Spiritual Autobiographies: A Newly Catholic Phenomenon?

Daniel Silliman has a very interesting post up on his blog about the phenomenon of Catholic conversion stories, which he sees as being -- in the most part -- something new in the Catholic world, whereas it's a staple of Evangelical self-identification.

There's a lot going on in his post, all of it very interesting, and I think his central point is absolutely right: this is, at least as a popular form, a new phenomenon among Catholics. I wonder how much of it is a result of Vatican II's reminder that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ, and its exhortation that we should read the Bible more. Certainly, there's a level at which this must simply be a response to 1 Peter 3:15's mandate that we should always be willing to say why we believe what we do.

Telling how we became Catholics is something obviously has an ancient pedigree, perhaps most famously in the example of Augustine, and over the last couple of centuries has been echoed in the well-known spiritual autobiographies of such individuals as John Henry Newman, Josephine Bakhita, and Thomas Merton; indeed, it's striking that when Newman was recently beatified it was decided that his feastday would be, not the day of his birth, his baptism, or his death, but the day he entered into full communion with the Catholic Church. There's clearly a place in Catholicism for personal narratives and spiritual journeys, and perhaps even more so in this post-Vatican II world where we think of ourselves just as much as the people of God as we do the Body of Christ. Bearing this in mind, I'd still say that Daniel's right, that as a popular phenomenon it's quite a new thing.

Evangelical Catholics and Catholic Evangelicals
I think he puts his finger on a key issue when he says that Catholic conversion stories are so evangelical, because as far as I can see they tend to be formed in large part by American Evangelical culture: I'd be very curious to know the extent to which this new trend towards Catholic spiritual autobiography is a specifically Anglospheric phenomenon, rather than a universal one.

Certainly, when I think of such prominent contemporary apologists as Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Jimmy Akin, Mark Shea, Peter Kreeft, Dwight Longenecker, Thomas Howard, and Francis Beckwith, all of whose spiritual autobiographies are well-known, it's striking that the common factor in their stories is that they all were Evangelical Protestants who, after years of reading, thinking, and praying, eventually became full members of the Catholic Church -- or, in the case of Francis Beckwith, returned to full communion with the Church. Their stories, in essence, are Evangelical conversion stories, albeit ones that go one step further further.

Their influence in terms of apologetics and their personal examples surely play no small part in the striking growth in this sub-genre, so that nowadays we'll hear of former atheists such as Dawn Eden explaining in quasi-Evangelical terms why they became Catholic, and also of Catholics who'd strayed writing accounts of their reversion to Catholicism.

I have grown somewhat used in recent years to recounting my own reversion to the faith, as I'd been raised Catholic but become ardently atheist in my teens, after much thought and research grudgingly accepting the truth of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular in my early twenties, and only fully returning to communion in my late twenties. I've often over the last year or so also accompanied friends to their Evangelical Anglican church, and chatted with people there afterwards, and when my story's been told it's often been met with the thrilled response: 'That's like C.S. Lewis!'

I think Lewis, with his reluctant conversion and submission, may well be a kind of mentor for this kind of storytelling. Certainly, he's an influence on so many Christians of so many stripes that I don't think we should discount the possibility that Surprised By Joy may influence Catholic self-identification at least as much as any specifically Catholic writer.

I happen to think this is a good thing. One thing lots of those apologists I mention tend to come back to quite often is that denominationalism is perhaps the greatest scandal of the universal Church, and that we must work towards the unity for which Christ prayed. In light of this, they often talk of how, just as they'd believe Evangelicals should become Catholic, so Catholics should become Evangelical. This entails, among other things, a deep familiarity with the Bible as the word of God and the ability to explain to the best of our abilities why we personally hold the hope we do.

What is a Christian?
I would distinguish between what should happen when a Catholic is asked 'why are you a Christian?' and 'why are you a Catholic?'

Catholics don't necessarily see being a Christian as based on what you believe; rather, it's about what you are. Baptism, we believe, is the new circumcision, something that ontologically changes us so that we are adopted into God's family and belong to Christ. In that sense, it's baptism that makes us Christians. In the case of adults we must make a personal confession of faith, but even so, it's not our personal confession that makes us Christians, so much as it is our being baptised. Obviously, Catholics believe in infant baptism, where parents guarantee that they will raise the child in Christ, and on the basis of their faith the child is baptised.

(This, I suppose, is how we can justify baptising those with severe learning disabilities, people who might never be able to confess a faith in Jesus. It's a bit like the paralytic man who's brought to Jesus by his friends, and who Jesus addresses in response to their faith, not his own.)

The point being, that there's a sense that even when I was an atheist I was still a Christian: I had ceased to believe, but I had been sacramentally adopted into God's family, and belonged to Christ regardless of what I did. I suppose it's like the idea of the prodigal son: he may well have scarpered off to a farway land and basically forsaken his family, but that didn't change the fact that he was still part of his family.

As such, if someone asks me why I'm a Christian, I sometimes feel the need to point out that that question has two answers, depending on whether the question is meant sacramentally or intellectually. They usually want an intellectual answer, but I think the sacramental one is more important.

As for why I'm a Catholic, this is easier, in a sense. I left the faith, after all, and I returned; these were acts of will, in accord with reason, all doubtless powered by God's grace. Even so, though, I don't always respond to this question with a personal apologia. Sometimes I answer after the fashion of a friend of mine who used to be Anglican and is now Catholic, saying, in a drily Newmanesque way, that I'm Catholic because I believe in Christ and I believe that the fullness of Christian truth subsists in the Catholic Church. This, of course, invites the question of why I believe that, and depending on the day I can answer with my own story or with an argument rooted in philosophy, history, and Scripture.

Now, I feel Daniel's absolutely right to pick up on the corporate nature of Catholic identity, but I think he misses the mark somewhat when saying that it's not essentially individualistic too. It is. As ever, in the Catholic worldview, there's a both/and mentality at work. We may not talk about our faith as individuals, but we see our faith as both corporate and personal; this is rather neatly expressed in how the Creed, which we recite every Sunday at Mass, summarising our beliefs, while usually beginning in English with 'we believe' in fact begins in Latin with 'I believe'. I'm glad that the new translation shall be restoring the singular pronoun!

Anyway, for most of us who are 'Cradle Catholics' rather than converts, there's still a story there, albeit one that's not dramatic: the question of 'why are you a Catholic?' isn't about why we became Catholic, as why we remain Catholic. Many of us are plagued by doubts and temptations, and yet we remain faithful and hold fast to Christ.

For most of us, being Catholic isn't about one big Pauline choice; it's about thousands of little ones, a constant war of attrition in the battleground of our souls. Even if we have converted to Catholicism, many of us would be uneasy of talking of our conversion, as we never know if we shall eventually fall: we don't know who among us will fail to finish the race.

I think that may be at the heart of the matter. For us, the question isn't about how or why we became Catholic; it's about how and why we remain Catholic, and that, ultimately, is a question about faith: about faith in things unseen, about personal faith in Christ, and about keeping faith with him who keeps faith with us.

Mancunian Myths and the Futility of Fidelity

Lots of the sporting talk in Britain lately has been of the retirement of the football legend that is Paul Scholes, the revelation that Scholes' fellow legend Giggs has feet of clay, and Manchester United's having decisively dethroned Liverpool as the most consistently successful football club in English history.

There's no denying the fact that United's achievement is impressive, and that Giggs and Scholes have been among the most successful players the English game has ever seen, but the praise heaped upon Ferguson's United is sheer hyperbole; they may be legends, but we should be careful how we build our mythologies.


The Myth of the Perch
To take one example, a few weeks back I kept hearing talk on how United had knocked Liverpool off their perch, and how Ferguson had announced back in 1986 on his taking the job of managing United that his ambition was to knock Liverpool off their perch.

Nonsense. Ferguson said nothing of the sort back in '86. Indeed, he has admitted as much, saying just a few weeks ago in the Telegraph that:

'That thing about knocking Liverpool off their perch, I don’t think I actually said that but it’s more important that United are the best team in the country in terms of winning titles.'

