Written evidence submitted by Nigel Siederer (PVE 65)
Submission to Parliamentary Enquiry on Voter Engagement in the UK
1. This is a submission from me as an individual voter. I do however have extensive experience of electoral issues, having been for 11 years a Trustee (and sometime Chair) of the McDougall Trust (which promotes research into electoral democracy). The Trust will be making its own submission.
2. I am focussing on the factors which engage me as an individual voter.
3. I first voted in the 1970 General Election, being one of those voters who were first given the franchise when the voting age was reduced from 21 to 18.
4. I was brought up in a household where politics were keenly discussed, even before I was allowed to vote. I have always voted.
5. In the 11 General Elections where I have voted, I think my vote might have made a difference only in one such Election (in Luton). This was where I happened to be living in a marginal seat which had changed parties at several General Elections and where a further change of parties was a reasonably likely prospect. This was at the 1970 Election, my very first.
6. At all General Elections since, I have been living in a safe seat: variously St Pancras North, Islington North, Lambeth Central, Lambeth Norwood, and Lewisham Deptford. In all of these seats, a Labour MP was elected. It made no difference whether I voted Labour or anything else, as the majorities were so large that Labour was bound to win.
7. The change from Lambeth Central to Lambeth Norwood happened without my moving house because there was a boundary change. This removed the former MP for Lambeth Central, who I regarded as a particularly good constituency MP. The choice of successor was made by the new constituency Labour party, effectively without reference to the voters. The ‘new’ MP was previously the MP for a neighbouring constituency, and in my view less effective than his predecessor. With no ‘primary’ system, I could have no influence on this without having been a member of the Labour Party.
8. The former Lambeth Central constituency was split between two former constituencies. Most of the constituency was transferred not to the new Lambeth Norwood constituency, but to Lambeth Vauxhall. The chosen candidate was again chosen by that constituency Labour party without reference to the voters. He was elected effectively by default of choice, and not long afterwards decided that his personal career was not well served by being the MP for a deprived inner city constituency, so he resigned, creating an unwanted by-election. The successor candidate was imposed on that constituency by the Labour Party HQ, which decided that the local CLP’s candidate was likely to lose the election. Again, all this happened without reference to the voters, and the chosen successor was elected by default of voter choice.
9. The lack of a link between the voters and either the local or national political party was significant, but it seems unrealistic to argue for renewed mass membership of political parties.
10. In 1992, I moved to Lambeth Deptford, which is one of the safest (Labour) seats in the country. I have sometimes voted for the sitting MP, and sometimes for others. It has made no difference. My vote has been reduced to a ‘protest’, whether I have wanted to protest or not.
11. Little party campaigning has ever taken place in this constituency at General Elections. The Labour Party has typically managed one or two leaflets in advance of the election and one during the campaign. The Conservative Party, which normally comes second, has been invisible. The Liberal Democrats, who have usually been the main opposition party on the local authority, have done little more, and have not chosen credible candidates. The Green Party, sometimes also represented on the Council, has distributed some leaflets but has never come higher than fourth place. A fringe left-wing group, also represented on the Council at times, has done the most leafleting in my ‘home’ ward, but could never do more than campaign for protest votes.
12. At each of these general elections, the national choice has been effectively between Conservative and Labour Parties. My vote could never have made a difference. I do not want to be a disengaged voter, but the system effectively disengages me.
13. Even in seats which are less ‘safe’, individual voters have little chance of influencing the outcome. Unless the majority of the sitting MP is small, the political parties do not campaign. They concentrate their campaigning resources on the marginal seats.
14. The parties also seek to influence the ‘swing’ voters in those seats, including those who are easiest to influence and who are most likely to change their voting intentions for trivial reasons. This, in my view, leads to an excessive emphasis on personalities and the personal foibles of national politicians, and over-simplification of political ideas. It reduces the effective scope of debate across the nation, devalues the whole notion of politics, and contributes significantly to the disengagement of voters.
