(from the Electoral Reform Society (UK) newsletter, August 2021)
Baroness Randerson was a member of the Welsh Assembly, the Senedd, from 1999 to 2017. She had helped found the Senedd in 1999 and here looks back on its founding as a PR body and her hopes of it evolving into a system with no aspect at all of FPTP Single-member plurality elections. She expresses her hope that the Senedd would be elected through STV in the future.
As an Assembly member of Cardiff Central she worked alongside members elected as additional members for the South Wales Central region. In the region, eight represented districts, and four were elected as additional members.
As she says here, such a system, like other PR systems, meant there were no safe seats but each politician was pushed to do his or her best job to ensure re-election. As we know in Alberta, historically the candidate who ran for the leading party, of whatever quality, was usually elected or re-elected under FPTP. But such was not the case in a PR system.
BR: What was so exciting ... there was a very strong feeling that we didn’t want to reproduce the House of Commons in any way.
Another thing that made it very significant was all the women—half of us were women.
One of the things that any list system gives you is that the individual political parties feel obliged, when they stand back, to make their lists more balanced.
In what ways does the Assembly work differently to Westminster?
BR: You’re also always looking over your shoulder and that’s the hard reality of why a form of proportionality works.
There are no safe seats in a properly proportional system.
We’ve got constituency seats [in the Welsh Assembly (Senedd), under the Additional Member electoral system]. Of course, you have safe Labour constituency seats. But they’re not as comfortable as they are in England [where First Past The Post single-member plurality is in use], because if you represent a Valleys’ seat with a majority of 20,000, there is always someone else working on your patch [someone else who has been elected to one of the regional list seats].
There are a couple of good examples of Plaid taking seats in this way. Leanne Wood was an example of a Plaid Additional Member who took a Labour seat as a result of really working hard in it, and working legitimately as a list member.
[Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru) was an additional member for the South Wales Central region 2003 to 2016 and then took the Rhondda district seat in 2016.
On the other hand, the election as an additional member was not a zero-sum contest. Of two candidates in the running. both could be elected, one of the one or none of them. However in the district contests, where only one candidate was elected in each district, each election was a zero-sum contest - the election of one meant the defeat of another candidate.
As well, Jonathan Morgan (Conservative) went from being an additional-member Assembly Member to being a district member (to represent Cardiff North) in 2007.]
If you’re an ordinary MP for England and someone from another political party starts working in your constituency, you know they’ve got their eye on it. But they’re doing it from the outside.
If you’re a list Member of the Senedd and you’re working with a view to take over someone’s constituency seat, you have the right to all the same letters from ministers, all the same briefings from officials. If the residents call a meeting, you have a right to be there, and to meet residents if they come to the Senedd. You have a right to talk to them in the same way. So you are of equal stature officially. It puts you in a stronger position to campaign.
As a politician in a Proportional Representation (PR) system, you are always looking over your shoulder – because there’s other people picking up your caseload, picking up campaigns and so on. You have to try harder to be successful.
[A bit about the Welsh PR system:
The Senedd comprises 60 members who are known as Members of the Senedd (Welsh: Aelodau o'r Senedd), abbreviated as "MS" (Welsh: AS). Members are elected under an Additional Member system, in which 40 MSs represent smaller geographical districts and are elected by first-past-the-post single-member plurality, and 20 MSs represent five electoral regions using the D'Hondt method of PR, with adjustments made for those elected to fill district seats.
In the region Randenson was elected in, South Wales Central, in 1999 the districts went predominantly to Labour, with Randenson taking one district for the Liberal Democrats and one going to a Plaid Cymru candidate. In 2003 when Randenson was re-elected, Labour took all the other seven district seats in the region.
But each time a measure of proportionality was achieved by electing two Conservatives and two Plaid Cymru to the additional member seats in the region. Labour and Plaid Cymru was over-represented (or at least adequately represented) in the district seats so received none of the additional member seats in the region in these elections.]
Interviewer: How do voters react to using PR?