What actually happened is that when interviewed by the Guardian back in September 2002, on the day of his 400th game, years after United had supplanted Liverpool as England's preeminent team, Ferguson said that his toughest task as United manager up to that point had been taking Liverpool's place at the pinnacle of the domestic game:

'Ferguson does not seem like a man in a corner. "I don't get paid to panic," Ferguson said. "We have had plenty of stuttering starts." Neither the topics of Juan Sebastian Veron nor Diego Forlan could stir Ferguson into a crimson caricature of his legendary wrath. But Hansen's analysis did. "My greatest challenge is not what's happening at the moment," Ferguson countered, "my greatest challenge was knocking Liverpool right off their fucking perch. And you can print that."'

This, of course, should make perfect sense to anyone who thinks for a minute instead of unthinkingly repeating lazy journalistic claptrap. After all, when Ferguson became manager in 1986, United had just seven League titles to their name, and hadn't won the League since 1967. They were widely regarded as a cup team, unlike Liverpool, which by that point had won the League sixteen times, seven of those victories being in the previous ten seasons. If Ferguson had said that he planned on overtaking Liverpool's record he'd have been locked away.


The Myth of Honest Home-Grown Success
Nobody in 1986 could have predicted what would happen over the next few years, with the development of the Premier League and the Champions' League -- oiled and fed by Sky money -- transforming English football from being a broad competition where a host of teams could plausibly compete for the title, into, in practice, an oligarchic system where a handful of rich teams were guaranteed to hold the top four slots year after year, so that each season began with most clubs knowing that the best they could hope for would be the glorious position of also-rans.

One of the great ironies of modern British sporting analysis is that people too often and too lazily repeat cliches about Blackburn having bought short-lived success, about Chelsea having bought more sustainable success, and about Manchester city trying to buy success; United, it is generally held, did it properly, training up youngsters and earning success the hard way. The conceit, basically, is that United are an honest team, and that the others have merely tried to lie and buy their way to the title.

Obviously, it's blatantly clear that the current United team isn't a home-grown one. We can all see that. Indeed, if we look at the teams that faced off in the Champions' League final on Saturday, we can see that of the thirteen players in the defeated United side, only two came through their youth system, both of them progressing to the senior team almost twenty years ago; even with the club's most expensive ever signing not making the bench, the eleven imported players that took the field cost the club about £130 million. Against that, it's interesting that the Barcelona team that beat United fielded fourteen players, half of whom had come through their own system...

Still, I don't think it's ever been true that United's success in the Ferguson era has been home-grown. There's a figment of truth in this, but when you get down to it it's as nonsensical as the Myth of the Perch. Back in the early nineties United did indeed have a clutch of gifted young players they'd reared from scratch -- the Nevilles, Giggs, Scholes, Butt, and Beckham, but this shouldn't blind us to the fact that United's success was largely bought, and it was bought at exactly the right time.

Ferguson's first years with United were bleak ones, but in the summer of 1989, armed with a uniquely wealthy war-chest, and desperate to turn things around after having come eleventh in the League, without a trophy of any sort in four years and without having won the League since 1967, Alex Ferguson embarked on what was then an unprecedentedly spectacular spending spree. He spent £8 million on five players, the £2.3 million spent on Gary Pallister in August 1989 breaking the national transfer fee, and a further £2.4 million being spent on Paul Ince. The money proved well-spent: United won the FA Cup in 1990, their first trophy since 1985, and Ince and Pallister formed the backbone of the team for the next few years.

With the addition of Denis Irwin to the squad, bought for £625,000 in June 1990, United won the European Cup Winners' Cup in 1991, thereby becoming the first English team to win a European trophy since Everton's victory in the same competition in 1985, just before the Heysel Stadium disaster had led to Mrs Thatcher pressuring the FA to withdraw English clubs  from European competition.

June 1991 saw Manchester United being the first football club floated on the Stock Exchange, raising £6.7 million. The following year, with the squad bolstered by Andrei Kancheskis who had been bought for £650,000 in March 1991 and by Peter Schmeichel who had been bought for £500,000 in August 1991, Manchester United won its first ever League Cup. In August 1992 the club bought Dion Dublin for £1 million and in November 1992, when they were lagging behind Aston Villa and Blackburn, the club also bought Eric Cantona for £1.2 million from League champions Leeds; United went on to win the inaugural Premier League.

Hardly had the Premier League been won that United broke the national transfer record again, buying Roy Keane for £3.75 million from Nottingham Forest, and with him in the team they again won the Premier League and also won the FA Cup, thus earning their first ever Double. Indeed, in the first seven years of the newly lucrative Premier League, Manchester United won the title five times along with three FA Cups and the European Cup, in the popular mindset having done so with the kids Alan Hansen so famously disparaged.

It's true that the likes of  Giggs, Scholes, Beckham, Butt, and the Nevilles all became stars during the 1990s, but the thing is, it's not as if United weren't continuing to buy at the same time. With the money they had from being a PLC, and with the Sky money flowing into them from the Premier League, they bought David May for £1.2 million in 1994, and broke the national transfer record for the second time in less than two years when they bought Andy Cole for £7 million in January 1995. Solskjaer was bought for £1.5 million in July 1996 and in summer 1997, United added Teddy Sheringham to the squad for £3.5 million and broke the national transfer record for a defender by spending £5 million on Henning Berg. The following summer saw even more being spent, with £4.4 million being spent on Jesper Blomqvist, the national transfer record for a defender again being broken when £10.6 million was spent on Jaap Stam, and a further £12.6 million being spent on Dwight Yorke.

And thus the Treble was won. Nine of the thirteen players who played in the UEFA Champions' League final -- including both injury-time goalscorers -- had been bought by United. They hadn't been bought cheaply either: the team that won the FA Cup that year included two players whose transfer fees had broken the national record, and other players who were even more costly but who'd been bought in more expensive seasons.

Since then, of course, the Champions' League has become an absolute goldmine and with the money United made from that they were able to break the national transfer record three times running, spending £19 million on Van Nistelrooy, £28.1 million on Veron, and £29 million on Ferdinand, since going on to spend £25.6 million on Rooney, £14 million on Carrick, £17 million on Hargreaves, £14.7 million on Nani, £17.3 million on Anderson, and £30.75m spent on Berbatov.

Those figures are difficult to substantiate, unfortunately -- this very interesting site gives different figures though reveals the same trend -- but it seems clear that even under the Glazers, despite their fans' refusal to believe otherwise, they've bought six of their ten most expensive ever players. Granted, City and Chelsea have bought, respectively, 14 and 19 players in the price range of United's top ten, but that's largely because they've bought them in the last ten minutes or so, with prices being higher nowadays than even three or four years back. To put this into context, Liverpool have bought seven players in this price range, Spurs have bought five, Arsenal have bought only two, and Everton and Villa have bought just one apiece.

Anyway, it's with such a pricey brigade of players that United have won the the League a further seven times since winning the Treble, along with an FA Cup, three League Cups, and another European trophy.

And none of this gets into the issue of wages, with almost a third of the total Premier League wage bill being accounted for by just three clubs, one of which is United, the others -- predictably -- being Chelsea and City, who are really just spending to try to catch up, just as with their ultra-expensive squads. It's like watching people turning up late at a party when everybody else is already tipsy, and then hammering back the drink to try to match them.

I'm not criticising, as United have been very fortunate in coming good just as football became big business; any other team would envy their luck, their brand name, and how well Ferguson et al have built well on the success they've had. All I'm saying is that the notion that United haven't bought their success is claptrap. They have. They've bought in spades, and they keep buying, and they're going to keep buying, and though some of their purchases haven't paid off, many have.

What does all of this mean?


The Myth of a Competitive League
Well, I said the other day, prior to the Barcelona match, that I hoped United would lose. Not because I take pleasure in my friends' disappointment, as I don't and I would have liked them to be happy, but because I didn't believe it'd do the English game any good for any member of English football's dominant cartel to receive a cash injection of £109 million in order further to enhance its dominance in the English game.

The Premier League, quite simply, isn't as good, as interesting, or as meaningful a competition as the old First Division was. I don't dispute for a moment that the football is better -- I think it probably is, especially given the sheer quality of foreign players that now play in England, albeit at a clear cost to the quality of the English national side. However, if you look back at the last fifty years or so of English football, it's quite clear that over the past fifteen years the English top flight has become a stitch-up.

Don't believe me?

