Gordon Brown will attempt to force plans for a referendum on changing Britain’s voting system through Parliament before the next election, The Times has learnt.
An agreement to table the enabling legislation, probably as a late amendment to the Constitutional Reform Bill, was thrashed out at Monday’s meeting of the Cabinet’s Democratic Renewal Committee (DRC).
Ministers said that the measure represented a “serious declaration of intent on political reform” — and could enhance prospects of a deal with the Liberal Democrats if there was a hung Parliament.
Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, is understood to have persuaded Cabinet colleagues to offer the “alternative vote” on a “take it or leave it” basis, drawing a line under a decade in which the merits of different systems have been endlessly debated.
The Liberal Democrats want a fully proportional system, but senior party sources suggested that they would back the alternative vote as a “small step in the right direction”.
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This would change the existing first-past-the-post system to one in which candidates would need to secure 50 per cent support from voters, who would rank them in order of preference on ballot papers. Crucially for many Cabinet ministers wary of proportional representation systems based on party lists, the alternative vote would maintain the direct link between MPs and their constituencies.
When Mr Brown promised to include a referendum on the alternative vote in the next election manifesto in his conference speech two months ago, he was greeted with cynicism by reformers who pointed out how the party had failed to fulfil similar promises at the last three elections.
As recently as last month, the Prime Minister rejected calls to include legislation for a referendum in the Queen’s Speech because the Conservative Party, as well as Labour’s own defenders of the existing system, would prevent any legislation reaching the statute books in the time remaining.
But Mr Brown relishes the chance to portray the Tories as a brake on political reform and has also been encouraged by polls that suggest Labour still has a good chance of denying David Cameron an overall majority at the next election.
A plan favoured by Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, to hold the referendum on the same day as the election was rejected by the DRC. Instead, the Government believes that the prospect of an early referendum, which Downing Street said would be held within the first half of the next Parliament, would be an important bargaining chip with the Liberal Democrats if the party held the balance of power after the next election.
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Mr Straw used a speech last week to declare his strong support for voting reform. “The two-party system of the 1950s is gone for good,” he said. He added that the “crisis of trust in politics following the expenses scandal” meant that it was time to bring in reforms that secured greater “legitimacy for the public”.
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, indicated last month that in the event of a hung Parliament the party that won the most support should form the next government.
But he deliberately left unclear whether this would be determined by the number of votes or seats won. Mr Clegg’s aides acknowledged that “because of the vagaries of the current electoral system” it was quite possible that Labour would have more MPs than the Conservatives — even on a smaller share of the vote A senior Liberal Democrat source said that constitutional reform was a priority but that power-sharing deals would be a “bridge that will have to be crossed at the time”. The source added: “We have heard many promises on reform from Labour and I will believe this one when I see it.”
Willie Sullivan, from the Vote for a Change campaign, said: “We welcome the Government’s acceptance that there’s a crisis and we need a referendum on the voting system to fix it.”
The alternatives
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? The alternative vote keeps the same constituencies, each returning one member to Parliament
? Candidates are ranked in order of preference by voters
? If no one has a majority of first choice votes, the one with fewest is eliminated and their second choice distributed. This is repeated until one candidate has more than 50 per cent
Source: Electoral Reform Society, Times Archive