No to AV, no to status quo!

Submitted by Matthew on 6 April, 2011 - 9:57

With the referendum on Alternative Voting fast approaching, most people in the UK can barely contain their excitement.

People have been known to faint simply upon knowing that an election circular from either side had arrived in the house, and sales of Eddie Izzard DVDs have gone up by 341%; a fact we can only attribute to his starring role in the “yes” campaign.

Election material from the “yes to fairer votes” campaign has been delivered to every elector in the country, with a minor storm being generated because black poet Benjamin Zephaniah was left off its leaflets for outside of London. The gallery of other supporters included Joanna Lumley and Tony Robinson, and if the endorsements of Patsy Stone and Baldrick aren’t enough to secure your vote, then what will?

While there are few consistent political demarcations in the debate — with figures from all three mainstream parties on both sides — most major trade unions have come against AV. GMB, ASLEF and the POA all sent circulars to all members urging them to vote “no”. But their arguments hardly take working-class democracy as their starting point. The GMB, for example, has “concluded that first past the post is a tried and tested system which delivers strong single-party government and that it is simple and easy to understand and with it there is a strong constituency link.” It is hardly the job of the labour movement to defend FPTP, a system which has effectively disenfranchised working-class people in many areas…

Workers’ Liberty is for a “no” vote in the referendum; we believe that an AV system would push parties into horse-trading based on second-preferences, and that it is far too subject to how big parties choose to “play” the system. The success of AV would also mean, in all likelihood, a big setback for any possibility of securing genuinely democratic electoral reform — such as a move to a proportional representation system — in the near future.

But rather than positioning ourselves as defenders of the status quo, we believe the left and the labour movement should oppose AV and FPTP in the name of real reform — in the first place, reforms to the existing system such as the introduction of PR but ultimately the replacement of parliamentary democracy with working-class democracy.

That is not something that can be secured through referenda, but only through working-class struggle.

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