The straight vote is crooked

Posted on April 10, 2010 at 06:31 PM

I was watching BBC Newsnight last night and a report from one of the Marginal constituencies, Luton. The BBC reporter was at a bar in Luton where a band was about to play and she interviewed three young men about how they intended to vote.  One of them said he was excited and it was his first time to vote, and that there were lots of different candidates presenting, and he would be looking at each of them, and what they were saying, to help make up his mind what way to vote. What I thought when I watched this young man was how the reality for him was that, despite the apparent choice of candidates he thought could choose from, if he voted for one of the candidates with very little chance of winning, then he would have no say in who actually wins the seat and represents him in Westminster.  That is the problem with the First Past the Post system in the U.K and their single seat constituencies.  British Labour will, according to their election manifesto, change to a system of the single transferable vote in single seat constituencies if they are returned to power.  That would be an improvement but still would lead to a disproportionate vote where the winner takes all. It is not really PR STV but rather the alternative vote.  Those that vote for smaller parties or less popular candidates could at least transfer their votes to candidates more likely to win and hence try to influence which of the heavy hitters would win the sole seat in the constituency.  It would be the equivalent of what happens when we hold bye-elections in this country except it would be for all constituencies. According to Garrett Fitzgerald in an article in the Irish Times last year if there had been single seat constituencies in 2007 Fianna Fail would have won 75 per cent of the seats with 42 per cent of the vote.  The Liberal Democrats have the most radical proposal for electoral reform in Britain, which is for elections to parliament to be by PR STV and representatives to be elected from multi seat constituencies. This is the system we have in Ireland. It has also been introduced in recent years in Northern Ireland for the Assembly elections and Scotland for the local elections.  Ironic that some people here are calling for a move to single seat constituencies and claiming that this would be reform.

I read a speech today by Mrs. Nora Connolly O’Brien, daughter of James Connolly and a Senator from 1957 to 1969.  The speech was made on the 5th February 1958 during a debate in the Seanad on the bill for the referendum to change to abolish P.R.  This was the first of two referendums rejected by the Irish people.  Labour campaigned against the change proposed in both referendums.   For the second referendum Labour had posters that declared “The Straight Vote is Crooked”.  Nora Connolly O’Brien was a Taoiseach’s nominee and was appointed to the Seanad by a Fianna Fail Taoiseach. She wasn’t a member of Fianna Fail, however ,and was, I understand, a member of Sinn Fein, and for a brief period of the Labour Party. Her brother Roddy Connolly was a Labour T.D. and later a Labour Senator and our Party Chairman, having founded the Irish Communist Party.  Roddy’s son is still active in the Labour Party. 

Nora Connolly O’Brien did vote in the Seanad on the 5th February 1958  for the bill for the referendum to be put to the people but argued during her speech on the bill that PR should be retained and that she hoped the majority of citizens would, like her, vote “No” in the referendum.  What is especially interesting for me in her speech is how she describes as a young girl being persuaded as to the merits of PR STV, and how she found the principles of PR so entwined with the fundamental principles of Labour and Irish Republicanism that she found it difficult to disentangle them, and how she could no more readily forgo one than the other.  This is very much how I feel about PR STV today.  One thing that comes across from the transcript of Nora Connolly O’Brien’s speech was that she was a very eloquent speaker. She said that feeling comes from the heart and so did her opposition to the abolition of PR. She argued for the place of the smaller party in our parliamentary democracy and said, “I was not reared in the belief that God and Truth are solely on the side of big battalions, nor can I more easily believe that God and Truth are solely on the side of big parliamentary Parties”.  This is what Nora Connolly O’Brien had to say about PR and young voters: “I know it is generally deplored that the youth of the country is apathetic towards taking part in its political activities, but is that to be wondered at since they consider our ideas so ancient that they find none of the political movements that we have shaped completely satisfying, and are reluctant to accord any of them their full support? Still, under P.R., we have had evidence that there is a stirring in their minds towards taking part in the shaping of their country by the numbers of them—not splinters of any Party—who have offered themselves and their ideas to the electorate. That they fail to secure election is not important. What is important is that they give evidence that they are dissatisfied with what is on offer from us, and that the germ of the idea of taking part in the shaping of their country's future is in them. The hope is that new, young ideas can more readily be achieved through P.R. If we abolish P.R. how can we know what movement of great beauty or utility we have prevented from coming into being, and which may be lost to us and to the country? I do not think there should be any attempt to be little that possibility because that possibility must have its beginnings in a minority group.”  

This brings me back to the young man in Luton who was excited about the range of choice of candidates on offer to him in the first election he had a vote in. If Britain had PR STV, like Ireland, and as proposed by the Liberal Democrat Party, that young man could genuinely choose between a range of candidates who each under such an electoral sytem would have a real chance of being elected.

This speech can be accessed on the Oireachtas Website www.oireachtas.ie under Seanad Historical Debates
5th February 1958.

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