Well, think of what I'm saying, that back in the day pretty much any team could rise to win or at least challenge for the title, but that in recent years the competition has been predictable and stale, with the same teams forming the same hierachy year-in year-out. This is easy to test. All we have to do is look at the top four teams in any given year, and see how many of them had been in the top four the previous year, tracking this back over the decades. I'd pick the top four as I think the Champions' League formalises a top four elite nowadays, and since the difference between fourth and fifth place nowadays can effectively be twenty million pounds or so, which buys you a top-notch player.

Look at the chart.

Interesting, eh? Before 1997 it was typical for two teams from the previous year's top four to make it into the top four; the odd year three teams would make it, and sometimes only one made it, but on balance two would typically retain top-tier positions. Since 1997, though, there hasn't been a year when fewer than three top-four teams from one year made it into the top four spots the following year, and there've been four years when the same four teams had retained their collective position at the pinnacle of English football.

It's worse, though. Only nine teams have won places in the 60 top-four spots that have been available over the past fifteen years, with just four teams having held 52 of those places. To put that into context, eighteen teams -- twice as many -- won places in the previous fifteen years' 60 top-four spots, with the top four teams overall having held just 35 of those places.

What's my point?

English football's top flight has become a rigged game, where victory is pretty much guaranteed to one of a handful of foreign-owned superwealthy clubs, those clubs that feed at the Golden Trough of the Champions' League. Victory in the Football League had long been dependent on cash, but even so that cash was more evenly spread about than it's been since the rise of the Premier League. The prize money -- especially from the Champions' League -- is such as to enable teams that do well to guarantee that they'll do well henceforth, so that success is rewarded with cash and cash buys further success.

United have won their nineteenth title. They'll win their twentieth in a year or two. It won't mean much, though. It'll be a victory in an unofficial mini-league, informally nestling at the top of a bigger and messier one. I hate to say it, but Liverpool's eighteen titles all mattered more. The League was a real competition then. Winning was more romantic, and being beaten didn't mean being vanquished: teams could lose, and regroup, and come back in the real hope of triumph. That doesn't happen anymore.


On Love and Loyalty
I still support Everton, of course, even though I do not believe she will ever win the League again, unless she's bought as a rich man's toy, as Chelsea and Manchester City have been.

That's the nature of love and of loyalty: we may admire things and people for what they can do, but we love them for who and what they are, for that royal blue strip, that church in the corner of the ground and pillars we've to crane around, that statue of Bill Dean, that fleeting moment when I was a little boy and Everton might have been the best team in Europe, my brother being at the other semi-final and a city mourning together, a battered schoolbag bearing the badge and the teasing it brought, a sense of secret fellowship with those few Dubliners I'd meet who supported a team that didn't wear red, years of squandered promise and too frequent a survival by the skin of our teeth, the occasional magnificent performance, too much mediocre dross to mention, going to my first match on the day I was persuaded to move to England, bitterness boiling over when playing our offshoot and oldest rival, quiet calm appraisal from the stands in match after match, wry head-shaking with family and friends and people who could be either in the pub afterwards, a friend trying to hide her pleasure at her first top-flight game as her team demolished mine, a cousin grabbing and shaking my shoulders in a frenzy of delight as Everton turned the tables with rare style, the smug pleasure in establishing that Everton are my local team with their ground being the closest Premier League ground to my home in Dublin, and decade after decade of family fidelity.

I don't support Everton because she's good. I support her because she's Everton. My blood's blue.

Chesterton nailed this idea of attachment, talking once of Kipling's lack of true patriotism:

'The great gap in his mind is what may be roughly called the lack of patriotism -- that is to say, he lacks altogether the faculty of attaching himself to any cause or community finally and tragically; for all finality must be tragic. He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English.'

I like Arsenal because they play more creative football than any other team in England and because even when their rivals at the top splash money around like there's no bubble waiting to burst tomorrow they spend sensibly; but while I admire their elegance and their prudence, I don't love them. I freely recognise that United are the best team in England, though I'm suspicious of their fans, as there are too many of them who have never known anything but success; I often wonder how deep their loyalty runs, and whether they'd fly to another team if United's sun were to set. Certainly, I suspect the future may belong to Manchester City, who are only too frank in admitting that they'll soon be acquiring their own legions of gloryhunters, all too keen to contribute to City's coffers, and I'll doubt their new fans too. I'm highly dubious about Chelsea ones too, not least because so many of them are recent converts, lured by cash-fuelled success.

While I wouldn't go so far as to embrace claims that the followers of the most successful English football teams are more likely to be unfaithful to their partners and spouses than those who follow less successful teams, I do wonder whether if a person's loyal in one aspect of his or her life, he or she's likely to be loyal in other areas. Terry Leahy, Tesco's erstwhile CEO, had a mantra that said he believed in 'one religion, one football team, one wife, one firm'. Taken at face value, that's obviously facile and trite, but I suspect he had a point. Certainly, people who support teams that look destined never to succeed must be the sort of people who stick by those they love through thick and thin.

If there's a moral to this story, it's that United's success is real but not as glorious as it might look, and that you should never marry a Chelsea fan.  Against that, a friend of mine married a Blackburn fan a couple of years back. I tend to think that'll prove a wise move in the long run, as a man who's supported Blackburn over the last decade is  clearly a man of unshakeable faith. I think theirs shall prove a long and happy marriage.

AV 7: Seven Simple Reasons

Contrary to the claims of the NO2AV crowd, including David Cameron, we use AV in Ireland, so I know what I'm talking about on this one. I'm not dependent on a febrile imagination to conjure up spectres of what AV would mean. I know what AV means.

I've voted in the AV elections that made Mary McAleese President of Ireland and Brian Lenihan Jr TD for Dublin West. I've also voted in more than a few PR-STV elections. I'm well-used to preferential voting when it matters. I'm used to transferable votes. I've seen my first-choice candidates elected and my second-choice candidates elected, and I've at least twice seen my vote die without any of my candidates getting elected. I've voted in five different voting systems and I've never felt my vote as futile as in FPTP.

FPTP in Britain has become a system where more people vote for losing candidates than for winning ones, where most people are represented by people for whom they did not vote.

Simply put, then, in any given contest AV will produce a result more reflective of the popular will than FPTP. Voters don't need to worry about squandering their vote on a loser or compromising their principles by voting for people they don't like. Under AV, you can vote for your favorite candidate but if your first choice comes in third place or worse, you still have a say on who wins a contest between the major parties.

AV could empower British voters like never before.

AV is a simple, elegant system, and for all the hyperbolic claims made by misguided Yes campaigners, and despite the misleading claims by No campaigners who say they can't understand a system fully understood by even the simplest voter in Ireland, I think there are seven straightforward reasons why we should vote for AV today, two more certain than the rest.

• AV would ensure elected representatives represent most of the people they represent.
• AV would allow people to vote honestly and transparently, without wasting their votes.
• AV might boost voting turnout, thereby giving new life to a moribund system.
• AV might lead to fresh thinking in how people approach politics.
• AV might perhaps lead MPs to work harder.
• AV might perhaps go some way towards getting rid of safe seats.
• AV might break the traditional duopoly of power.

This isn't about Cameron, or Clegg, or the BNP. This is much bigger than that. It's very simple, really. If you want your voice to mean something, and if you want your representative to represent you, then you should vote for AV.

AV 6: AV again, a Personal Explanation

Sigh.

I had planned to do just one more AV post, but a friendly Troll has claimed that I haven't really tendered any arguments as to why AV is better than FPTP, or responded to any points on why it is flawed. I guess this means he hasn't been reading these posts, but still, in small words, here goes.

Firstly, in emulation of one of my friends, but at greater length, why have I become so convinced on the need for voting reform here?

 

 

March 2005

Back on my old blog I wrote in March 2005:

'... in this de facto two-party system, lots of people perceive votes for any party other than Labour and the Tories to be squandered.

It always strikes me as funny that in the supposed interests of "electoral reform", Labour have tinkered with the House of Lords. Surely a more honest interest in reform would involve changing the electoral system so that the composition of the Commons more accurately reflected the will of the people.

 

I mean seriously, think about it. In 2001, Labour got 40.7% of the popular vote, the Tories managed 31.7%, the Lid Dems earned 18.3%, and the rest garnered 9.3%. You might expect then that the Commons should break down, more or less, along the general lines of: Labour 268 seats, the Tories 209, the Lib Dems 120, and the others 61.

