It’s not the defeat of AV that makes it hard(er) to get, it’s the fact that Labour and the Tories don’t want it. The “stepping stone” argument was always tenuous, and only based on the idea that in the medium term it would create a parliament that was more balanced to the three party views of the nation and therefore create a circumstance whereby the Lib Dems had enough clout to demand PR.

Too much focus goes on to the PR in Commons debate. It’s not the be all and end all, and it is imperative now that we don’t spend our time licking our wounds over the commons when the Tories are already starting to use their perceived stronger position on anti-reform to back out of Lords reform. In 5-10 years we could have an 80-100% elected House of Lords using some form of PR system, a situation that would tick all of the boxes for the reasons we’d want PR for the house of commons aside from the one of governmental make-up.

Also, I’d argue we should never have a referendum on our voting system again. Or arguably referendums at all. It’s clear that people are unable to bring themselves to vote objectively and solely for the question on the table, that other factors such as party loyalty matter too much, and that regulation on what people can get away with saying isn’t tight enough.

I agree that Labour and the Tories not wanting it is a big factor, this is just another factor to do with how difficult a referendum would be to win. (In the unedited version on my blog I was a bit clearer: “It isn’t as if a referendum on PR would need any help being defeated. If you thought that the establishment was out in force to fight against AV, you’ll find even fewer members of the Labour Party who are willing to step up to defend a proportional system.”

A paragraph from the unedited version makes it a bit clearer what i mean by making the campaign more difficult to win as well.

“It should be fairly obvious that the rejection of AV will cause incredible problems for the ‘Yes’ side in any referendum on either of these systems. As we saw last week, in a referendum on an issue that most people have little knowledge of and care little about, campaigns with a catchy ‘hook’ do very well indeed. “We’ve already voted on this system and rejected it by a huge margin” is as catchy a hook as any – even if it isn’t really true and is irrelevant. Even simple association with the ‘loser’ system AV will put any ‘yes’ campaign for either system off on the wrong foot from the start.”

I don’t think so, of the 69% who voted no to AV,30% want PR and of the 31% who voted yes to AV, 95% want PR so half the people who voted last week want it, thats a good enough reason for change even if it’s in 10 years time,

Where is the 30% of those who voted no figure from?

Um, I understand what you’re trying to say but this article has a big flaw in that it considers AV to be part of STV. It’s not. The case is in fact the opposite.

STV is a proportional system in multi-member constituencies. When you have a single member to be elected then it functions identically to AV.

Sorry to be pedantic.

The worry for me is if the simple AV system can be sold as complex and arcane, then what chance would STV or AV+ have?

The No camp managed to make FPTP synonymous with One Person One Vote too as if the current system has a monopoly on that principle (whilst obviously not caring that by doing so they were accusing Australia of being undemocratic)

Also there is the complaint about coalitions dominating British politics which even (bizzarrely) the @no2av_yes2pr account on Twitter didn’t like (their last tweet is a No2AV RT for the Alan B’stard advert)

Let’s face it: The people listened to all the arguments and voted No. Unfair results may not be popular, but complexity and coalitions are even less popular and the people would rather stick with our current basic system regardless of it’s faults. It was an indication that this generation does’t want reform full stop.

The majority of conservatives (who voted NO) also want a resolution of the West Lothian Question. Their favoured solution is an English parliament. In fact, what they want is a Federal UK. This may be forced onto the national agenda by what happens in Scotland regarding independence. If a federal system came about, or even just an English parliament, then the voting system for the English and the UK parliaments would again be an issue needing resolution – but in a different political climate. Furthemore, the HoL would also need reform to reflect a new settlement. Some election in that place would become inevitable (if only to reflect a federal UK). All eyes then on what happens in Scotland – either indepence or a stronger devolution will have major constitutional effects on England.

