The mood is for change: people hate the system and believe in fairness. The May vote will have lasting consequences for British politics
The alternative vote is to British domestic politics what the Schleswig-Holstein question once was to European diplomacy. Few know what AV is. Almost as few care. "The public have many priorities. This just isn't one of them," says a Conservative minister. But if you think that means the AV referendum now confirmed for 5 May does not matter, think again.
Do not forget that the Schleswig-Holstein question was, in the end, the key that unlocked the process of German unification. The very silly question produced a very important, though largely unforeseen, answer. And it may just be that the AV referendum is itself one of those improbable agate points of history upon which, as Winston Churchill put it, the balances of the world turn. Well, not the balances of the world in this case, but certainly the balances of British party politics.
It is easy to mock AV, and lots of people will certainly do this in the next 10 weeks. After all, AV – the ranking of candidates in order of preference so that the winner has to get the support of more than half the voters – is the electoral reform measure that no party supports.
Not the Conservatives, who think no change to the first-past-the-post system is needed. Not the Liberal Democrats, who believe AV is a feeble reform compared with proportional representation. And not Labour, who embraced the change in 2010 but whose MPs have, until now, made up many of the scheme's most prominent opponents. The 1998 Jenkins commission on electoral systems didn't support AV either. And no politician has ever reported any interest in the issue on the doorstep. Turnout will clearly be a huge challenge.
Yet you only have to read David Laws' gripping account of the formation of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition last year to realise precisely why we are here. AV was the pivotal issue in the coalition negotiations. Labour's offer of AV to the Lib Dems kept Gordon Brown in the negotiations even after it was clear the Lab-Lib numbers did not stack up. By the same token, the Tory referendum pledge on AV was the Lib Dems' hardest-wrung concession of the lot, the one the Tories least wanted to make. There is still Tory bad blood over it. But it was the deal-clincher. It was the prize that finally persuaded the Lib Dems they could go in with David Cameron.
But that is only the immediate reason why there is a referendum on the way we choose MPs on 5 May. The deeper underlying reason is that British politics is steadily losing credibility. That's partly about expenses, an issue which has no direct connection with the electoral system but which will loom over the way the public responds to the AV vote. But it's also about the manifest dysfunctionality of a system that awards 89% of the seats in parliament to two parties that collected less than two-thirds of the votes between them; in which it takes four times as many votes to elect a Lib Dem MP than an MP from the other two main parties; and in which most voters vote for losing candidates, not winning ones (think about it).
These two reasons – the public's hostility to the existing political system and its belief in fairness – are the two reasons why I both support the Yes campaign and also think it will win on 5 May. Intelligent people in the No campaign think that, in the end, the attractions of the status quo will prevail, as they did in the "Do we stay in?" vote on Europe in Britain's only other nationwide referendum. But the public's view of politics is very different in 2011 compared with 1975. The public mood is for change. The No campaign is dominated by reactionary Conservatives and conservative Labourites. That's why the Yes campaign is smart to capture the anti-politics mood.
Historically, many Lib Dems have treated AV with disdain. Clegg's comment that it is a grubby compromise will be hung round his neck every day until polling day. But AV still has three huge attractions to Lib Dems nevertheless. The first is that AV is a fairer system than first-past-the-post because more voters get to choose an MP. The second is that AV encourages parties to broaden their appeal, a crucial dynamic of the move away from the old tribal duopoly. And the third, crucially, is that the Lib Dems will almost certainly do better out of it because it is plainly and simply fairer.
Because of this, the outcome on 5 May matters more obviously to Clegg and his party than it does to anyone else. For that reason, the coalition's enemies from left and right are queuing up to join the No to AV campaign. Labour's antis include many MPs who simply calculate that AV will threaten their retention of their seats. Most, though, see the referendum as a chance to punish the Lib Dems for the coalition and as a way of reasserting the Labour-Tory duopoly.
Ed Miliband, writing here, made no mention of party advantage. His pitch on behalf of AV was more elevated: his belief in "a better politics". By far his most interesting line, however, was the one that said a yes vote would help get politics away from the practice of "exaggerating disagreement in order to create false black-and-white choices". Who could he have had in mind when he wrote that? But it shows Miliband is positioning himself for the business – both campaigning and coalition-making – of post-AV politics.
Miliband's detractors – like the unions who are donating their members' money to the No campaign – will moan that supporting AV is about giving away Labour's chances of ever governing as a majority party. But what if those chances have gone anyway? What if a senior minister was right this week when he argued not just that Labour can no longer win under the existing system but that – and here's the striking bit – Labour's only chance of ever governing on its own, not merely in coalition, is now with AV? That minister may well be right. For Labour, not just principle but party advantage point to AV.
But in some ways that goes for the Conservatives too. Most Tories do not believe this. They are traditionalists. They like the existing voting system. The Tory party is already campaigning hard for a No vote and Cameron is himself joining the campaign. But the Tories are nothing if not realists. They read the polls. They did not get where they are today by refusing to adapt to changes in the electoral system. Like Sir Robert Peel after 1832, whom he so much resembles, Cameron will adjust to AV if he has to. He may well get there before Labour, and with lasting consequences for British politics too.