 

But no, despite only having 40.7% of the popular vote, thanks to the 'First Past the Post' system, Labour took 412 out 659 seats. That's 62.5%, a huge majority. In other words, the country is run according to the wishes of two-fifths of the country's voters. And 2001 was no fluke, in that regard. As a rule, all you need is around 40% of the vote and the right geographic spread to be guaranteed to rule the country despite three-fifths of the population having voted against you. Take a look at the previous few elections -

• 1997 - Labour get 63.6% majority, with just 43.2% of the vote
• 1992 - Tories get 51.6% mahority, with just 41.9% of the vote
• 1987 - Tories get 57.9% majority, with just 42.2% of the vote
• 1983 - Tories get 61.1% majority, with just 42.4% of the vote
• 1979 - Tories get 53.4% majority, with just 43.9% of the vote
• 1974 - Labour get 50.2% majority, with just 39.2% of the vote

Um, and earlier in 1974 Labour managed a minority government with 47.4% of seats, slightly more than the Tories, despite having wangled, at 37.1% of the vote, a smaller share of the vote than the Tories.

 

I'm not going to get into issues of turn-out, since with only 59.4% of eligible votes having cast their votes last time, you could argue that Labour are in government with the support of only 24% of the population. That argument has no ending, and if people don't show up when decisions are being made then they have to live with the consequences.

 

On the other hand, maybe if the U.K. adopted some kind of a Proportional Representation system, people might be more willing to vote. After all, there might be more of an incentive to vote if they thought their votes actually meant something.'

The whole thing bothered me. But what happened a couple of months later bothered me more.

May 2005

I voted Labour in the general election that year -- or rather, I voted for Gerald Kaufman, who I like, and who was most definitely no Blairite. He won comfortably in Manchester Gorton, getting 53.2% of the meagre vote there. However, as I blogged in the immediate aftermath of the election, I wasn't happy with the national picture.

'Well, it seems as though the election's gone according to predictions, with Labour's 35.2 per cent getting them 365 seats, the Tories' 32.3 per cent earning them 197 seats, and the Lib Dems' 22 per cent only fetching them a mere 62 seats. It's the best result they've had since the 1920s, but still, it's a bit naff really.

 

But then, that's what happens when you've single-seat constuencies and a first-past-the-post system. Labour's 35.2 per cent of the vote somehow translates into almost 57 per cent of parliamentary seats, the Tories' 32.3 per cent manifested itself as just over 30 per cent of seats, while the Lib Dems' healthy 22 per cent converted into less than 10 per cent of seats in the Commons. It's democracy, folks, Jim, But not as we know it.

 

Of course, I've talked about this before. I find it funny, looking at these figures, to think of all those pundits claiming that the British people have spoken to the effect that what they wanted was Labour to stay in power, but with a greatly reduced majority. Er, really? It does seem to me that only slightly more than a third of them actually wanted a Labour government enough to vote for Labour. After all, Blair has somehow manage to get a far healthier majority than John Major did in 1992, albeit with a much smaller share of the vote.'

I grimly decided that the only way I could vote in conscience after this was in favour of the Liberal Democrats. It wasn't that I was a Lib Dem: it was simply that I believe they were the only party that would deliver voting reform. I didn't care in the least about the purity of their motives. I just didn't want my team to win because the rules of the game were rigged in their favour.

Electoral Reform in Britain

One of the things that fascinated me was how new the current British system, where each voter has only one vote and is linked to just one MP, really only dates back to 1948. Sure, the guts of the system had been in place since 1884, but even so, plural voting -- where people linked with universities or owning property could vote in more than one constituency -- was only abolished in 1948, and not once since then had any government been elected with the support of a majority of voters. Indeed, there'd been a few weird results, like 1951 when more people voted Labour than voted Conservative and yet the Conservatives won more seats, or February 1974 when more people voted Conservative than voted Labour yet Labour won more seats, or 1983 when Labour and the Liberals got 53% of the vote and little more than 35% of the seats... It really looked as though 2005 was no anomaly.

Indeed, it seemed you had to go back to 1931 to see an occasion when any single party had received a majority of the votes cast. The Conservatives that year received 55% of the votes and were thus awarded a whopping 76.4% of the seats.

Perhaps not surprisingly, they took advantage of the situation and killed a bill that had been working its way through Parliament. In February 1931, the Commons had voted by 295 to 230 to replace the FPTP voting system with a system of transferable preferential voting, called Alternate Voting, or AV. A Royal Commission carried out a couple of decades earlier had recognised that FPTP was not fit for purpose in a system where there was more than two political parties, and had recommended that AV be introduced instead. Of course, these things take time, but eventually the 1931 bill had got bogged down in the Lords, but had looked set to become law when the government fell. Of course, knowing it might harm them, and determined to maintain their position in charge of Britain, the Conservatives knocked that bill on the head.

This was, of course, the context of Churchill's oft-quoted line about AV being a system determined by

"the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates".

This was back in the inter-war period when he was in favour of machine-gunning striking workers, gassing rebellious Arabs, and admiring Hitler's patriotic achievements. Not the greatest phase in his life, the inter-war period. For all that, though, back when the Royal Commission was doing its work, Churchill had openly recognised the failings of FPTP, saying,

"the present system has clearly broken down. The results produced are not fair to any party, nor to any section of the community . . . All they secure is fluke representation, freak representation, capricious representation."

Perhaps the most telling point was that he recognised that the problem was that the system as it stood was not fair to any section of the community. That was the issue. Parties have no standing in the British constitution, but the British people do. We shouldn't care in the least about what's fair for Labour, the Conservatives, the Lib Dems, the Greens, or whoever. But we should care about what's fair for British people, because they all have to live with the consequences of whatever their elected representatives decide.

Once in government in 1997, Labour commissioned the Jenkins Report into electoral reform, which recognised -- as had the Plant Report of a decade or so earlier and as had the Royal Commission of 1910 -- just how unrepresentative the current system was. Whereas the Royal Commission and the Plant Report had both recommended the relatively minor change to an AV system, Jenkins advocated a change to AV+, which would have entailed most MPs being elected by AV, with some -- perhaps a hundred or so -- being elected from a single national constituency on a proportional basis. The Liberal fantasy of a fully proportional system was dismissed as impractical if the constituency link between citizens and representatives was to be maintained.

A Technical Problem

Democracy is a lot of things, but one of them is, at least in theory, a political system where the people have power. Not a few people, not the best people, not the worst people, not the richest people, not the cleverest people, and not one person. The people.

Our polities being as large as they are, it's just not practical for us to legislate directly, so our democracy is an indirect one, of a sort that might be more accurately termed a representative oligarchy. So be it. The challenge for us is how best to choose our representatives. There's no right system, and no wrong one, but that doesn't mean that some might be better or worse than others.

General elections allow us to choose our representative assemblies, and it is, I think, reasonable to assume that these assemblies be as representative as possible. In this respect, the current British system is spectacularly unsuccessful, as it regularly allows minorities to rule the majority.

Yes, I realise that British system doesn't work around a single national constituency, instead being based on hundreds of constituencies, to such an extent that a general election is really just lots of simultaneous local elections. It works that way in Ireland too, so that by this stage I've voted eleven times in Parliamentary elections, using four different systems to send representatives to Dublin, London, and Brussels-Strasbourg.

So the British system allows minorities to rule as though they have a popular mandate, and to do so despite sometimes having nothing of the sort. Indeed, the British system is such that most people in Britain vote for a candidate who loses. This wasn't the way back in the 1950s, when pretty much everybody voted Conservative or Labour, and it wasn't the way back in the 1880s, when Ireland aside pretty much everybody voted Conservative or Liberal.

  

But it's the way things have been for the last thirty years, just as it was between 1918 and 1931. More people vote for candidates who lose than for candidates who win. Most people don't vote for the people who represent them.

This, I would think all fair-minded people should agree, is not a good situation. Elections aren't about winners and losers: they're about choosing parliaments, those parliaments being representative of the nation. There should only be one winner in a general election, that being the people as a whole, and the people only win if their voice is accurately represented.

