The AV referendum in real life
THE UPCOMING Alternative Vote (AV) referendum will
not determine whether Britain progresses to socialism or slides to
barbarism; its outcome will probably not even threaten the Coalition.
Nonetheless the fact of the referendum raises useful questions about
bourgeois democracy.
Clive Heemskerk (The
AV Referendum, Socialism Today No.145, February
2011) raises the spectre of the big parties of capitalism using AV to
gang up on a nascent workers’ party. Where AV is used, this has not
happened. In Australia, the largest country to use AV, each party issues
‘how to vote’ cards indicating their second, third preferences and so
on. In the most recent election in Australia where the CWI’s Australian
section stood against the main parties, Australian Labour called for a
vote for the Socialist Party as third preference. Even Australia’s
Liberals marked Socialists preference four.
The failure of the ‘ganging-up’ hypothesis can be
explained in two halves, the first of which is tactical voting. While no
system eliminates tactical voting – cold mathematics shows the whole
question of whether a voting system is ‘fair’ to be absurd – AV enriches
the possibilities for tactical voting. The Australian Liberals, for
example, marked the Socialist Party number four to undercut the Greens,
perceived by the Liberals as the greater immediate threat, by marking
that party number five.
The new possibilities for tactical voting under AV
negate the argument regarding possible outcomes of the Coventry South
East election in 1992. Nobody can say what the result might have been
there, however the Jenkins Report, which considered AV in 1998, found
that had AV been used in 1992, John Major would never have won a
majority even in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. AV, while not
truly proportional, can sometimes be more proportional than
first-past-the-post, and its disproportionality consistently hurts the
Conservatives.
The second half of the failure of the ‘ganging-up’
hypothesis is that historically conspiracies by established parties
against newcomers have been against the far right, not the left. In
Australia, AV denied the openly racist One Nation party any seats in the
lower house of parliament, despite that party receiving the third
highest proportion of the vote in 1998. Ganging-up is not unique to AV
or to capitalist parties; in the 2010 UK general election, there was no
TUSC candidate in Barking and some socialists called for a vote for
Labour as part of a programme of keeping the BNP out. Under AV we would
not face such an odious decision again.
Capitalist parties are not Marxist parties. They
connive not out of class solidarity nor even to preserve capitalism per
se but rather for immediate selfish enrichment. Thus they decide their
positions not by long-term goals but by pursuit of quick power, money
and popularity. And they do not readily form alliances: consider the
instability of the two-party coalition here and note the shaky
multi-party coalitions seen in continental Europe, fragile even when all
partners share essentially identical programmes. Labour’s parliamentary
breakthrough in Britain came when the Liberals and Labour entered an
electoral pact in 1903; from a class perspective this should have been
unthinkable for the Liberals, but their highest concern was crushing the
Conservatives to win the election. Ed Miliband has more in common with
Nick Griffin than with Keir Hardie; would big capitalist parties today
risk the blow to popularity by openly backing the BNP, even while they
adopt more BNP policies?
And should the parties of capitalism ever form an
alliance, is there better propaganda for us than for some New Labour
clone to address a rally in Pontypridd, Sheffield or Walthamstow, and
tell thousands of workers not to vote for the militant who fought for
their jobs but for the Tories who destroyed them?
Having abandoned the working class, all Britain’s
big parties can do to gain advantages over one another is chase money
and alter the constitution. Thus, Lenin’s observations on imperial
capitalism are repeated in parliamentary politics in the UK and
worldwide. Sometimes, as with devolution to Wales and Scotland or
reforming the Lords, these changes help the working class at the same
time as they entrench an established party. The AV referendum is the
latest item in a 15-year-long surge of constitutional manipulations.
Whether it makes electoral success for a new workers’ party easier or
makes no difference, the fact of constitutional rewriting points to
heightening tensions among Britain’s capitalist factions that ensure
ruling class division and leave vast possibilities both within and
outside the electoral system for a mass workers’ party.
Edmund Schluessel, Cardiff
Clive Heemskerk responds:
EDMUND’S LETTER is welcome as it raises important
questions about the article in
Socialism Today No.145. Unfortunately,
however, he does not clearly say whether trade unionists, socialists,
students and working class communities fighting the austerity consensus
of the establishment parties should vote yes, no, or not vote at all in
May’s AV referendum.
Edmund agrees that the working class can not be
indifferent to the struggle to deepen democratic rights and also accepts
that AV is not necessarily more proportional – as the Yes to AV campaign
claims – than the current first-past-the-post system. But he does seem
to argue that, because “AV enriches the possibilities for tactical
voting”, it may make “electoral success for a new workers’ party easier”
or, at least, “makes no difference”.