15. The 2015 Election is the most uncertain in recent years. Yet most voters will have no influence on the outcome. The negative campaigning of UKIP will bring it few if any seats, but may affect the outcome in seats where it takes votes from major parties through negative campaigning. Green and Liberal Democrat MPs will be re-elected because of an ‘incumbency factor’ even though (in the case of LD MPs) their national share of vote is likely to shrink. The SNP will have an excessive influence on the outcome because of its high share of the vote in Scotland even though it will not run candidates in the rest of the UK. It is quite likely that the parties’ share of seats will not be related in any logical way to their share of votes, and also quite possible that a ‘majority’ government will be formed by a party with only 35% of the national vote. The outrage which I have felt as a voter in a very safe seat may well come to be shared much more widely. More voters will feel disengaged.
16. I share the Select Committee’s concern about the low level of registration of potential voters from black and minority ethnic communities. I have been living for all of my voting life in constituencies with a high proportion of such voters. I support all the moves (short of compulsion) to encourage voter registration, including support for organisations such as Operation Black Vote.
17. I am concerned that the House of Commons is still very largely white. In terms of racial origin, it does not look like the population of large cities, including London, where the BME population is high. Although things improved in the 2010 General Election, there is still much to be done.
18. I was greatly impressed to see my mixed-race son and his mixed-race best friend watch the inauguration of the USA’s President Obama on TV with open-mouthed admiration. Neither of them were much interested in politics, but the effect of the election to high office, even in another country, of someone who looks like them was remarkable.
19. The dominance of political parties in the selection of candidates in safe seats has much to do with the outcome of racial bias in the House of Commons. This is not just a matter of the relative failure of parties to recruit members from BME communities. It also turns very largely on their selection procedures for candidates. With the need to select a candidate who will appeal across the board and to avoid offending the least informed swing voters, they tend to gravitate towards selecting candidates who are white and male.
20. In my view, the best remedy for this would be to combine constituencies in groups of four or five, each electing more multiple members of Parliament. This would have several advantages:
21. The introduction of a preference system would also carry advantages. But if done in single member constituencies (the ‘alternative vote’), it would permit disproportionate representation of parties which were second or lower choices of individual voters, while giving voters no choice of the candidates chosen by parties.
22. This could possibly be corrected by a system of ‘primaries’, but this carries the disadvantage that supporters of opposing parties could register to vote in the ‘wrong’ primary, producing a tendency to select candidates from each who lean most towards the opposite party. This would tend to reduce the differences between the main parties, and further alienate voters who did not support either.
23. A system of ‘first five past the post’ would be better, in terms of increasing the diversity of the candidates on offer. However, as major parties would tend to run full slates of candidates, they would, at least in safe seats, tend to sweep the board. This would not produce a politically diverse House of Commons, but would make the composition of the House more vulnerable to major change from small swings. There would also be a tendency to produce the election of ‘single issue’ candidates from parties which could not run a full slate but might be given one of a voter’s four or five available votes.
24. It would surely be better to combine a single preference vote with multi-member constituencies, so allowing voters to split their vote across parties and choose their most preferred candidates from within party ‘tickets’. Over-representation of minority views could be avoided by providing for the transfer of successful candidates’ excess votes (at a reduced value) to the next preferred candidate. This is the system used in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. It produces results that are more representative of the diversity of political opinion and of other factors such as (in the case of Northern Ireland) religious background.
25. I note the Committee’s view that “Westminster has a settled view on First Past the Post”. It is undoubtedly right about this.
26. Unfortunately, Westminster is wrong, and not for the first time on an electoral matter. The worst recent experience was that of the ‘poll tax’, when the imposition of an unfair tax produced a rebellion on the streets and, indirectly, a change in the country’s leadership. But other examples come to mind, including the 19th Century change from a property-based franchise, and the early 20th Century’s resistance to allowing women to vote.
27. The refusal of MPs to address the merits of different electoral systems looks increasingly to be motivated by preservation of their own jobs than by the merits of the arguments. The plethora of electoral systems for other UK purposes (eg European Parliament, local/regional mayors, local government in Scotland) makes the House of Commons system looked increasingly ill-suited to reflecting modern electoral opinion.
28. As I have stated above, there is a serious prospect of a House of Commons majority which does not reflect the range of political opinion in the country, leading to a government which cannot claim to be representative, or to one formed by a shabby compromise between parties of mutually contradictory views.
29. In such circumstances, the disengagement of voters would grow, along with their alienation from Parliament and the government that it selects. In my view, the remedy of serious electoral reform would then need to be revisited.