch. 1997, the first of only two years I have voted Labour, still saw them winning a massive Parliamentary majority based on less than a quarter of the electorate. So I feel a change is due.

Proportional Representation
Proportional representation - PR - has been talked of for a long time. Its opponents decry it as producing weak government, giving excessive power to minority parties, and usually mention Italy. Italy, of course, is just Italy - and its proportional system has resulted in surprisingly stable Government for a very long time, despite the widely-publicised horse trading after each election. What the anti-PR activists are slightly less forthcoming about is that there are quite a lot of countries not renowned for political instability which use proportional systems. Sweden, for example, and Holland. And Germany. And France, Spain, Finland, Luxembourg... in fact just about every country in Europe apart from, I think, the UK and Liechtenstein.

Transferable Votes
Single transferable vote - STV - is a form of PR which is well suited to the British idea of representative democracy. Broadly speaking the ballot paper is the same, but instead of voting for a single candidate you rank them in order of preference. This may be limited to first, second and third choices for simplicity. You can distribute second and third preference votes in a number of ways, for example by a system of weighting, or by redistributing the ballots of the least-popular candidates in turn until only two remain. This seems to me to be inherently fair. It means that the representative of a constituency will be much more likely to represent the views of the people in that constituency. It might well be that the same person is elected, in fact that's quite likely in a lot of cases. In other cases a constituency where, say a third of the electorate supports each of the three main parties, but Labour and Lib-Dem voters would both prefer not to have a Try MP, might have a different result. More importantly, every seat potentially becomes a marginal. We know from past experience that the main parties are increasingly targeting marginal constituencies almost to the exclusion of safe seats. If you live in a safe seat, the chances are you will not even see a canvasser. Transferable votes could change all that - and with it, provide an incentive for people to get out and vote, because for the first time in their lives every vote will count. Thanks to http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/area/uk/e01/results.htm for doing much of the donkey work on this.