As things stand, huge numbers of British voters go unheard. Lots more don't even bother to vote, and given the way things are, I don't blame them. The game is rigged; why should they play?

 

May 2010

Obviously, I voted Lib Dem in the last election. Not because I am a Lib Dem, despite my housemate's teasing, but just because I believed they were the only party really willing to reform the system. I was convinced the system was utterly bankrupt. I'd voted in elections under four different systems -- FPTP, PR-STV, AV, and PR-D'Hondt -- and never once felt as disempowered as under First Past The Post. In 2005 there wasn't much point in voting, as I was rightly confident the Labour candidate I supported would be elected, and in 2010 there wasn't much point in voting as I was rightly confident the Conservative candidate I most definitely didn't support would be elected; given that in both occasions the incumbents had had majorities of more than 11,000 votes in the previous election, you can probably grasp my thinking.

The 2010 election led to the kind of result one would expect: a parliament in which no one party had a majority, which was at least reflective of the popular will, but the Conservatives and Labour getting a rather higher share of the Parliamentary seats than they had received of the national vote, and the Liberals, despite getting their highest share of the vote in decades, actually losing seats. The system, of course, didn't work, and so the haggling began.

The Lib Dems' price for coalition with either of the bigger parties was obviously going to be voting reform, and they wanted PR. I think we can confidently assume they said this in whatever negotiations they engaged in. Labour, which was hardly in a position to lead a rainbow coalition government anyway, offered a referendum on replacing FPTP with AV. As this was already in Labour's manifesto, and didn't reflect any movement on the part of Labour, this was dismissed by the Lib Dems as a miserable little compromise; only movement to the halfway house of AV+ would have been a real compromise. The Conservatives offered a similar referendum to the Lib Dems, and recognising this as an apparently genuine compromise, a movement from their previous position of FPTP, the Lib Dems accepted this.

I was happy enough with that myself at the time. The Conservatives would vote for the Referendum in Parliament, but when the referendum came around they'd be free to campaign on an individual basis against any change. Such, at least, was the impression we were given. There was no suggestion that the Conservative party would campaign, as a party, against the very referendum it had agreed to legislate for.

Of course, this was before the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Foreign Secretary all publicly condemned the proposals, of course. This was before the Lib Dem leader's comment on Labour's negotiating stance was publicly misconstrued as being his opinion of AV. This was before local branch after local branch of the Conservative Party across the land began campaigning against change. This was before the Conservative Party's homepage would feature in pride of place huge banners saying that AV was un-British and should be rejected. This was before a host of Conservative Party donors, keen to keep their party in power, poured money into the NO2AV Campaign, to an extent where everyone with a brain in his or her head can see that it is no more than a Conservative front, bolstered by a few old Blairites and the BNP.

An Imperfect Solution?

I don't think AV is perfect. I'd like to see a PR-STV system here, but I think Jenkins was right; it'd probably be unwieldy. Given that, then, I'd most like to see AV+ introduced, but as that may be a while off, I'd be happy with AV. It'd be a huge improvement.

It might not change the overall results. It might not make MPs work harder. I might not get rid of safe seats. It might not destroy the traditional binary dominance of the Tories and Labour. But it might do these things.

It'd do more than that, though.

It would force candidates to reach out to gain the support of the majority of the people they'd represent. As things stand, there are constituencies where MPs are elected with the support of fewer than a third of voters. This is hardly surprising when there are constituencies with four credible candidates. Frankly, a quarter of the vote would do the trick. What would happen if there were more than that? If there were ten credible candidates, it'd be easy to imagine a candidate elected with a tenth of the vote. FPTP allows that to happen. AV doesn't. In AV a candidate isn't deemed elected unless he or she has the support of half or more voters in the final decisive count.

(It's basically like a Conservative leadership election in that regard: there are several counts with everybody's vote being counted each time, the weakest candidates are elected in sequence so that their supporters are given an opportunity of shifting their support to another candidate, and the candidates who gets the most first-preference votes isn't necessarily the winner, as noted here. And yet they argue it's too complex to understand. I wonder why.)

In short, it'd mean that most people would have voted for winning candidates than for losing ones. This'd be a huge improvement. And yes, I know that plenty of candidates would have depended on people's second choices and maybe even some third choices to get elected, but do you really think that's any different to now? After all, plenty of people nowadays would like to vote for a candidate that they know doesn't have a hope, and, rather than cast a Quixotic vote, instead vote for their second-choice candidate. Or their third-choice one. Very few people, after all, treat political parties like football teams, to be cheered on at all times, with all other parties being equally scorned. Most people recognise a spectrum of political options.

AV would allow people to vote honestly and openly, without feeling obliged to second-guess the outcome and instead to vote for somebody they don't support most. It would allow Eurosceptic Conservatives to express a primary preference for UKIP candidates in the confidence that their vote would return, unwasted, into the Tory fold. It would allow Scottish Conservatives to have a meaningful say in Scottish elections, so that they could express their Conservativism and then do whatever was necessary to stop the candidate or party they most deeply opposed. It would allow Liberal voters to vote Lib Dem without fearing they'd be splitting the progressive vote and letting a reactionary candidate in. It would allow all manner of people to express a preference for the Greens, to show the bigger parties that environmental issues need to be accounted for.

With voting being more meaningful than under the charade FPTP has become, it might encourage people to vote who have basically given up on the system as it stands.

Finally, the introduction of AV could lead to a decommissioning of mindsets, so that people realise that voting systems aren't sancrosancy, and can be adjusted and fine-tuned, depending on what end we have in mind. If people liked it, they could keep it. If they liked it and felt it could be improved, they could introduce AV+ or PR-STV. If people didn't like it, they could always go back to FPTP. This isn't a bed we make and have to lie in. This is a bed we can make as often as we like.

Five Key Reasons

There you go, so. Five reasons, in the end, in declining order of importance:

1. AV would ensure elected representatives represent most of the people they represent.
2. AV would allow people to vote honestly and transparently, without wasting their votes.
3. AV might boost voting turnout, thereby giving new life to a moribund system.
4. AV might lead to fresh thinking in how people approach politics.
5. AV might perhaps lead MPs to work harder, get rid of safe seats, and break the traditional duopoly of power.

It's a simple system, really, one that I learned in one English class in school when I was fifteen. Most Irish elections are held under a PR-STV system, but whenever there's just one position at stake -- a single parliamentary seat, say, or the national Presidency -- then we use AV. It's very simple. Our second preferences are meaningful, and our third ones are too, and if we're really bloody-minded about things, we know how to use our votes to utterly gut parties we dislike a lot. We did it to Fianna Fail a couple of months ago. If you wanted, in Britain, you could keep the BNP down for as long as you wanted. No wonder they're opposed to AV -- they're basically the definition of transfer-repellant.

After I've voted, I shall grumble about how the referendum's almost certainly been vitiated by the conduct of the No campaigners. But that's for tomorrow.

 

For now, if you still think it all sounds complicated, let Dan Snow explain it:

AV 5: AV - An Almost Penultimate Rant, wondering about one of the biggest lies in the No Campaign

Some weeks back, Bec told me that if I went beyond ten posts on the AV Referendum we'd have to have words. By that point, of course, I'd written four notes on the subject, more if you go back further.

I'm afraid I've not posted since, instead being busy and occasionally watching in dismay as the whole referendum process was being corrupted by the No2AV campaign. I really think the outcome has almost certainly been vitiated at this point, and that the whole idea of referendums in this country has been hugely discredited by the conduct of the No2AV campaign.

I started to write a note once, about a recent study for a Tory Think Tank, trumpeted on Conservative Home*, claiming that the version of AV being proposed here is so strange and obtuse it's only ever used in local elections in New South Wales and Queensland. The study carried on to reach conclusions based on the last two elections there, as though that was a valid sample, oblivious to the fact that these aren't the only places in the world where Optional Preference Voting is used.

A Mysterious Silence

Yes, it's used in Ireland. We use it in Presidential elections and in parliamentary elections where there's only one seat at stake in a constituency:

Why on earth do you think the No2AV campaign is so keen to suppress the fact that AV is used in the only country in the world which you don't have to cross a sea to get to from the UK? Why do you think the No2AV people hush up the fact that AV is used in the only country you can walk to from the UK? Why do you think that the No2AV people hide the fact that AV is used in the country in which almost a million of Britain's current residents were born, a country which -- Britain aside -- was the birthplace of more residents of Britain than any other, every single one of whom is eligible to be on the British electoral register and to vote in this referendum?

