Guess who would have run Britain under AV?

Try to imagine a Britain in which Margaret Thatcher had never been Prime Minister. Where the Welsh windbag Neil Kinnock had bluffed his way into No 10 thanks to a shabby deal done with Paddy Ashdown after the 1992 general election. And where Tony Blair’s New Labour landslide in 1997 was even bigger, giving him almost unlimited power in Parliament. Welcome to modern Britain under the Alternative Vote system.

While supporters of AV — whose adoption will be the subject of a public referendum on May 5 — claim it is merely a way to make the way we vote ‘fairer’, the reality is that if previous general elections had been held under the confusing and costly system Nick Clegg and his friends seek to impose, our recent political landscape would have been shockingly different.

To see why, let us look in detail at Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979. It was an extraordinary moment: the arrival in Downing Street of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister in a country far more conservative — with a small ‘c’ — than Britain is today.

Under the AV system, Margaret Thatcher might never been Prime Minister and Neil Kinnock could have bluffed his way into No¿10
Under the AV system, Margaret Thatcher might never been Prime Minister and Neil Kinnock could have bluffed his way into No¿10

Under the AV system, Margaret Thatcher might never been Prime Minister and Neil Kinnock could have bluffed his way into No 10

Thatcher’s majority was 43 seats. This was not a landslide by any means, but it was sufficient to enable her to force through the radical reform needed to turn around Britain — which was then an economic basket case — by taking on the overweening power of the unions, lowering taxes, restraining spending and unleashing the forces of enterprise.

Would Margaret Thatcher, under the AV system, have become the fearless Iron Lady who boldly transformed her country’s fortunes at home and abroad? Highly unlikely. For she would have struggled to secure a working parliamentary majority and thus an outright victory.

The AV system is fiendishly complicated. But a brief explanation of how it works — and how it differs from the ancient first-past-the-post system we have long used — is necessary to explain why Margaret Thatcher’s majority could have disappeared.

Our existing system of voting is brutally efficient. The candidate with the most votes in your constituency wins the seat. It is utterly straightforward, like a runner winning a race or a football team scoring more goals than their opponents.

Under the AV system, however, voters rank the candidates in their constituency in order of preference. If one candidate has more than 50 per cent of the first preference votes then he or she is declared the winner.

Where no candidate gains 50 per cent of the first preference vote,  voters’ second, third, fourth and even fifth preferences are recounted until a winner emerges.

In the case of the 1979 election, this would have dramatically disadvantaged Margaret Thatcher.

Liberal voters — who were more naturally inclined towards Labour policies, whose party had only two years earlier joined the Lib-Lab pact keeping Labour’s Jim Callaghan in No 10 in 1977, and who would have been innately distrustful of an untried woman with robust Right-wing values — would have been more likely to deliver their second preferences to Labour.

Under AV, where no candidate gains 50 per cent of the first preference vote, voters' second, third, fourth and even fifth preferences are recounted until a winner emerges

Under AV, where no candidate gains 50 per cent of the first preference vote, voters' second, third, fourth and even fifth preferences are recounted until a winner emerges

Likewise, Labour voters would have probably given their second preference votes to Liberals.

How could this have had an impact? Under AV, Tory candidates who came first in their seats but who did not get 50 per cent would submit to another round of counting.

Second preference votes would then be counted. And if Labour and Liberal voters were more likely to back the non-Thatcher option then a number of seats would have been taken from the Tories and given to Labour or the Liberals.

It is, of course, impossible to guess quite how many seats might have gone Labour’s way. But it  required only 22 seats to fall to Labour for Margaret Thatcher’s majority of 43 to have been wiped out, transforming the outcome of the general election.

If 30 seats had changed hands in this way then Labour and the Liberals combined would have had more seats than the Tories. The sitting Prime Minister Jim Callaghan — he of the Winter of Discontent in which rubbish piled up in the streets as a result of widespread strikes in 1978/9 — may even have managed to survive as PM.

Result? Economic disaster, with the IMF probably having to bail out Britain again. One can envisage a succession of Left-wing coalitions then going on to rule Britain for years, resulting in higher tax rates, excessive government interference and a deeply uncompetitive country belittled on the world stage.

The Tories might not have lost so many seats under AV, but the situation could still have been disastrous for the country. We could have had a minority Conservative administration, and in those circumstances Thatcher would not have lasted long as Tory leader.

