What's wrong with the electoral college?

So Ed Milliband has been elected Labour leader, winning the unions big, and losing the members and MPs. Are the system and result wrong in some way? Does it matter that not all votes are equal? I don't think so.

There's nothing inherently unreasonable about having a ballot just of MPs or just of members, or just of some wider constituency, like an open primary. So what can be wrong with a heterogenous compromise between these homogenous ballots?

And yes, there is something wrong with representing the interests of unionised workers over and above everybody else - lower paid non-unionised workers, the unemployed, the self-employed, etc - but it is a wrong that is at the core of the Labour party identity. If the Conservatives had an electoral college with such a wider constituency, it would include all the already privileged and powerful people. Well perhaps not all of them - they might make a point of leaving out Trades Union bosses.

And if the Liberal Democrats had an electoral college including non-members, it would include everybody, or at least all self-identified supporters, reflecting our belief in not dividing people up arbitrarily by class or some other aspect of identity.

And we're not so far off an electoral college. Nick Clegg had the support of many more MPs than Chris Huhne, and this fact alone doubtless influenced some members to support him. And a leader should enjoy the support of MPs, so perhaps this could be recognised in the ballot rather than relying on the power of endorsement. On the other hand MPs are perhaps more likely to back the winner, so a ban on endorsements would be a good complement to an MPs section in an electoral college. And for deputy leader MPs vote and we don't. And it's not an outrage.

The Conservatives also have something like an electoral college, but cleverly have the MPs reducing the contenders to 2, and then the members making the final choice. I say cleverly, because this process is designed to enjoy all the benefits of AV while looking as little as possible like it.

Ah yes, AV. Did I mention that Ed Milliband only won on transfers, and that David was leading not only on first preferences but in every round but the last one. But of course supporters of Diane Abbot and Andy Burnham deserve to have some say in the final outcome. It's not a gerrymander to let them transfer their votes to one of the Millibands. Ed had more support than David in the electoral college as specified, and the FPTP result would have been a travesty.

So it is good to see the importance of transfers in proving the winner is better supported than the runner-up, is not just supported, but taken for granted by the Labour Party. Amen to that.

Government can do more harm than good

There's something fanciful about protests coming from Labour sympathisers about a possible deal with the Tories, and vice versa. Labour and the Conservatives have for decades conspired to keep each other in power - untrammelled power - about half the time. They do this by maintaining an electoral system that frequently hands absolute power to their supposed opponents on a minority of the vote.

But what goes around comes around, doesn't it? There is a quid pro quo for Labour and the Tories isn't there? No. Your co-conspirator-opponent can always do more harm in government than you can make up for when you are in government. The Tories can make a complete hash of privatising the railways, and it is beyond Labour's power to fix it. Labour can spend so wildly there is a deficit of £170bn. Could the Tories as easily generate a £170bn surplus? This is not just a pendulum swinging, it is actually, slowly, dragging the country backwards.

It is as if I were happy to lend my Ferrari to my wildly reckless neighbour, half the time, if in return he would lend his Aston Martin to my similarly reckless self.

It would not be so bad if our constitution had rudimentary checks and balances, if we had reasonable separation of powers between the executive, legislature and judiciary, but here too we are still in the Dark Ages. Successive governments feel the need so badly to be "strong" to overturn the harm done by their predecessors, that they give their successors the power to do it all over again. Spare us more strong government.

One might almost expect the Tories to understand this when they start talking about small government and the big society. Small government should imply weak government and strong government is necessarily big government. But they don't.

AV would be brilliant

Not so brilliant for the Lib Dems, but good for democracy. Not as good as STV of course, but let's face it, what is?

First Past the Post is the cornerstone of the brokenness of our politics. It has the power to subvert all your campaigning efforts for a good cause, making that cause weaker instead of stronger.

Support the environment? Vote Green where the Lib Dems could win and you do more harm than good.

Support Euro-nihilism? Vote UKIP where the Conservatives could win and you have the opposite effect.

Support socialism? Vote Socialist Labour, where Labour could win, and, well maybe the pattern breaks down there.

Want to stand as an independent? The problem is that whichever party it is you consider least bad, you will take more votes from them than from the others. So unless you can be very confident of winning, you will only make things worse.

AV fixes all this. It lets you stand and campaign for what you believe in without damaging the causes you support. It lets you vote for what you believe in without having to second guess what the result will be and support the lesser evil.

Sure, it's not proportional. That stinks. But proportionality is not the only important feature of an electoral system. If it were we would support list systems rather than STV. And this is the worst time of all to hold a referendum on a proportional system, when the BNP have just won seats.

If Brown and his few friends plump for AV, we will probably get it. We could even have it for the next general election - it is the only reform that won't require years of boundary commission work. And it may be a stepping stone to STV or AV+, but not towards party lists.

If they plump for PR, the whole thing will be quietly dropped, "after considered reflection", the next time Griffin gets some publicity. Or, even worse, we have a referendum on it after weeks of the Tory press giving publicity to the BNP at every opportunity in order to get a "no" vote. It would then be off the agenda for decades. This is the single worst time for a referendum on PR. Give it a few years when a couple more nazi MEPs won't have brought the world to an end.

See also: Anthony Hook, Mark Reckons, Himmelgarten Cafe, Jock Coats, Sunder Katwala, and Duncan Borrowman (already linked)