@6 AV, IRV and STV are the same system, but in multi winner elections the outcome is proportional within any constituency. The difference in naming and normally using “STV” to only refer to the multi-member implementation is done to differentiate the significant differences in output that happen when you use multi members (e.g. a result proportional within that constituency)

@Ricardo “Let’s face it: The people listened to all the arguments and voted No.”

The people did no such thing. They were bamboozled by subtle manipulations of the truth (“One man, one vote”, “Panders to BNP”), fooled by outright lies (“£250m”) and encouraged to focus on short-term emotional arguments (“Say No to Nick Clegg”).

You’re right, though, that PR has no chance in the face of this. A necessary precursor to electoral reform is changing the law to make referendum campaigns answerable to the EC or at least the ASA, But how to legislate for the equivalent of a by-election?!

@10 and @2 Also important points on needing some kind of legal oversight of the campaigns. If the No campaign had been publicly censured for its lies early on it would have made the campaign feel very different and set a different tone. Arguably the unregulated free-for-all lost it for AV.

@Jon: AV is a degenerate case of STV. If you have STV, set n=1 and they have AV. STV cannot similarly be derived from AV.

It has been shown mathematically that there is no such thing as a “fair” voting system. The much more important question is good governance. The problem with an effective system of PR is to overcome the question “Do you want the same system as Italy, Israel and Belgium?”. As soon as you ask that you know what’s going to happen. If what you really want is an assembly that accurately represents the population there is a simple answer. Tell the politicians to go to hell and select 600 people at random. That would automatically give you a balanced sample for gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, age and anything else you can think of. It would also be a great deal cheaper than any alternative.

@2.Lee

Im glad somebody’s made that point. The electorate find it very hard to get excited about a referendum asking them which way of counting votes is the best. The logic probably being that it’s something that should already be ‘given’.
The flip side is though that negotiations for any kind of electoral reform have to have that hurdle because otherwise advocates of electoral reform would be arguing against democracy. It’s a tricky one

@12: Of course you can derive STV from AV – what we call STV is how a multi-winner AV election is counted. They’re both instant run-off voting. AV just has “n=1″ permanently set, just change it to “n=5″. You could argue that it would then by definition be STV but you’ve still derived it from AV…

It’s rather outside the point though, as obviously in practice neither system is very similar to AV in outcome. But they are clearly based upon the same principles, which is the problem.

I agree that the electoral reform movement needs to look hard at the results of this referendum. Most reformers want STV, but I fear that a referendum on it would almost certainly be lost because it would be so vulnerable to the same scaremongering that did for AV – “it’s too complicated, too expensive, would take too long to count the results, it’s only used in a couple of countries…” The great flaw in STV is that the counting process is fiendishly complex and, while it tends to produce the fairest results of any system in terms of taking everyone’s full preferences into account, the process of getting to that result is far from transparent to any non-mathematically-literate person.

Mind you, I don’t think we should be too pessimistic. AV was always likely to lose because it was enough of a change to get the defenders of the current system up in arms, but not enough of a change to really excite anyone. For most people, AV was an irrelevance – it wouldn’t have changed the winner in their constituency, and there was no reason to suppose that it would have made much difference to the national result. They looked at AV and saw a more complex and more expensive way of producing the same result. It’s telling that even in Northern Ireland, where people are thoroughly used to preferential voting and the wish to kick Nick Clegg presumably wasn’t a big factor, a majority still voted against AV. It just isn’t an attractive system.

There is another system – AMS. It would be a simple change – it retains FPTP for constituencies, just adding a top-up. It’s already used in Scotland and Wales, and plenty of other countries across the world. It has just produced a pleasingly decisive outcome in Scotland (and the full result there was known by Friday afternoon with no need for voting machines, so no chance for the No campaign to go on about the cost of counting the votes). Yes, there are downsides to it – it has a party list element, though that could be made less objectionable by making the lists open – but to me, AMS is clearly the system that reformers ought to be pushing for.