The Liberals or the Ulster Unionists might have offered to form a coalition with her in some cosy back-room deal, but the lady is not one of life’s natural coalition-builders, preferring strong principles and tough action. In a minority Thatcher government, the Tory ‘Wets’, Conservative grandees and members of the party establishment who opposed her clear-sighted policies would have removed her. Without a proper majority she would have been sunk years before anyone had heard of the Belgrano.

Even if by a quirk of the system AV had allowed Thatcher a small working majority, it would have been an insecure basis for a long-lasting government.

The same Wets would have been even stronger inside her Cabinet than they actually were between 1979 and 1983, and might have seen off the one party leader determined to avert an economic crisis. After 1983, we can assess the impact of AV in more detail because that was the year the BBC started asking voters in its general election exit polls for their second choice, enabling academics to crunch the numbers.

What emerges is nightmarish, unless you like the idea of Neil Kinnock in No 10 propped up by the Lib Dems and their then leader, the insufferable Paddy Ashdown.
According to calculations by Electoral Calculus — a website run by election experts — in the 1992 election, under AV John Major would have fallen short of a majority by 28 seats, despite securing the Tories their highest ever number of votes and a majority of 21 in the actual first-past-the-post system

Kinnock and the dreaded Ashdown combined could conceivably have forced Major from office quickly. The resulting pro-EU, high-tax and spendthrift administration would have produced policies to make Middle Britain’s eyes water.

And what of Tony Blair? Under AV, the extent of his dominance could have been virtually unprecedented.

The British Election Study, comprising a group of leading academics, suggests that Blair, who was coldly contemptuous of Parliament at the best of times, would have had 445 MPs, a majority in excess of 200 and with licence to do even more of what he pleased.

Adopting AV will fundamentally alter the character of British democracy, if the electorate is misguided enough to vote for it next month.

If it had been in place since the end of the Seventies, British politics — and the country itself — would have been far bleaker in the past 30 years than it has been.

In that time, AV would have boosted the Lib Dems because they would so often have been the second choice of both Tory and Labour voters, enabling them to keep on insisting on a major role in coalition governments for themselves. This is why Nick Clegg is now such an enthusiastic supporter of what he once called a ‘miserable little compromise’.

If it is introduced, AV will also make the party leaders even more timid than they are now. They will feel compelled to avoid strong policies, for fear of alienating voters who might give them their second preference vote. If you think our politics is bland, remote and smug now, try it under AV.

But the worst result of AV is that it would make coalitions more likely, with all that involves in terms of deal-making and stitch-ups concluded behind closed doors.

The lesson is clear: if you want a country run by the likes of Ashdown and Kinnock then vote for AV on May 5. If you want governments of principle and courage with the ability to take radical action in times of crisis then vote No.

A lunatic tax on aspiration to aid Pakistan

Oliver Letwin's opposition to the expansion of airports and disdain for cheap foreign holidays is in keeping with the detachment of the elite from the concerns of middle-ground voters

Oliver Letwin's opposition to the expansion of airports and disdain for cheap foreign holidays is in keeping with the detachment of the elite from the concerns of middle-ground voters

Last weekend I revealed that Oliver Letwin, a leading minister and Cameroon ‘thinker’, had told London Mayor Boris Johnson that the Government didn’t want ‘more people from Sheffield flying abroad on holiday’. Letwin is now even more unpopular in Sheffield than the discredited Nick Clegg, the local MP.

But Letwin’s comment perfectly illustrated a great truth about the appalling condition of our politics. The aspirational classes — those earning modest amounts who want better lives for themselves and their families and are prepared to work for it — are being completely disenfranchised by the political class. The metropolitan Cameroons and their equally detached Lib Dem allies have no natural feel for the ambitions of the ‘strivers’.

Neither does Ed Miliband. He talks about the ‘squeezed middle’. But his answer seems to be ever higher taxes and more spendthrift policies on the never-never.

Letwin’s opposition to the expansion of airports and disdain for cheap foreign holidays — inspired by the Government’s deranged campaign to prove its green credentials — is very much in keeping with the detachment of the elite from the concerns of middle-ground voters. And then this week the Coalition lowered the level at which taxpayers start paying the higher rate of tax. Another 750,000 people will be ensnared.

Dare to earn more than £42,475 and you are now clobbered at 40p in the pound.

This lunatic tax raid on aspiration will raise £650 million for the Treasury.

By an extraordinary coincidence that is precisely the amount that the Prime Minister announced this week he is sending to Pakistan to be spent on schools there.