• Do you think it's because the No2AV campaigners are ignorant and don't realise this? It's possible, I suppose. Certainly, given how George Osborne was claiming just four years ago that the British economy should be run on Irish lines, it does seem that the Tory high command aren't very clued in on political and economic realities outside their front doors...
• Or do you think it's because they're stupid and don't understand what transferable voting actually is? Certainly, I know someone who's been ardently opposed to AV ever since he was told to be -- you can watch him in the background of the No2AV mob here -- but who had to ask me the other week what AV had to do with transferable voting...
• Or do you think it might just be because they know full well that if British people realised that Irish people are very familiar with transferable voting, not least the version of it technically called Optional Preference Voting but known here as Alternative Voting, then they'd be able to seek the opinions of the many people here who actually know how the system works in practice, rather than relying on Tory fantasies of 'can you imagine what would happen?'

 We don't need to imagine. We can talk to people who are used to this in reality, and we can look at the facts of election campaigns -- I happen to think the Irish 1997 Presidential Election Campaign would be a pretty close template for how a typical British constituency vote would go under an AV system. I wish I'd written a post on that, but I fear that bird has flown. Still, you can look it up on Wikipedia. 

Another Irishman's View

Jason O'Mahony, a one-time unsuccessful Progressive Democrat -- that's economically centre-right, for British readers -- electoral candidate at home, wrote on this to good effect the other week, advising that British people should actually listen to people who've used transferable voting before deciding whether they approve of it or not.

Much more gifted as a pundit than he was successful as a politician, O'Mahony's been following the debate here in, frankly, complete disbelief. He's written at least five posts on the topic, all of which would definitely repay reading, for any of you who's not yet made up your mind on AV or for any of you who have but are even notionally open to the possibility that you might be wrong.

1. For my British readers: AV is the voting system for non-fanatics

2. Some Tories and Labour would honestly prefer each other in government to AV? Really?

3. Before you vote on AV, ask someone who has used it

4. AV: Tories and Eurosceptics are people too

5. For my British readers: AV lets you choose from the whole menu

The first of the posts, for instance, comments on how surreal he finds the debate here, drily observes the weakness of the argument that First Past the Post should be retained as it's the only way the Conservatives can thwart the will of the British people, notes how the No side seem to be shutting down their brain functions in this debate and convincing themselves that transferable voting is terribly complicated, and makes one very perceptive point about the nature of the debate.

'One thing that has struck me has been that one’s attitude to AV is shaped by one’s attitude to politics, and I don’t mean left wing or right wing.

...

There’s a common theme running through the anti-AV campaign, and it’s this: You are only allowed think about politics the way professional politicians thinkabout it. You should love one party unconditionally, and hate every other party vociferously.

Of course, that’s not how most people think. Most people have a tendency towards one party over others, but also don’t mind some other parties, have no opinion on others and really dislike one or two. UKIP voters feel differently about the Conservatives than they do about the Lib Dems. Even Conservative and Labour voters, the two traditional enemies, probably are more well-disposed, generally, towards each other than the BNP. It’s like going into a restuarant. If they don’t have your favourite dish, you make a second choice. You don’t storm out and go hungry. Yet that is how anti-AV people seem to think.

In Ireland we use AV in presidential and by-elections. We don’t need special voting machines, we don’t have mass panic trying to understand the ballot paper or voting or counting. Our parliament is elected under a different system that uses the exact same ballot paper, and people vote in the same way. Is there chaos and confusion? No.

There is, however, one difference between British and Irish politics, or at least it appears that way to me.

In Ireland, our politicians, elected under a preferential voting system, seem to be much more afraid of us, the voters, than British politicians are afraid of British voters. Personally, I think that’s a good thing. But I can understand why the professional politicians opposed to AV would think otherwise.'

You should read what he has to say. And then you should vote Yes, unless you like your country being ruled by a minority. To be fair, you might like that, of course. Because, you know, maybe you think that real democracy is government of the people, by some of the people, for a few of the people. And if so, you should vote to keep the current system, even though more than a hundred years have passed since a Royal Commission on Electoral Reform found that it was no longer fit for purpose and should be replaced with AV.

_________________________________

* This post if you're interested. You shouldn't be. The guy who did the 'research' should be sacked.

AV 4: AV yet again, Or Counting's Not Hard: A Simple Real-World Example

It seems pretty clear that there are lots of people out there who, even if they can grasp the mechanics of voting in AV, nonetheless have issues with how the counting system works.

AV Voting is pretty simple, of course: instead of the current British system where you put an X for the only person you want to represent you, and let's use the word 'want' loosely, leaving aside issues of second-guessing and tactical voting, in AV you put a '1' next to the candidate you'd most like to see represent you, and if you so wish, a '2' next to the one you'd next most like, and so on. It's the same process that says 'I'd like a ginger beer, please, but if that's not possible I'd like an orange juice.'

What of counting? People seem to think it's horribly complicated, even though the Irish and the Australians find it fairly straightforward. Well, let's take a simple real-world example of AV in action, and look at the 1990 Irish Presidential election*, as that's about as simple an instance of AV as you're ever likely to see. I was in school at the time, and we did a mock class election to learn how this worked. I've understood the system since.

There were three candidates. Fianna Fáil's Brian Lenihan -- the deputy prime minister -- and Fine Gael's Austin Currie both ran as centrist figures, put forward by the two traditional centrist parties. Mary Robinson, an independent, ran with the support of the Labour Party; anything but a bland centrist, Robinson was an eminent liberal, who had campaigned back in the seventies for the legal availability of artificial contraception and who worked as a legal advisor for the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform. She was about as polarising a character as one could get in Irish politics back in 1990.**

When the election was held, Lenihan received the highest share of first preferences, with 44.1%, Robinson coming second with 38.8%, and Currie coming third with 17%.

Now, the problem with this is that all three candidates received a minority of votes. Not one of them had received a direct and explicit mandate from the majority of voters.

Currie, as the recipient of the fewest votes, was eliminated so that his votes could be redistributed. It turned out that while a few Currie voters had expressed a secondary preference for Lenihan, and about half that number had taken the view that it was Currie or nothing, the vast majority of people who had voted for Currie had expressed a secondary preference for Robinson.

The end result of this was that Robinson won in the decisive final count, with 51.93% of the poll, Lenihan coming second with 46.44%.

Like I've said, this is basically how I learned how transferable voting works. We held a mock election in English class, of all places, with us being asked who we wanted to win, and with the class roughly breaking down along what would be the national line: three minorities, with Lenihan supporters being the largest minority and Currie ones being the smallest, and then almost all of the Currie voters switching their allegiance to Robinson.

Before you ask, yes, I was a schoolboy would-be Currie voter. And I was one of the ones who switched to Robinson. Was she my first choice? No. Was I happy with her? Yes.

If you're good, I'll talk about the 1997 Presidential election soon. That's a little bit more complex, with more candidates, and probably a better guide for how AV would be likely to play in a typical British parliamentary constituency. But still, the principle's the same.

___________________________________________________________

* Yes, Ireland. Because despite the lies that even the Guardian seems to be swallowing, AV isn't something that's only used in Australia, Fiji, and Papua-New Guinea.

** Because preferential voting systems don't inevitably lead to bland centrists getting elected, despite what you'll read in the Spectator, the Mail, the Telegraph, and on ConHome.

AV 3: AV yet again, or why archers should practice on live targets rather than straw men

Sigh.

There's a piece on Conservative Home which a friend of mine rather extravagantly pointed to yesterday, billing it as 'a comprehensive case against the introduction of AV by statistician Graeme Archer PhD'.

It's a  slightly different approach to the three standard ones for opponents of voting reform, those being, of course:

• I'm opposed to voting reform for a whole host of reasons all which are demonstrably false, such as lies about which countries use AV or lies about people having more than one vote under AV or lies about the cost of introducing AV.
• I'm opposed to voting reform because only first past the post produces strong candidates rather than bland ones, though it's best not to ask why my party doesn't use first past the post in its internal selection processes.
• I'm opposed to voting reform as the current system is good for my party and is therefore, by implication, good for the country.