(As for AV+, it’s a needlessly complex compromise that was designed by Roy Jenkins for a very specific purpose: to win Tony Blair’s support for an electoral reform referendum by designing a system that was more proportional than FPTP, but still disproportional enough to have given Labour a big majority in 1997. It failed in that purpose and in my view it ought to be quietly forgotten.)

A system based on single member constituecies alone cannot produce overall proportionality except by chance. AV attempts to give more weight to all expressed preferences than does FPTP, but can itself lead to just as much overall disproportionality. Whilst the major parties continue to love single member constituencies, and AV is a dead duck, how can electors express greater preferences? Range (score) voting is even more complex than AV and will certainly require voting machines to count. So that is dead. But a recent suggestion has a lot going for it. That is, retain a single (cross) vote per elector as now. But allow multiple candidates from political parties. Then the elector votes for one candidate (as now), all votes are counted (as now), but then all the votes for each party are allocated to the most popular candidate from that party, then the candidate with the most votes wins. Hence, if Labour had three candidates in a seat with votes thus: A 100, B 200, C150. B would be the contending Labour candidate with 450 votes. Sounds more complicated than it is in practice.

The Green Party does support AMS. It is alright… in the unedited version (again) I did do a little bit on it:

“The Additional Member System (AMS) used to elect the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly is also a contender, but has its problems – at the constituency level it is FPTP where it shares most of its problems – the ‘spoiler effect’, wasted votes, split votes, and leading political parties at a national level to be disproportionately concerned with marginal constituencies.”

Arguably the unregulated free-for-all lost it for AV.

70/30. You can explain away a narrow points defeat on the vagaries of the system or on the quality ofthe campaigns, but when you’re rejected by a margin of more than two to one it means that the failure was of the product.

The difficulties with winning a referendum on PR are two-fold: getting one and then winning one. Neither the Tories nor Labour will offer one (overwhelming majorities within each party are against PR) so the only chance to get one actually going would be for the Lib Dems to win an overall majority.

Now we’ve all stopped laughing, there would then be a further problem of winning that referendum. The moment it would be announced there’d be a general feeling of “didn’t we already have this discussion? And didn’t we tell them to bugger off?” Don’t overestimate the general public’s interest in electoral systems. Even most politically engaged people are bored witless by discussions of the technical merits of PR, party lists, D’Hondt systems, STV, AV+ and so on. If you subject the public to another referendum on this arcane and tedious subject, you’ll get your arses handed to you again.

av and stv are the same in that they are both preferential voting and any campaign to system should now only be based on the non-preferential system thats used in wales, scotland and london we could also argue that it is a mix of what we do in euros and what we do in local national elections. i dont think preferential voting is that good what we should want is the most proportional allocation of peoples first preferences in a way that people can grasp. additional members system is that and we already use it in three regional bodies.

See my article on PR-based Lords Reform, over at LiDemVoice (!), and the comments there: You could for instance have an open list AMS PR system, or you could simply adopt the Welsh or Scots system for Westminster elections. Yes, preference-based voting is off the agenda for some time, because the NO campaign successfully won the argument (sic.) that AV is too hard for Britons to understand (!!); but that need be no obstacle to PR

@16

I agree that the electoral reform movement needs to look hard at the results of this referendum. Most reformers want STV, but I fear that a referendum on it would almost certainly be lost because it would be so vulnerable to the same scaremongering that did for AV – “it’s too complicated, too expensive, would take too long to count the results, it’s only used in a couple of countries…” The great flaw in STV is that the counting process is fiendishly complex and, while it tends to produce the fairest results of any system in terms of taking everyone’s full preferences into account, the process of getting to that result is far from transparent to any non-mathematically-literate person.

A simple way to conbat that would be to go for the same system they use in Scotland and Wales and London. That way the “it’s too complicated” argument would be neutralised. After all if it is already in use in elections in the UK it could hardly be argued that people are incapable of understanding it. Not of course that they wouldn’t try. But it would take a lot of the wind out of the sails from the antis.

reply to rupert read, il have a look at your article on lib dem voice but i have to say i dont like open lists as i find people from the same party publicly competing against each other as in irish stv and united states primarys an unsavoury practice that promotes the cult of the individual.

