WHEN your argument is weak, set up some straw men – they are easy to demolish. That's how George Foulkes last week tried to show that politicians cannot be held to account by proportional voting systems.
He wrote at length about the national party list voting system in Macedonia. He wrote even more about the hybrid additional member system we use to elect the Scottish Parliament, with its closed party lists.
But both of these are "straw men" in a
ny discussion about holding politicians to account. Neither delivers personal accountability, and only the ill-informed would claim they did. But George Foulkes is not ill- informed – his purpose is more devious.
He wants to defend the discredited first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system we use to elect MPs to Westminster and makes the amazing claim that because we elect one MP from each geographically-defined constituency, we can in some way hold these MPs specially to account.
But the opposite is the truth. These single-member constituencies stop most of us from holding our political representatives properly to account.
There are undoubtedly many angry electors who want to enforce some electoral accountability on MPs over the expenses scandal, but if those angry electors are supporters of the same party as the sitting MP, the only way they can get rid of an unsatisfactory member is to vote against their preferred party.
That is surely a very perverse way of holding the MP to account.
The angry electors may well want rid of the MP, but they don't want to be forced to vote for one of the opposition parties.
How different it would be if those electors had a free choice among several candidates nominated by their preferred party. They could then still vote for their preferred party but make sure the unsatisfactory MP was not re-elected.
They would have achieved their objective and the sitting MP would have been made to pay for their actions. But they would have done it without having to inflict damage on the party they support.
That is exactly what the STV system of proportional representation would offer. We could perfectly well elect our mainland MPs from multi-member constituencies.
For example, the six Edinburgh MPs could all be elected together, from one Edinburgh constituency. In Westminster terms, they all represent a common geographical interest, so nothing would be lost by electing them together and a great deal would be gained.
The larger parties would all put up teams of candidates and there would be strong incentives for them to nominate at least one more candidate than the number of seats the polls suggested they might win.
So if your party has put up three candidates, and one of those three is a sitting MP you want out, with STV-PR you don't have to vote against your party. Instead, you vote "1" and "2" for the other two candidates nominated by your party, with the MP at "3". That way your party will get its fair share of the seats, but the unsatisfactory MP will be dumped.
And it doesn't stop there, because with STV-PR you can also mark your preferences for all the candidates of all the other parties. So you can help unseat their unsatisfactory MPs as well.
At first sight it may seem a paradox that electing several MPs together would increase their accountability to their local constituents. But that's the reality of giving the voters free choice among all the candidates through STV-PR.
That really would hold the politicians to account – no wonder some of them don't want it.
• Dr James Gilmour is a voting reform campaigner.
The full article contains 623 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