The second point is, I think, the only anti-AV argument that has any real merit, being capable of being maintained sincerely and without cynicism, but I think it ignores real-world evidence and invites some very serious questions. This point rears its head in Archer's article, but his argument is somewhat different. Instead he goes for smoke and mirrors, wheeling out some of the more absurd and unusual claims people have sometimes made for voting reform, and then attacking them as though they're the main arguments.

Before loosing his volley against his artfully-arranged battalion of straw men, Archer starts his article with the ostensibly reasonable observation that:

'The likely anti-Conservative outcome of an AV election wouldn't matter, of course, if the AV algorithm were capable of delivering a fair outcome.'

Why does everyone automatically assume that an AV election would lead to an anti-Conservative result? It might, sure, but given that the Lib Dems, not long ago regarded as the most left-wing of the major parties, are in government the Conservatives, doesn't it rather look as though anything might be possible? Why assume everyone hates the Conservatives? Or course, if everybody does then they probably shouldn't be in government, because I don't think democracy is about allowing a minority to dictate to a majority. Still, I think the basic thesis is wrong.

  

Straw Man No. 1: AV will end safe seats

Archer says it won't, because around a third of seats can be called 'safe', and will continue to be so under any reasonable electoral algorithm. I presume he's talking about the fact that a third of MPs are elected with the support of most of their constituents, and that this is unlikely to change. I'm inclined to agree, albeit with the proviso that nobody knows for certain. After all, in such 'safe' seats, people who might be inclined to vote against incumbents may nowadays simply not vote, thinking there's no point in their voting: AV may actually encourage them to vote.

The key issue, which Archer should be aiming at if he was interested in, well, accuracy, would be that AV would end precarious seats. You know, like Brighton Pavilion and Norwich South, where MPs can be elected with less than a third of the vote. Where more than twice as many people vote for losing candidates than for winning ones. It's odd that he doesn't address this, and given that he doesn't do so, I don't really think he can be said to be comprehensively addressing anything.

  

Straw Man No. 2: AV will make candidates work harder...

Archer doesn't so much demolish this claim as rephrase it, saying 'a candidate will have to appeal to people who don't want to vote for him', and then fail to refute it at all. Indeed, all he manages to do here is basically to say 'imagine what would happen under AV - nobody would say controversial stuff in case it might scare off transfers'. It's disappointing that he just relies on imagination here, rather than looks at real-world evidence for how politicians appeal for transfers in countries with electoral systems based on transferable votes.

He could just look as far as Ireland, say, and ask whether of the current crop of new TDs -- let's just say Gerry Adams, Shane Ross, Luke 'Ming' Flanagan, Richard Boyd Barrett, or Stephen Donnelly-- are really examples of candidates smoothing out their message to get transfers? Could any of them be described as a bland non-entity? Just google them to find out what they're like. Or Joe Higgins, say, who I remember running and coming very close to winning in an AV race in my constituency once upon a time...

Straw Man No. 3: ... by aiming for 50% of the vote

I don't think the issue is that AV requires candidates to aim for 50% of the vote; rather, it requires them to get 50% of the vote, or more precisely 50% of the vote in the only decisive round of counting. The important thing is that it's not about what candidates aim for, so much as what they need. Archer misses the mark on this, again.

He goes on to insist that 50% is meaningless, anyway, and that it's an arbitrary target, which it is, if we treat it as a number, but if we translate it into English, it makes more sense: AV requires elected representatives to have the support of most of the people they're representing. Is this really a made-up fetish?

  

Straw Man No. 4: AV will end the expenses scandal.

According to Archer, this is something that Nick Clegg believes, and to support this claim, he links to a scanty London Standard article written the day before Clegg gave a speech, reporting on what it expected Clegg to say.

Look, I don't care one way or another about Nick Clegg or what he thinks, but Archer's citing on that Standard article rather gives the game away regarding the level of research he's done. He could have linked to the speech itself -- http://www.newstatesman.com/2011/02/vote-mps-means-post-past -- in which case he'd have learned that Clegg certainly saw a link between MPs abusing the system and MPs feeling invulnerable in their seats, and envisaged a whole package of reforms to help sort out Britain's broken political system, but never simplistically claimed that AV would end the expenses scandal.

He could have done that. He didn't. Instead he just misrepresented Clegg. He could have done research and checked his facts, but instead he just made stuff up. Sure, why not? If lying about AV is good enough for the Prime Minister, why not for an ordinary party hack? The fish stinks from the head, as they say.

Straw Man No. 5: AV will help minor parties flourish.

This, Archer says, is obvious rubbish, but rubbish which lots of centre-right readers are inclined to believe.

The reality, of course, that this is another thing that people just don't know about. Nobody knows. It'll all depend firstly on whether people who currently don't see a point in voting start to exercise their right and do so to support parties other than the established if declining big two, and secondly on whether people who currently and reluctantly vote for the big two will feel it's worthwhile to express their honest opinions, even if that comes down to 'I really want the UKIP candidate to represent me, but if that's not possible then I'd be happy with a Conservative'.

In the short term, I'd expect this to mean that the smaller parties would get a boost in their share of the first-preference vote, but without any significant boost in seats, so that the end result isn't radically different. In the longer term... who knows?

  

Straw Man No. 6: AV is fair.

Not many people say AV is fair. They just tend to say it's fairer than First Past the Post, which it is, irrespective of what formulae Archer waves around to impress the easily impressed.

In 1992, the Liberal Democrat Russell Johnston was elected MP for Inverness, Nairn, and Lochaber, with just 26% of the vote. That'd not be possible under AV. What's more, imagine if that'd happened in every single constituency in the country, with the Lib Dems topping the poll with just 26% of the vote. That'd be 650 seats being awarded to a party with just 26% of the vote. Would that be possible under AV? No. Is it possible under FPTP? Yes. Yes it would be.

I know, that sounds crazy, but given that the current system is such that a party can get 76% of seats with just 55% of the vote, or 55% of the seats with just 35% of the vote, I don't think it's all too fanciful to imagine a party getting an absolute landslide with the support of just a quarter of the voting population. It'd be unlikely, sure, but it'd be far from impossible.

Look, it's very simple. General elections are about electing parliaments. Parliaments are representative assemblies. Representative assemblies should be representative of whoever of whatever it is they represent. Parliament, therefore, should be the United Kingdom writ small. The challenge is to create a parliament as representative of the people as possible. As things stand, under the current system more people vote for losing candidates than for winning ones. AV is a very slight change -- one that was recommended by Royal Commission as far back as 1910 -- which goes a small way towards correcting the current imbalance.

  

Archer's witterings are based on what he assumes AV would be like. Well, I've participated in AV elections in Ireland to pick a member of parliament and head of state, and I can assure you, he's wrong. The fact that he doesn't draw on any evidence from, well, anywhere that uses transferable voting, rather shows that far from being a comprehensive argument, it's just another piece of dishonest fluff.

I really think the Electoral Commission wouldn't need to spend half as much money educating people about AV if they weren't obliged to counter the constant stream of lies from the opponents of AV.

AV 2: AV Again, OR If you have to lie to make your case, then it probably isn't a good case...

See, here we go again. Have a look at this article and especially the three quotes from David Cameron. Every single one of them is a lie. It seems as though he has no respect for the truth, the British people, or the integrity of the referendum process.

"It is a system so undemocratic that your vote for a mainstream party counts once, while someone can support a fringe party like the BNP and get their vote counted several times."

Leaving aside how in a quarter of UK constituencies, the Conservatives are at best a third party, this is nonsense. In AV your vote is ultimately only counted once. However many rounds of counting there may be, there's only one decisive round, and in that round everybody's vote is counted just once. Not several times. Once.

"It's a system so obscure that it is only used by three countries in the whole world: Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. I'm not making it up, three countries in the whole world. Our system is used by half of the world."

Leaving aside how its just an accident of history that lots of countries have inherited First Past the Post -- with there being no shortage of ones that have abandoned or rejected it -- this just isn't true. I've voted twice in AV elections in Ireland, as we use AV for presidential elections and parliamentary elections when there's only one seat at stake, and India uses AV for presidential elections.