@19 Tim J

I’m not sure you’re right – consider the fact that the Yes campaign were ahead in the polls for most of the campaign until the last week or two, where there was a massive switch. So at one point most people seemed to think that AV was better. We know it wasn’t impossible for AV as a system to command a majority of support across the country.

But the opinion of most people did change very dramatically, and AV lost. What caused that? Well, they’d have have to have had some new information that set them against AV. If they changed their mind half way through, something that the collective No campaign and its auxiliaries said or did has to have persuaded them against the system during the course of the campaign, rather than people just being against AV from the start on principle.

Which is where the regulation of the campaign comes in… because most people seem to have conceded that the No campaign spoke barely an honest word throughout the whole campaign, what with its dying baby posters, ‘one person one vote’ nonsense, BNP scaremongering, and focus on Clegg rather than the system itself.

@13: What rubbish. Don’t give us all that baloney about the Arrow Theorem etc etc. Juust because there is no perfectly fair system doesn’t mean that there aren’t fairer and less fair systems. (In that respect, if in no other, ‘Campaign for fairer votes’ was a good and accurate name.) Fairness is an art, not a science. Only mad scientists think that that implies that there is no such thing as fairness.

I take the point that STV is similar to AV but multi-member constituencies are a bit of a game changer in terms of the rhetoric used. The no campaign pushes pretty strongly the idea that people 2nd preferences might make ‘undeserving’ candidates win. Now the yes campaign failed to push was that the existing system already delievered ‘undeserving’ MPs (except in the way that all MPs are undeserving simply because they’re MPs), but that aside this aspect of AV vs FPTP is a debate over the justness of outcomes, that a change in system will deprive you of your ‘best’ possible MP – because at the end of the day only one can win.

With multi-member constituencies this matter of ‘who wins’ is shifted because lots of people do. At the national level there are ultimate winners and losers but at the constituency level most voters win (fairness to voters), as most get the representation they want. The people who are winning are the people who deserve to as idea that there should be different levels of winning is fairly intutative (multiple stands on the podium and all). ‘Everybody wins!’ rather than ‘a slightly more deserving person wins!’ is a much easier point to get across language-wise.

The real problem with STV will be the complexity (‘They’re at it again! Voters already rejected AV! WTF is a quota? Elections should be decided in the ballot box, not by a calculator!’) But if we say it’s impossible to use systems more complex than our current one, then we can’t have electoral reform ever. We have to assume that we can do a better job countering this one and that real lessons will be learned from the failure of the last campaign. Again, this is about what results the system achieves. What No was selling was that ‘AV is a complex system that leads to unfair (and rigged) results’, I think a message that gets across ‘STV is a complex system that leads to intuitively fairer results’ has a chance, and ‘everyone gets what they want’ is a better basis to sell that on than what we had with AV.

Basically I think that losing the AV vote doesn’t make it harder to fight new referendums, so the issue that the current preferred systems have similarities isn’t a deal breaker. The problem is that losing the AV vote makes it much less likely to get another because it strengthens those the two main parties who would oppose it in a coalition agreement, and their problem isn’t that they don’t like AV, it’s that they don’t like electoral reform. Given that AV was the most mild change possible and they went after it with full force means there is no real point in debating which electoral system will be most acceptable to them, none of them are.

Having this referendum also set the precedent for them to oppose changing it at any future date without one and we have to also bear in mind British Columbia, where the second referendum on STV faired much worse than the first one (where there had been a majority in favour, not the 70/30 we got). If the question does come up, I think a citizens assembly is a good way of getting round the ‘Lib Dems always propose a system in their best interest’ perception but as someone whose really keen on electoral reform, I’m not even sure I’d mind if the Lib Dems didn’t make it a redline issue in any coalition negotiations in the next parliament. More time between the two referendums, with a chance of giving us several more examples of stable coalitions working in the UK, is good for us.

