Barry: Johnson gets big thumbs up

May 27 2009 by Barry Gibson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

THREE cheers for a Cabinet minister – and they don’t get many these days.

This week Health Secretary Alan Johnson came out in support of electoral reform as a solution to the crisis caused by MPs’ expenses claims.

This may seem strange – why suggest proportional representation as the answer to the problem of people thinking the taxpayer should fund their duck-house habit?

But on closer inspection, you find that the wheezing horse that is first-past-the-post is partly to blame for the current mess.

There is only one good thing to say about the voting system used to elect MPs – it doesn’t discriminate against people who are scared of numbers. All you have to do is go into the polling booth and put an ‘X’ next to your favourite candidate – no need to worry about scary things like the numbers 1, 2 and 3.

It’s a simple system producing simply stupid results.

In the 2005 general election – with Labour’s war in Iraq massively unpopular – the party won just 35% of the vote nationally. So was the party kicked out of office?

No, Labour was returned to power with 55% of the seats. Meanwhile the poor old Lib Dems – who won one in five votes – got one in 10 seats.

What’s the point of an electoral system which doesn’t at least broadly reflect the will of the people?

But what’s even worse about first-past-the-post is that, more than any other system of voting, it breeds the complacency of safe seats.

Six out of every 10 MPs have majorities so large that they have to do something pretty spectacularly stupid to lose their seat – and some of them are trying.

But what effect does this have on voters? Look around the Huddersfield area and you will see.