Since the royal commission of 1908, political calculation has dominated the debate over electoral reform
In all the petty mud-throwing over Thursday's AV referendum one key protagonist who has attracted neither praise nor blame is William Robert Ware, the Harvard-educated American architect who devised the model while briefly dabbling in voting systems in his spare time as a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That was in or about 1870, and Ware's was not the first high-minded attempt to inject greater "fairness'' into the ancient winner-take-all method of picking leaders now widely known as first-past-the-post (FPTP). The architect's starting point was the single transferable vote (STV) system, independently invented for multi-member constituencies by both the Danish politician-mathematician Carl Andrae (1855) and the British political scientist Thomas Hare (1857).
Ware adapted STV to the needs of elections where there is a single winner: whether for national constituency politics, state or local council ballots, more widely in choosing mayors, presidents or party leaders and — since 2009 — winners of Hollywood's Oscars. Colin Firth, who is campaigning for a yes vote, got his King's Speech Oscar that way.
Known in many countries, including the US, as "instant-runoff" (IRV) or the "preferential ballot", AV had to wait until a modification of the Ware model known as the "contingent vote" was first used in an election for the colonial government of Queensland, Australia. By 1908 true AV was being used for a state election in Western Australia. Hare's STV had been adopted by Tasmania in 1897, but in 1918 it was AV that Australia adopted nationally.
A high-minded democratic instinct for experiment in the young dominion (it abandoned property qualifications to vote long before Britain) was part of the story. But so was low partisan calculation. Australia emerged from World War I with its old Labour v Liberal position fragmented. Faced with a Labour candidate winning the 1918 Swan byelection on 34.4% of the vote, the conservative Country (30.4%) and National (29.6%) parties joined forces over AV to avoid it happening again.
By now AV was on the radar in Britain too. The Proportional Representation Society — known as the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) since 1958 — was founded in 1884 by Sir John Lubbock, the first Lord Avebury, to promote proportional representation (PR). Its own preferred model, then as now, being pure STV. CP Scott, editor-owner of The (Manchester) Guardian, was an early supporter. So was the Rev Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll).
Early efforts to attach STV to political reform bills failed (Gladstone had declared he would prefer a reactionary Tory government to STV) – and the society flagged until after the great Liberal landslide (in informal cahoots with Labour) of 1906. At this stage – though not after the Liberal collapse in the 1920s – radicals such as Asquith and Lloyd George ("a device for defeating democracy") were both hostile.
Yet after a vigorous campaign by the ERS's dynamic new secretary, John Humphries, in 1908 Asquith conceded what remains Britain's only royal commission on voting reform.
STV was proposed for Ireland under the doomed 1914 Home Rule bill (and adopted to this day after independence in 1921), but by 1917 the royal commission was recommending AV.
Humphries duly helped ensure that a Speaker Conference in that year split the difference, an attempted compromise which often characterises the PR battle. It proposed AV for 358 of the then-569 UK seats (the mostly rural ones) and multi-member STV for densely-populated urban areas.
During debates on the representation of the people bill (the reform which gave the vote to all men and women over 30) the Commons narrowly rejected STV and — by one vote — inserted AV. The Lords voted for STV. Efforts to achieve further compromise floundered, though STV was introduced for the then-university seats. Over the next few years backbench bills proposing STV or AV were routinely defeated.
But in 1923 a sea change occurred in British politics. Lloyd George's Tory-dominated coalition had collapsed. Exhausted and divided by the war, the Liberal party was overtaken by Labour which formed its first, brief, minority government. Facing the political wilderness, Asquith and Lloyd George finally embraced electoral reform as their route back to influence and power.
In circumstances like those facing Gordon Brown in 2009-10, their chance came after 1929 when Ramsay MacDonald formed Labour's second minority government. To shore up Liberal support against Stanley Baldwin's newly-defeated Tories, MacDonald offered not STV but AV as part of a Lib-Lab progressive alliance which, speculation suggested, might have sent Lloyd George back to the Treasury. The history of the Great Depression might have been different if the Keynsians had prevailed and deficit spending eased the horrors of mass unemployment. Instead, Labour's latest representation of the people bill – including AV – passed the Commons by 295 to 230 votes on 24 February 1931. The Speaker refused to allow discussion of the more radical STV option – as outside the scope of the bill. In the Lords attempts to insert the 1917-18 compromise of 100 urban seats elected by STV also floundered.
An AV amendment to cover conurbations of over 200,000 was passed by the Lords on 21 July. But by now the government, grappling with spending cuts and the tottering value of sterling, was close to collapse. The bill fell with the government on 24 August and MacDonald emerged as head of a three-party coalition, buttressed by a very distorted general election result. In varying guises a national coalition ruled until Labour's great postwar victory in 1945.
With a Lab-Con duopoly now claiming up to 95% of the vote, electoral reform again disappeared from the political agenda until 1974 produced a hung parliament, prompting moderate Tories such as Douglas Hurd and Chris Patten to flirt with PR, versions of which were by now in use in many countries.
After Labour's third defeat by Margaret Thatcher it set up the Plant Commission, which recommended a version of AV and a referendum. As opposition leader, Tony Blair promised the Roy Jenkins commission, which produced yet another refinement, known as AV-Plus, for Westminster, to match the use of the additional member system (AMS) in the new devolved assemblies.
Blair's landslide victories killed that option. Only when defeat again loomed did pragmatic politicians reach for the electoral reform lever to save themselves. Brown, and now the coalition leaders, Cameron and Clegg, mix high rhetoric with low calculation: business as usual.
John Harris, page 30
Leader comment, page 32