@ 2 Lee Griffin

So you are effectively in favour of democracy when it gives you what you want, but when it doesn’t you are unhappy with it?

AMS would obviously be a huge improvement on the status quo, whatever its imperfections. But how on earth will we get to the point where we can implement it? Not even the Lib Dems support it – if they were in a position to demand PR they would go for STV.

I definitely agree that a referendum on AMS would be easier to win based on what I wrote in the article. But the point is that STV and AV+ are the two PR systems that are most likely (although still not very likely) to ever make it onto the table in the future.

For something to happen in politics we you need to have someone who wants something and for them to be in a position to enact it. I just don’t see how we’d ever get into the position politically where someone who wanted AMS (as far as I can tell, just the Greens in terms of parties) would get into a position where they could demand it.

It needs to assess how best to convince a majority of the public that their side – whatever their side is and however they define it – can win more under PR than under FPTP.

We are now in the midst of what might be a tectonic shift in politics. Labour might well become a much broader and more liberal coalition (as Ed Miliband wants). The LibDems might well wither on the vine and die away as Greens and Labour draw their support.

We might even see the conservatives and lib dems (probably by then the liberals) form a long term coalition of the centre right – in reaction to lost support for lib dems from the left.

Or we might end up with much the same as before.

For those who want reform we need to hope we don’t end up with much the same as before. Only a massive shift in the normal political shape of this country will erase the stain of right wing coalition from the left-wing self-interest in reform.

However – if the lib dems cease to be a force – and other parties grow as a result – then the long hard slog of convincing the left again that it will win through reform can begin.

The reform dream is not dead for a generation. It just has to wait a few years before deciding its next course of action.

Pure party-list PR is another option, but there are legitimate arguments against it

For closed list as we use to elect MEPs outside Northern Ireland, yes, sure. I’d still take it over a non-proportional system, but I wouldn’t like it much.

For open list (vote for individuals within a party; party gets seats proportional to votes for all individuals on its list, but order of election within list determined by individual votes) those issues go away – or at least as much away as they do in STV.

I actually prefer open list to STV, if the electoral environment supports it (political parties exist and are likely to get most of the votes; constituencies large enough for several parties to get at least one seat).

One of the big successes of the anti-PR crowd has been to associate “PR” with “Closed list PR” and all its disadvantages.

Hamish/10: [accountability of referendum campaigns]

I’m not sure there’s any reasonable way to do this. How could you set up an elections court able to make binding decisions on the campaigns so that their statements could be assessed before polling day – as opposed to several months after the fact – and what sanction could they usefully impose if false statements were found? An ASA-like “don’t do it again” would be virtually useless.

Jon/15: what we call STV is how a multi-winner AV election is counted

Well, sort of. There are several different variants of STV (ERS, fractional, Meek, minimal, etc), depending on how surplus transfer is handled. They all reduce to AV for n=1 because AV doesn’t have surplus transfer, but there’s no one “STV” that AV can expand to in the same sense.

jon, the NO to Av yes to PR campaign, that was backed from everyone from David Owen And Rod Liddle to quite alot on the left of Labour including most of Jon Cruddas camapaign team at compass/ Demos

@26 Alex – Interesting post. I do agree with your analysis to a degree, particularly on how there needed to be more focus on the problems with FPTP, which seems to be a big part of everyone’s post-mortem analysis of the referendum. But I think it’s difficult to predict how it will play out in a referendum situation. Would there really be a fluent enough field of debate to get the point across about multi-member constituencies? I’m not sure that it would best the simple to understand ‘this is really similar to AV’ argument. I suppose it comes down to how well prepared the campaigns are.

One thing that really struck me is that with decades of experience fighting for electoral reform, the people in charge of the Yes campaign seemed to have absolutely no detailed, pre-prepared plan for how they would win the referendum. It’s possible that it was because the referendum was for AV and that all the rehearsals would have been for PR systems, but you’d have expected the ERS in particular to have some kind of instantly deployable response to every conceivable argument.