"Just think forward to the Olympics. Usain Bolt powers home in the hundred metres but when it comes to handing out the gold medals they give it to the person who comes third. You wouldn't do it in the Olympics, we shouldn't do it in politics, we've got to vote no to this crazy system."

These are the same Olympics that'll be held in a city where the Mayor is elected by instant run-off voting? And not by FPTP? Just making sure...

Look, the metaphor's wrong for starters, as an athletic contest has a clear finishing line, which AV has and First Past the Post, despite its ironic name, lacks: AV basically requires a winner to be supported by half of the voters, whereas FPTP just requires the winning candidate to be supported by one more voter than the next guy. Depending on how many credible candidates there are, that figure can be pretty low. That's why the Liberal Democrat Simon Wright is in Parliament with just 29.36% of the Norwich South vote and why the Greens' Caroline Lucas is there with just 31.33% of the Brighton Pavilion vote. Neither of them even needed 29%.

That aside, Cameron obviously doesn't believe this. If he did, he'd favour using First Past the Post when selecting Conservative leaders and candidates. Granted, that'd have meant that Ken Clarke would have won in 1997, Michael Portillo would have won in 2001, and David Davis would have beaten Cameron himself in 2005. The Conservative system is, after all, a sensible one: a series of preliminary rounds of voting is used to winnow the field of candidates down to two, those two then being decisively voted on. AV does exactly the same thing, except that preferences are all stated at the outset, which is why it's also known as Instant Run-Off Voting.

And none of this nonsense about run-off voting being okay for choosing individual candidates, leaders, presidents, or whatever, but not for choosing parliaments. Given the British system of single-seater constituencies, a general election is just a load of individual elections happening at the same time.

No, Cameron obviously opposes AV because the undemocratic advantage the Conservatives enjoy in the current system might be cancelled out under AV. Might. The fact is that nobody knows what the effect of AV will be. The only thing we can be certain of is that it will allow people to express honest preferences, without fearing that doing so could mean that their vote will be wasted.

I have a fair idea of what the broad effect of the change will be, in the short term, but I'll save that for another day. Back to work, methinks.

AV 1: AV and the Silent People

The AV Referendum's more than a month away, and I'm already tired of it.

I'm tired of the lies, and the misinformation, and the hypocrisy. I'm tired of the ignorance, and the stupidity, and the confusion. I'm tired of people masking vested interests beneath a veneer of principle, and of good people standing shoulder-to-shoulder with liars and making liars of themselves.

I'm sure that the British people -- or whatever fragment of them bothers to vote next month -- are going to reject voting reform. I'm certain of it. But why? What would a no vote mean?

Would it mean that if Nick Clegg wants Alternative Voting then you don't?

Great. Cut your electoral noses off to spite your Lib Dem faces, why don't you? Presumably you've already stopped eating Spanish food and Hob Nob biscuits, because, y'know, Clegg likes them.

Would it mean that you're rejecting AV because it's not PR and that's what you most want? You know, the David Owen approach?

Wonderful. Make the perfect the enemy of the good, why don't you? You know full well that your 'no' to AV will be read as a 'yes' for the status quo. You don't think the government are planning on doing a survey, like in Ireland after Lisbon I, to find out why people voted against the government's proposal, do you? No, they'll interpret it to suit their own purposes.

Would it mean that you think people should only ever be allowed vote once?

Come on, surely you're not thick enough to fall for that. As the pro-AV crowd keep saying, the thinking behind AV is simple: it's the same thinking that says, 'If you're going to the shops, I'll have a ginger beer, but if they've none, I'll have an orange juice'. In AV systems, every individual's vote only counts once at the the sole decisive stage. That's why political parties are happy to use run-off systems when selecting candidates and leaders. Nobody claims that William Hague only became Conservative party leader ahead of Ken Clarke back in 1997 because Michael Howard supporters were allowed to vote three times!

Would it mean that you think the country's in dire straits and can't afford £250 million to be spent on AV?

That's what the No2AV crowd are saying, after all, that around £130 million will be needed to pay for vote-counting machines, and that over £100 million will be spent on the referendum  and educating people about AV. Well, the referendum money's spent anyway, and the Conservatives who are backing the dishonest No2AV campaign agreed last year that they were going to spend that. As for the voting machines, well, aside from the fact there aren't any plans to buy such machines...Australia doesn't use counting machines, and neither does Ireland, with a more complex system, so do you think the British are uniquely dim and incapable of counting? Is that your problem? That you think the British are too stupid for any system more grown-up than the current one?

Would it mean that you think AV is a discredited system, used only in three countries in the world?

Why would you think that? Is it because the No2AV people keep telling you this? They keep saying only Australia, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea use AV, but India elects its President with AV, and I've voted twice in AV elections in Ireland. They're lying to you. Again. And here's the thing: all British political parties elect their leaders along AV lines. They select their candidates the same way. If it's good enough for them, why isn't it good enough for you?

Would it mean that you're convinced AV is a recipe for chaos, whereas First Past the Post guarantees stability?

Have you done any research into this at all, or have you just listened to the No campaign's lies? I don't think Australia's doing too badly, is it? It's certainly had no more hung parliaments over the last century or so than Britain has. Meanwhile Canada, with its First Past the Post system, has had three hung parliaments in a row.

Would it mean that you want to stop minority parties like the BNP from getting into parliament?

Assuming you think it's okay to rig the system to block those whose views you dislike from having a say in how their country is run, this makes sense, I suppose. I'm not even sure how we define parties as fringe or minority parties, though. In a quarter of UK constituencies, the Conservatives are at best a third party; should their voters be thought of as the kind of extremists who should be made to keep their mouths shut? All else aside, though, it seems odd for the BNP to be opposed to AV if AV would help them gain power. Maybe they think it's not British...

Would it mean that you believe First Past the Post is a British system and part of your cherished heritage?

Well, ignoring the fact that none of your political parties use First Past the Post when choosing leaders or candidates, I suppose this makes a kind of sense. After all, of the nearly forty democracies in Europe, only Britain is still hanging on to this way of doing things, which I suppose is a good thing: somebody needs to stand up for how things were done in the nineteenth century. Of course, a Royal Commission recommended as long ago as 1910 that you should ditch First Past the Post in favour of AV, recognising that First Past the Post doesn't really work when there are more than two parties, but maybe the time's still not quite right...

Would it mean that you like the current system because it means that your favourite political party sometimes gets to rule as though it has a national mandate even when scarcely one in three voters have backed them?

This, at least, would be honest. I'm pretty sure this is why most Tory and Labour MPs who oppose reform are taking the approach they're taking. Turkeys rarely vote for Christmas, after all. It just leaves me wondering why they don't insist on this system being used within their parties too.

I can't see AV getting passed. I think that through a mixture of laziness, hypocrisy, and stupidity, the British people are going to vote to keep the current system. You know, that current wonderful system which a Royal Commissions as long ago as 1910 found outdated and inadequate, and where since then...

• No party has won a popular majority since 1931, when some people could vote more than once.
• In 1951, the Conservatives won more seats than Labour despite getting fewer votes.
• In 1974, Labour won more seats than the Conservatives despite getting fewer votes.
• In 2005, Labour won a big parliamentary majority with hardly more than a third of the vote.
• In 2010, more people didn't vote than voted for losing candidates, and more people voted for losing candidates than for winning ones.

I don't believe the current system is either sacrosanct or fit for purpose anymore, and I don't believe the de facto disenfranchisement of most of the British population is a good thing, so I think reform is needed.

Sure, I don’t think AV is the best possible voting system, but I think it's a far better one than First Past the Post.  I've elected representatives under four voting systems, including both Alternative Vote and First Past the Post, and have never felt voting so pointless as in the First Past the Post elections. It's the system where I've felt least empowered.

I think we should be wary of making the perfect an enemy of the good. While not perfect, I believe AV to be more likely to return a more representative parliament than the current British system, and I also believe that changing the system, even in so mild a way, could help change mindsets, so that people might be more willing to countenance other changes without fearing the apocalypse.

That won't happen, though. They say people get the politicians they deserve, and it looks as though they're determined to keep the electoral system they deserve too. Chesterton once wrote of the English as a silent people, who have not spoken yet. I fear that in a month's time they'll vote to continue their silence.