It is an entirely subjective argument that says that forms of proportional representation (PR) are more just than plurality voting... You may think PR is more "just"; I just don't see it. Is proportional representation a justice issue, as Bishop Jarrett argues?.I think that his dismissal is a little disingenuous. I think that it must surely be fairly clear that there is an injustice -let's call it a lack of fairness- at the level of a parliament not to represent votes more fairly than FPP regularly and necessarily does in a national multi-party scene. I do find it difficult to believe that he cannot discern some prima facie injustice/unfairness in the way that the 2015 General Election distributed seats in parliament in relation to national vote shares. To admit the discrepancy and to recognise it as having failure-to-represent effects is not necessarily to take stand either way on the advisability of one system or the other. It would merely be to admit that there are occasions in human affairs when claims of justice have to be weighed and may, to degrees, conflict.
A bit later in his letter, Mr Ould alleges that PR fails to offer direct accountability via MPs in constitutencies and thereby is less just:
Start moving to the single transferable vote, and you water down that direct connection. If you have straight national PR, then you lose that local accountability altogether. For some, this notion of local accountability is a factor that makes first-past-the-post far more just than PR systems.In passing, I note that by writing 'more just', he accepts a degree of justice for PR. So I take it that his 'just not getting it' is a relative (and rhetorical) rather than an absolute point. and that we are weighing up two claims for relatively just outcomes.
More seriously, he is ignoring the Electoral Reform Sociey's preferred option of multimember constituencies (probably 4 or 5members in each constituency in Britain) which it is being suggested is the way that STV be operated. It is suggested precisely because it retains that local accountability prized by Mr Ould. Obvisouly this point considerably weakens the relative case for greater justice of the FPP system as put forward by him.
I read his letter to make a case that FPP is more just because it delivers local accountability whilst evading the force of the the argument for the fairness PR by not engaging with the national proportionality issue. However the local accountability issue can be addressed in the way that the ERS suggests while delivering results that are far more fair to a multiple of parties at a national level.
I'd have to say though that there is a further issue of principle involved which I believe undermines further the defence of FPP as made by Mr Ould. It is that the representative system as he portrays it, really only makes relatively good sense on the basis that the representation remains by persons rather than parties. I say this because the issue of justice or fairness arises here in relation to representation of parties at a national level. A government is formed from people elected to a national body -parliament- whose commonality is their party political bond and manifesto. Therefore, at a national level, we should expect a relatively fair ('just') representation according to representatives' allegiance to party manifestos. That is the basis for the justice of the idea that a national parliament should represent reasonably well the spread of opinion in the nation as a whole.
If he wants to make the personal representation idea primary, then candidates for parliament should not be identified as belonging to political parties in elections and whip systems and other partisan behaviour in parliament should be outlawed. But as soon as you introduce party political allegiances then you weaken the personal accountability idea at a local level and scale up representation towards a view of ideas or manifestos being represented in national policy. The party 'brand' links to the national direction of political effort.
Furthermore, when we have more than two parties contending elections for national levels of government, then we have already begun to erode the personal accountability argument in favour of a 'brand' being franchised in local constituencies where the accountability goes also to a party discipline and personal favours, deals etc.
Since, at a national level, we have, in practice, parties forming governments, then proper acknowledgement of party politics should be taken into account in the voting system.
We should note that this party political branding of allegedly personal candidature already produces the manifest injustices of so-called safe seats in which elected members can, and sometimes do, take their personal accountability somewhat lightly since they know that the few hundred voters who may be dissatisfied with their less than properly accountable-to-constituents efforts in office will only tip the balance against them once in a blue moon (like an SNP resurgence in Scotland several generations and some very particular contextual happenstances in the making). And that is before we consider the arrogance of MPs towards constituents who don't appear to share their views, and the safer their seats the greater the temptation and more frequent the falls.
So if it's accountability that is desired and FPP remains the system, then finding a mechanism to 'unsafe' MPs seats and to unbrand their politics is what's wanted. But if we're making those kinds of reforms, we should note that STV in multi-member constituencies goes some considerable way to addressing the 'safe-seats' issue, diminishes the deleterious national effects of party branding by allowing plurality of views to be more fully represented (and indeed allows for independent candidates) and would help raise the game of lazy constituency MPs who would find themselves being outshone by more diligent colleagues and perhaps by PPC's in their own or other parties.
I'd have to say that it is not entirely subjective to say the PR might be better that FPP. We would have to agree of critera for judgment. But te decry the arguments as subjective as if that made them doubtful would be to fail to note his own arguments as putting another subjective point of view. In fact, both are offering reasons designed to appeal to senses of what 'ought to be' and these are rooted in something pretty close to objectivity in their appeals to fairness and to accountability. The question is what way does the best as far as we can tell according to criteria of fairness and accountability. This does not rule out a claim being made that one system is more just than another, provided we understand in what way justice is being defined.
As a codicil, I found another letter interesting from a Michael Cavaghan-Pack.
Proportional representation, for which Bishop Martyn Jarrett makes an impassioned plea, was rejected in the 2011 referendum by 67.9 per cent to 32.1 per cent.While it is true there was a referendum on the voting system for elections of MPs to Parliament, it was not about proportional representation. Rather it was for the Alternative Vote which can sometimes deliver more proportional effects at a national level, but sometimes can deliver even less proportional effects. As such it can't really be said that we've had a referendum on PR. And in any case we should note the political context and have to ask how far it was actually being used by the electorate as a way to register dissatisfaction with the coalition government and the LibDems in particular. The irony being that AV was in the manifesto of Labour party and not the LibDems, presumably being accepted by the LibDems as about as much concession as they could get from the Conservatives which went a little way to their preference for STV.
And in any case, is there a set time between referenda on what might be judged the same or similar-enough topics? I think the simple answer is 'no'. But as this would be a different thing again, it doesn't apply in any case.
