So What Does AV Mean in Terms of Coalitions? Part 2

In part one of my blog entry on coalitions I looked at what coalitions are, whether they're in principle a good thing, and whether the current government is a really representative example of coalition governments. Now I want to look at how we ended up with the current coalition government and show that AV would be less likely to give us
such bizarre mismatches in power.

In fact I would argue that the formation of this government owes a great deal to FPTP. First of all you have the laziness of many MPs that arises from FPTP's minority safe seats. Many MPs simply do not have to work very hard to win or keep their seats if they're lucky enough to be in a certain constituency. We saw the decline of the Labour government, which any opposition worth their salt should have ripped apart in the last general election. But
unfortunately the conservatives, because of the very same FPTP-induced indolence failed to capitalise on it. So voters were not particularly keen on Labour or the Conservatives. Certainly not enough to give either of them a
majority of seats.

But instead of voting elsewhere and giving power to promising looking alternatives (apart from a praiseworthy group of voters in Brighton who had the courage to go with what they wanted instead of just voting tactically for one of the big parties), most voters, again because of FPTP made a choice between Labour or the Conservatives, feeling that any other vote would be wasted (and quite probably had this idea rammed home to them by their Labour and Conservative candidates too). For all the promise of the television debates and internet coverage, the Lib Dems performance in the election was poor. First Past the Post meant that voting for them would have required a lot of courage, courage that not enough voters had. But that's not the fault of the voters, that's the fault of the system. I give a huge amount of credit to those voters in Brighton who had the bottle to go with what they wanted and won the Greens their first seat, but it shouldn't have had to be that difficult really.

Under a fairer voting system, we would have seen one of two things:

1)Labour and/or Conservatives pulling out all the stops to maintain their dominance fair and square,

2)the voters would have had the means to say that the Labour and Conservative parties weren't enough for them any more. We might have ended up with a coaltion government still, but it would have been a much more sensible match than a Lib Dem/Conservative one. And at least thanks to this at times farcical coalition government we now have an opportunity to begin the long road towards mending our broken political system and ensure that we never have this problem again. This is why we must vote Yes to AV on May 5th.

I should add another few sentences in anticipation of a fair question "How do you know the Labour Conservative dominance isn't merited/wanted?".

Well the voting figures show it for one thing. I quote from Andrew Rawnsley's article:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/28/andrew-rawnsley-electoral-reform?cat=commentisfree&type=article 

"At the 1951 election, more than 96% of the vote was scooped by Labour and the Tories. Only a tiny minority of voters did not associate with either the red tribe or the blue one. By the two elections of 1974, a quarter of the
voters were refusing to make a cross for either Labour or the Tories. The decline of class-based identification with the big two has been accompanied by diminishing respect for the duopoly that dominated British politics for decades. At the most recent election, more than a third of voters rejected both blue and red – and more than a third of the total electorate declined to vote for anyone at all."

So it really does appear that the dominance isn't wanted. That doesn't necessarily mean it isn't merited, but to assume it is when it isn't wanted would be undemocratic. The voters should have what they want regardless. If we
change the voting system to a fairer one that takes power away from the parties and puts it in the hands of the voters, which is what a change from FPTP to AV would do, and the Labour and Conservative parties, STILL dominate British politics, then that will be good for them for two reasons. First of all they will have irrefutable proof that the British public want them to be there, and Secondly they will be there because they have worked hard to win support (if not first choice votes) from over 50% of their constituents.

And so in the long term, even if you believe in strong single party governments, AV really is the way forward as a single party government is only effective if it's working hard for you. Just look at the difference between Labour from 1997-2003 where they'd the moment of working really hard to overturn the Tory stronghold, and Labour from 2003-2010 where they'd grown complacent relying entirely on the distortion of the FPTP voting system.