In her article in The Guardian (10^th June), Val McDermid described how her desire for proportional representation had been reignited over the past year by conversations with her 16 year-old son.  These conversations were triggered by the election of Donald Trump and advocated that Westminster should adopt the additional member voting system used for elections to the Scottish Parliament.  Over a similar period, however, I have found my beliefs move in the opposite direction.

Val concludes her article with the following words from her son, “Wouldn’t it be great if someone came up with a system of governance that worked for everybody?”  In answer to that, I say that we already have a beautifully simple yet flexible system of governance that should work for everyone.  The problem is that we have chosen to corrupt it.  We don’t see it as being corruption because we have dressed it up with rules and conventions.  As Jesus said to the Scribes and Pharisees, all those years ago, “You scrub the outside of the cup and the dish, but the inside is full of extortion and moral flabbiness”.  Many people don’t see boxing as being violent because of its rules and conventions, but at the end of the day it is just two people attempting to punch each other into submission.  You can’t get much more violent than that.

In October 1774, two hundred years before my birth, John Wesley wrote in his journal:

I met those of our society who had votes in the ensuing election, and advised them:

1) To vote, without fee or reward, for the person they judged most worthy.
2) To speak no evil of the person they voted against.
3) To take care their spirits were not sharpened against those that voted on the other side.

Although times (and, indeed, elections) have changed considerably since then, this came to my attention during an election campaign in which I had reached broadly similar conclusions:  rejecting party politics and deciding that the only honest vote I could make was for the person who I felt was best equipped to represent me in parliament.

Personal attacks on politicians – both local and national – from rivals, media and voters sadly seem to be an accepted part of the rough and tumble of political battle these days.  Another side of this would be the all too common tactic of attempting to induce voters to fear your opponents rather than trust in the truth of your own arguments.  At the end of the day, though, these things all amount to speaking evil of the person you have voted against or plan to vote against.  Another sad fact of modern politics is to blame outcomes on people who made a different voting choice to the one that you made.  Another side of this would be the comments I’ve read saying “I can’t understand how anyone could vote for XXX!”  I would suggest that people making such comments either do not want to understand or have not made sufficient effort to understand.  All this amounts to sharpening our spirits against those that voted on the other side.

Wesley’s first point, however, I suspect we rather take for granted in the UK.  Election expenses scandal notwithstanding, we are fortunate to live in a society where financial inducement to vote is something to guard against rather than a part of everyday life.  However, as the dust settles, I have found myself worried not by the notion of people receiving a fee in return for their votes (something that the prohibition on signing ballot papers guards against) but by the notion of people receiving a reward.  I have placed manifestos in the firing line on several occasions in my blog, complaining about the ways in which they:  make unrealistic promises to appeal to our need for certainty in an uncertain world; limit the ability of government to react to events and; take the power of decision making away from our MPs.  These things are all symptoms of an underlying disease:  manifestos exist to bribe us to vote for political parties.  What are manifestos, if not a list of rewards on offer in exchange for our votes?

The rewards on offer are sometimes explicit gain for certain sections of the population:  vote for us and we’ll give you this.  (We gloss over such attempts at bribery by calling them “appealing to certain sections of the population”.)  Examples of this could be:  lower taxes, free bus passes and free university education.  On other occasions, the rewards on offer are rather more subtle, designed to appeal to our better instincts:  vote for us and we’ll give this to other people.  Often, manifesto promises are cleverly designed in both ways, for example winter fuel payments.  This policy offers direct financial benefits to a large, electorally-active section of the population.  It is, essentially, a seasonal bump in the state pension, but by marketing it as a winter fuel payment it also appeals to the compassionate instincts of people who do not stand to gain financially.  I’m not saying that any of these policies are intrinsically wrong (some of them I agree with) but when political parties set them up as “vote for us and we’ll give you this” that is bribery.

As well as arguing against manifestos, I have also been arguing recently against political parties.  The two things are, of course, linked:  political parties write the manifestos.  However, I wonder whether the two are more intertwined than that.  No single candidate can offer a meaningful policy bribe.  By grouping together in large, powerful political parties, however, they can make these bribes meaningful and increase the size of the rewards on offer.  To ensure the bribes are paid up (something we euphemistically call “acting on their mandate”), parties have to enforce discipline by whipping.  Why have we allowed political parties, and the people running them from the shadows, to take control of our MPs?

Returning to where I started, Val McDermid concludes that to get the change she advocates we don’t need another referendum on electoral reform:  we need “a parliament willing to put the interests of democracy ahead of naked, self-perpetuating self-interest”.  However, electoral reform would enshrine in law our slavery to the parties and condemn us to their authoritarian rule forever.  We would finally lose sight of our duty to vote for the person we judge most worthy.

To get the changes I want, we don’t need electoral reform:  we simply need to clean the inside of the dish by being a people willing to put the interests of democracy ahead of naked, self-perpetuating self-interest.  We need to commit ourselves at future elections:

1) To vote, without fee or reward, for the person (or persons) we judge most worthy.
2) To speak no evil of the person (or persons) we vote against.
3) To take care our spirits are not sharpened against those that voted on other sides.