5 days ago
Why is Angela Rayner abolishing ‘first past the post' for mayoral elections?
The government has published the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, which includes a clause reinstating 'the use of the supplementary vote system in elections of mayors and police and crime commissioners'.
Angela Rayner, who is responsible for local government as part of her sprawling deputy-prime-ministerial empire, is reversing the change brought in three years ago by Priti Patel, who as home secretary in the Conservative government was in charge of democracy and the constitution.
Directly elected mayors were brought in by Tony Blair's government, starting with London, because it had no city-wide government after Margaret Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council. Labour chose the supplementary vote system for the election of the London mayor, and the same system was adopted for the other elected mayors that followed.
What is the supplementary vote?
It is a bit like the alternative vote, the system that was rejected for elections to the House of Commons in the referendum that took place under the coalition government in 2011, except that electors have only a first-preference and a second-preference vote.
Under the alternative vote, electors can number all the candidates on the ballot paper in order of preference. The supplementary vote uses a ballot paper with two columns, and the voter uses a cross to mark their first preference in the first column, and another cross to mark their second preference in the second column.
Why did the Conservatives change it?
The Conservatives have long had a sentimental attachment to the traditional 'first past the post' system, by which electors mark ballot papers with a single cross, and the candidate with the most votes wins. It is one of the few subjects on which the party is genuinely conservative.
However, the supplementary vote did also appear to disadvantage the Tories (slightly). Research by David Cowling, formerly of the BBC, found that in 17 out of 218 mayoral or police and crime commissioner (PCC) elections, the candidate who came first on first-preference votes was defeated when the second preferences of losing candidates were reallocated. The net effect was that the Tories lost six contests that they would have won under first past the post; Labour lost four; independents gained eight; and Plaid Cymru and the English Democrats (Doncaster, 2009) gained one each.
Why is Labour changing it back?
For both partisan and public-spirited reasons. The main reason is probably that the Conservatives changed it, so Labour wants to do the opposite, a bit like the way that the steel industry was nationalised, denationalised and nationalised again in the 1940s, 50s and 60s.
Labour might also think it will gain a party advantage, although the figures quoted above suggest that would be minimal against the Tories. The party is more guilty of changing the rules to suit itself by its plan to cut the voting age to 16, although there is no timetable for this.
In both cases, the plan might backfire. The supplementary vote for mayoral elections might allow the split on the right to heal itself, if the supporters of Reform and Tory candidates give their second preferences to each other. Votes for 16- and 17-year-olds could also fail to deliver a Labour advantage if Reform ends up being as popular with teenagers as some surveys suggest.
Electoral reformers are delighted with the change back, and many Labour supporters want it for the principled reason that they think preferential voting is more democratic. Passionate supporters of proportional representation tend to be a bit snooty about it, but they dislike first past the post so intensely that they see any other system as an improvement.
The supplementary vote is not a proportional system – in the cases of mayors and PCCs it cannot be, as they are elected as individuals. But proportional systems often include preferential voting, and the Electoral Reform Society, for example, is delighted by Rayner's policy – because anything that takes away from the system that gave us a Labour government winning two-thirds of the seats on one-third of the votes is a good thing, in its view.
