To PR or not to PR...

I have just spent a long weekend in London (hence no posts for several days), principally to attend the AGM of the Electoral Reform Society (ERS). The main debate was whether to launch immediately "a campaign of education and lobbying against the current voting system and in support of AV and preferential voting FULL STOP, or to continue "and further to use the campaign to promote Proportional Representation by the use of the Single Transferable Vote for future House of Commons and other UK election."

The "full stoppers" argued that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to get rid of the primitive First Past the Post system (FPTP), and that the Tories and much of the Labour Party will campaign against, so there is no guarantee that the referendum will be won. We should not therefore muddy the waters and weaken the campaign by arguing that AV is not really much of an improvement, and that if we want to win we must swallow our reservations and embrace AV with unqualified enthusiasm.

The "continuers" also argued that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, that, following the expenses scandal and the failure of FPTP's USP (that it magnifies a minority into a strong and decisive one-party government) the electorate is genuinely interested in and ready for electoral reform. AV is not a step towards PR, we are not likely to have a series of referendums which enable us to move gradually towards a proportional system, and it would be crazy for the Society (which was originally called the Proportional Representation Society) not to grasp the nettle and put the case for STV to the electorate.

In the end the "coninuers" won. I am one of them, but I do recognise there is a genuine dilemma. The way forward seems to me to persuade MPs to amend the government's bill so that the STV option is included in the referendum, then ask a two-part question:
a) should the electoral system be changed?
b) if it is, which of these options, AV or STV, would you like?

Paternalists and conservatives (small "c") argue that the electorate is incapable of making not one but two decisions on anything so complex. Reformers are more optimistic.

We are not alone.

In his comment to an earlier post scarier takes me to task for suggesting that we should have "banged on" about different forms of PR during the election campaign. I take his point. Until recently I spent my leisure hours trying to brush up my schoolboy French. I would ask one of my colleagues in the French department a simple question and he would pin me to the wall and try to teach me three new tenses. We STV advocates tend to be susceptible to the same vice: so enthusiastic about the virtues of this wonderful system that we go into far too much detail when we get or take the chance to talk about it. There are suggestions to how to put the essentials over simply and clearly and we should use them.

One advantage of the attention PR received during the election campaign is that at least some of the serious press, and presumably their readers, now understand that AV is not proportional, and may be even less proportional than FPTP. Nevertheless, as a result of Liberal Democrat timidity, AV is the system for which we must now struggle.

Well, AV is better than nothing, and we shall need all the allies we can get in the referendum campaign. The Labour Party pressure group Compass is running a campaign to urge PR on the leadership candidates. What version of PR they mean, or whether simply AV, I don't know, but I urge you to sign their
petition. You don't have to be a labour Party member. In the words of Tesco, "every little helps."