AMS appears to be the only version of PR that’s on the table, but I suspect there’s a “poisoned well” problem. The Yes campaign have made a big deal about “lazy MPs”, “out of touch politicians” and “helping the BNP”. AMS potentially rewards all of those categories, so the campaign would be very different – and, whatever people’s personal feelings, the principle that electoral system changes should be decided by referendum has now been effectively conceded in perpetuity.

It will be interesting to see how the public react to larger, odder-shaped constituencies, as well. Assuming AMS were achieved by making constituencies larger, rather than by appreciably expanding the Commons, that might end up being a strong argument against it – both from a local democracy perspective, but also in terms of the casework load, unless there were a way to get top-up MPs to handle casework.

@33

In Scotland and Wales top-up MPs are based on regions rather than just being completely non-geographic, they do casework there so that shouldn’t be a big deal.

Jon/24: consider the fact that the Yes campaign were ahead in the polls for most of the campaign until the last week or two, where there was a massive switch. So at one point most people seemed to think that AV was better.

I don’t think that’s true. The polls some distance out from the referendum included huge numbers of “don’t knows” – Yes may have been ahead of No among those who’d already made up their mind, but that was all.

There may have been a point at which more people actively wanted AV than actively didn’t want AV – but the vote would still have been lost had it been held then because “don’t know” effectively means “No, but could be convinced”.

The story of welsh devolution offers a glimmer of hope.

1979 devolution rejected by a huge margin.

1997 devolution wins just.

2011 – support for further devolution passed by a bigger margin.

Arguably the key reason for the turnaround was Tony Blair supporting devolution and campaigning for it during his honeymoon period. The key reason for support for it increasing was simply that it existed and all sane people realised it needed proper powers to work (hence UKIP opposed it).

We can draw 2 lessons from this:

(1) we need a charismatic and popular leader to bring people towards supporting a proportional system. Hence it has the greatest chance if a labour leader campaigns for it whilst enjoying a honeymoon. Blair could have won it in his first 2 years. A referendum agreed as part of coalition deal won’t win if the more popular party opposes it.

(2) Once it is in place and people see that the scare stories were just that, support is likely to increase as people see the benefits through experience. Thankfully we already have PR systems in the devolved nations and euro elections. If one of those systems is proposed, supporters of reform will be able to point to a working example.

So where now for electoral reform? Winning the labour party over is the first and crucial task. Which will probably take a few results under FPTP that are blatantly unfair on labour.

@34 Scotland has smaller constituencies and smaller regions. To make Westminster proportional in the same way, and with the same constituency size, would require 1,500 MPs. A Scottish “region” is about the size, in population terms, of a small English County.

> So where now for electoral reform? Winning the labour party over is the first and crucial task. Which will probably take a few results under FPTP that are blatantly unfair on labour.

Well, 2015 will almost certainly be that. But then, if 1983 didn’t convince them, what will? They just keep on thinking that there’ll be more 1997s, or even grossly unfair results in their favour like 2005. (It’s worth noting that the Tories never complained about 2005. They knew that the system that was kicking them would soon swing back in their favour, and that any fairer system would kick them harder: so they sucked it up.)

Ed Miliband decided to support Yes very, very quietly, so as to pick up progressive support without alienating the dinosaurs. With Clegg being pretty much kept hidden by the Yes campaign, there was a leadership void which he could easily have filled. Instead, he kept so far out of the limelight that many Labour supporters didn’t even know what side he was on. It was a cynical and cowardly decision.

“Well, 2015 will almost certainly be that. But then, if 1983 didn’t convince them, what will?”

What’s your basis for that? 2015 looks like being an election where the right-wing vote is split, not the left-wing vote. In any event, despite the myth of the “fractured left-wing vote”, most Alliance voters in 1983 told pollsters that their second preference was the Tories.

