A dismal campaign

I have changed my mind during the run-in to the referendum today on introducing single transferable votes in single vacancy constituencies ("alternative voting"). This was not thanks to any arguments put forward by the Yes and No campaigns, but on my own reading, and some reflection on it.

What a dismal campaign it has been, full of half truths and froth. The Yes campaign began with the idea that they were going to win, and thought it only necessary to cement this by buying into the celebrity culture and parading a few half-knowns on their publicity material with platitudes that AV would modernise our politics. The No campaign were considerably more focused at the outset and just fought dirty. I feel a little sorry for the treatment of Nick Clegg in the admittedly well designed material put out recently by the No campaign which did, at last, alight on the main argument against AV, namely that it is more likely to give parties an exit route from their manifesto commitments.

That it should be Chris Huhne who raised this personal attack on Nick Clegg at cabinet on Tuesday adds particularly enjoyable irony, as he has been taking full advantage of Clegg's difficulties by positioning himself to displace him from the leadership of the party and appears already to have acquired and stored away the stiletto which will no doubt in due course be inserted between his colleague's shoulder blades. I have no particular love of the Liberal Party, who seem to me to be often composed of political chancers who are quite happy to hold as many incompatible views concurrently as they feel is necessary to obtain a vote: but nonetheless the way in which Nick Clegg's willingness to go into coalition, as it appears the country wanted after the last election, has been used against him in the campaign does seem somewhat unfair.

Amongst the ludicrous arguments the No campaign have come up with, and some people appear to have been persuaded by, is that AV infringes the principle of one person one vote. This is bogus: instead, AV enables a vote to be transferred from an unsuccessful candidate to one still in the running. It is in effect a more efficient (or at least cheaper) version of a run-off, where voters in an election get a second chance to choose between remaining candidates once the outriders are eliminated. This is indeed the system that the Tory party apply in choosing their leader: if the Tory leadership had been decided on the basis of first preference votes, David Davis would now be Prime Minister - David Cameron only won by picking up second preference votes in the second round. A more plausible argument against AV is that it treats second and third preferences (and so on) as being as valuable as first preferences, but that is true of any run-off system.

If no candidate has an overall majority of first preference votes, it seems to me to be reasonable that the successful candidate should be the least unsatisfactory one, and that is AV's main claim in its favour. It does mean that any MP will be more mindful of the views of all the voters in her constituency and not just concerned with pleasing her core vote as at present.

For election geeks, one last comment: I have read material claiming that AV and single transferable voting are different things. That is not the case. AV is a form of single transferable voting, albeit single transferable voting applied to single vacancy elections rather than multiple vacancy elections - the distinguishing feature of single vacancy STV (that is, AV) is that only the bottom candidates' votes are redistributed on elimination, rather than also those of any initial winning candidates: in single vacancy STV, the count is over once a candidate beats the 50% hurdle. One way of implementing proportional representation (which AV is not) is to apply STV to multi-vacancy constituencies; but there are other well known ways of implementing PR.

The aftermath

What an intriguing election result; the most interesting result which it is possible to imagine. It looks as if the voters have, whether inadvertently or not, given a fine two fingers to the political class.

With the numbers now coming out, neither the Conservatives, nor a LibDem-Lab coalition, could actually achieve a majority government. This means that the only coalition game in town is a Conservative-LibDem coalition. My bet is that that won't happen, because the LibDem's price would be proportional representation in the Commons and the Conservatives are not prepared to offer it, and the LibDem's "triple-lock" would prevent a coalition on any other basis.

Gordon Brown could try to form a coalition of Labour, the Lib Dems, the DUP and/or the SNP and Plaid Cymru, but the bribes payable to the DUP/SNP/Plaid would probably be too high to be acceptable to voters in England, and even if not it would be so unstable as to be unworkable, particularly if the SNP and Plaid Cymru stick to their policy on not voting on England-only matters.

So my bet is a Conservative minority government with a LibDem undertaking for the time being to vote with them, or abstain, at the Queen's Speech and on budget/taxation matters. If the Conservatives are willing to offer the LibDems an elected House of Lords under proportional representation, which they probably are, that may keep it in place into next year, but probably not much beyond that.

If the LibDems are not prepared to agree even that, then the emerging make-up of the House of Commons would prevent any workable government being formed and we can look forward to another election in four weeks' time and a Gordon Brown "caretaker" administration in the meantime. The LibDems almost certainly don't want to take that risk: so big pressure on Nick Clegg.