Edmund disputes that Dave Nellist would “almost
certainly not” have won his Coventry South East seat in the 1992 general
election under AV – or, presumably, Terry Fields, who also stood against
Labour, in Liverpool Broadgreen. But given the vicious media denigration
of Militant, taking their cue from then Labour leader Neil Kinnock, it
is hard to imagine Tory voters backing Dave or Terry in a run-off with
Labour, with or without a formal ‘preference swap’ agreement. At one
point there was a 5,000-strong ‘Liverpool Against Militant’ march during
the city council’s struggle against Thatcher.
Edmund’s appeal here to the Jenkins Report and the
1992 general election doesn’t help his case. Jenkins doesn’t say that
“had AV been used in 1992 John Major would never have won a majority
even in coalition with the Liberal Democrats”. Instead it actually
quotes “one estimate suggesting it [AV] would have led to a Conservative
majority” of 27 in 1992 (paragraph 84).
Edmund’s main point is to dispute the argument that
AV gives a greater opportunity than first-past-the-post for the
capitalist parties to overcome their differences – which he agrees exist
even when they “share essentially identical programmes” – to ‘gang up on
a workers’ party’ by swapping preferences. He points to the experience
of Australia, but what does it really show?
A House of Commons Research Paper, Voting Systems:
The Jenkins Report (December 1998, p65), points out that AV in fact
“encourages alliances between parties since each can put up candidates
without fear of splitting the vote”. It then concedes that this affect
“can discriminate against anti-system parties which cannot find allies”
and, quoting a study by Richard Rose (in Democracy and Elections,
Bogdanor & Butler, 1983), that AV “has adversely affected Labour
representation in the House of Representatives in Australia for this
reason”.
This refers to the Australian Labour Party when,
like its British counterpart, it was a capitalist workers’ party, with
pro-capitalist leaders but with a working class base that meant it was
not fully under the control of the ruling class – not to the situation
today. But it confirms the arguments made in Socialism Today about the
1972-75 Australian Labour government and how AV, in a period of
heightened class polarisation, ‘encourages’ the capitalist parties
precisely to ‘form alliances’ – to ‘gang up’ – against a mass workers’
party.
Edmund refers to the November 2010 Victorian state
elections when, in the one seat contested by the CWI’s Australian
section, the Richmond district, “even Australia’s Liberals marked
Socialists preference four” out of five candidates. One difference with
the AV system proposed for Britain is that Australian voters have to
rank all candidates in preference order to cast a valid ballot. But most
significant, as the Australian Socialist Party argued, was the
state-wide “collusion of the two major parties in blocking the Greens
via a preference deal”. (Ruling Labour Party punished at Victorian state
election, www.socialistworld.net, 6 December 2010)
“Despite the fact that the Greens pose no threat to
the capitalist system, big business would prefer to maintain a two-party
system”, the Australian Socialist Party wrote, to avoid “opening up
space for other parties to develop”. The Greens polled 11.2% of the
state-wide vote but did not win a single one of the 88 seats contested.
No electoral system, of course, can ultimately stop
the development of a mass vehicle of working class representation.
Edmund argues that “Labour’s parliamentary breakthrough in Britain came
when the Liberals and Labour entered an electoral pact in 1903” – only
five Labour MPs elected in 1906 faced Liberal opponents – but this
downplays the profound shifts in consciousness, particularly after the
Taff Vale judgement assault on trade union rights, that lay behind
Labour’s emergence and the demise of the Liberals. The anti-cuts
struggle can be a similar era-defining development.
Electoral politics involve many tactical
considerations, including whether to fight particular electoral contests
against far-right or even fascist candidates. Trotsky, for example,
while arguing for a united front of the Social Democrats and the
Communist Party (KPD) to deal with the Nazi menace, nevertheless
defended the right of the KPD to contest elections independently against
the Nazis.
There are tactical questions around the AV
referendum too: Edmund lightly dismisses the impact a No victory – a
massive blow to the Lib Dems – could have in undermining the coalition.
But there are also principles involved. Not to bolster the myth that AV
is inherently ‘fairer’ or more democratic – not to spread ‘democratic
illusions’. And to explain how it will be used by the capitalists – if
not to stop localised ‘protest votes’ today – to try and block, on the
parliamentary plane at least, a mass workers’ party of the future. There
is no case for a Yes vote.
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