“Ed Miliband decided to support Yes very, very quietly, so as to pick up progressive support without alienating the dinosaurs. With Clegg being pretty much kept hidden by the Yes campaign, there was a leadership void which he could easily have filled. Instead, he kept so far out of the limelight that many Labour supporters didn’t even know what side he was on. It was a cynical and cowardly decision.”

Many of us feel Ed was far too involved in the Yes campaign, given 1) It was going to lose, and it would have been better not to be associated, 2) Most of the PLP were against it, for good reason, and 3) There were elections to be won, more important than the referendum either way.

@36

Actually – the lesson with Welsh devolution was that politics changed utterly – and thus opinions changed.

the post war consensus ended in westminster but not in Wales in 1979. Hence they wanted things to change. It wasn’t the campaign. A campaign is only ever a small proportion of the result.

@13

The counter to which is: Do you want the same voting system as Germany, Scandinavia and the vast majority of countries in the world – several of which outperform us on things like the economy, health, well being, satisfaction, education, etc.

By contrast the only examples they can point to are systems that don’t use the same method of PR that we would. One of the reasons I advocate using STV is because we have it in use in Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as the Republic of Ireland. This makes it very easy to make clear, and relevant comparisons.

@Jon I don’t think the hatred of AV is actually that deep at the moment or is likely to last that long. If people don’t understand it at the moment, I’m trusting them not to remember why they didn’t vote for it in ten years time. Any time the hypothetical future ‘no’ campaign is talking about AV will be time spend away from how great FPTP is, how sacred single-member constituencies are and being so very confused by quotas – I think they’ll judge there are more potent arguments to spend their evil on so I don’t think AV will be a big issue with the general public (but ‘we just did this’ generally for electoral reform might be).

I’m not sure the problem was that there weren’t counter-arguments – for people following on the internet, No was being torn apart in real-time – but that there was no real bridge between that and voters who were only passively engaged (I’m going to join everyone else in being completely mystified by at the freepost thing). We have almost no referendums and so actual experience with campaigning for them is pretty thin on the ground. The general message of Yes would have been better suited to PR (if only then because it’s arguments would actually be true about safe seats), but I suspect the Yes message came more out of the expenses scandal rather than the emergency strategy hidden behind a ‘in case of referendum’ break glass’ at the ERS. Comparisons with the US FairVote campaigns (which have actually had some success in doing exactly what this was one trying to do) might be interesting.

“Hence they wanted things to change. ”

it was pretty much 50/50 in 97.

Planeshift

Exactly – which the end of the post-war consensus in Westminster made happen. Before that there was widespread opposition.

Whether the electorate would vote for PR (or any other voting system) any time in the future is arguable. What is much more difficult to imagine is when and why such a referendum would be called.Do we really expect another coalition deal after the next election?

Of course, we can always hope that UKIP will make enough progress to split the vote on the Right. I’m sure Mr Cameron is light enough on his feet to pretend he was in favour of AV all along.

Why a referendum at all? There is plenty of evidence that the topic is just too complicated for the electorate to decide. We wouldn’t ask the electorate as a whole to decide on any other set of laws or policy, so why this one. There was no referendum on the voting systems for the NI, Scottish or Welsh parliaments.

Of course, until the Labour Party understands that changing the voting system for Westminster may be the only way it can compete with the Tories successfully except after a Tory government has had enough time to become extremely unpopular, no change is going to happen, whether it is decided by referendum or not.

Yes, I think an AMS referendum would be far more winnable – it could keep constituency votes exactly as they are, and unlike AV can be sold with a simple, easy to understand message: that it’s fair for the number of seats a party gets to match the number of votes it gets.

I cannot but help think that the need to engage the youth vote will bring the subject back to the table within a decade. I suggest that had AV adopted now government would be able to fend off PR. When the debate comes came it will be between FPTP and PR. It may be very difficult to defend FPTP in such a debate whereas AV is undoubtedly more engaging than FPTP.