BR: I think voters like choice, and they are well informed enough to use it. And there is a very strong tendency for people to automatically go to that constituency member. But if you don’t do well, they’ll go to a list member.
Interviewer: You’ve touched on something really interesting, which is the whole idea that people feel quite taken for granted under First Past the Post in Westminster.
BR: It is the being taken for granted that they don’t like. I think you might get it in some Valley seats, but that’s the constituency level not the list.
Interviewer: You’ve been in coalition and in Westminster as well as Cardiff Bay. It was a coalition under quite different circumstances, and also under a different electoral system. But did it feel similar in terms of process and of how it was perceived?
BR: I knew a great deal of thought was being put into how to make sure it lasted. And that was the same thing that we did with the coalition in Wales. So, when the media kept saying it [the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition] would be over by Christmas we kept saying, no. Those of us from Wales and Scotland said: “No it won’t.” It was stable.
We had the same cynicism in Wales, where they thought it wouldn’t last. In Westminster, it worked out perfectly well. Except that the Lib Dems lost lots of seats. And I always say that I don’t believe it was inevitable because we were in coalition in Wales in 2000 and 2003. In 2003, our vote went up as a party in Wales.
We still had six AMs (Assembly Members), and my majority doubled. [In 1999, the Baroness did not have a majority at all but won with only 45 percent. That is where Welsh politics is the same as Canada's - both allow a candidate with only minority support to take a seat. However the Additional Members system used in Wales ensures that the final result is proportional, unlike Canada's.
Sometimes people use the term majority to mean a lead over the nearest contender Randenson's lead over her nearest competitor was 3000 in 1999, and then 4000 in 2003 and 2007. So I don't know what she meant by her majority doubling.]
BR: I was deputy first minister for a year. I’d been a minister for three years. People didn’t punish me for it at all. So I don’t think that coalition was the great bête noire we’ve turned it into in the UK.
Interviewer: What do you feel are the biggest changes that need to be made in Westminster to give it a much stronger sense of democracy and fairness? What are the things you’ve learned from how the Welsh Assembly was set up that you’d do differently in Westminster?
BR: I’d change the voting system for a start!
I wouldn’t give it two different systems in one, I would do a proper regionally based system – Single Transferable Vote (STV). [under STV, often all of a city's voters vote in one (multi-seat ) district. And in each STV election each city elects mixed representation that represents most of the votes cast.]
As time goes on, I’ve become more and more alarmed by the anachronism of our whole system, in all sorts of ways. The voting system, the subsequent antagonistic basis for politics, the House of Lords which I think needs radical change.
I want federalism and one of my main roles in the Lords is trying to defend devolution.
The [UK] government is taking little bites, little chunks out of the powers of the devolved parliaments [of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland]. And it’s the UK government trying to re-centralize.
There is an assumption all the time that [politics] is an antagonistic relationship. And I think it’s time we look at our politics and say, this isn’t working for the people of Britain. It’s not properly representative, it’s aggressive, it’s confrontational. And if we’re not careful, it’s going to lead to the breakup of Britain.
I think that if you had a decent PR system, you would take the heat out of it. It would undoubtedly be part of a recasting of the British constitution, with a proper federal structure.
I tell you what really annoys me. When you talk to people about proportional representation, it comes down to, ‘oh, it’s complicated and people find it difficult’.
That’s a load of rubbish.
They do PR for all sorts of organizations. If they live in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, they do PR for their elections.
In Cardiff, on the local council, we’ve got mainly multi-member ward. Lots of people act like there’s PR there – they put 1, 2, 3. [I don't get her point here. Do people act like there is PR, or is there really PR there? It seems the latter - 1, 2, 3 means preferential voting. Preferential voting in a multi-member ward is PR-STV.]
And it’s so common, there’s an acceptance that this isn’t a spoilt ballot, but it’s someone who was refining their choice. [Transferable voting (such as preferential voting) means much fewer wasted votes. But voter do not always get their first choice but instead manage their vote so it goes somewhere, to elect someone (usually). Their vote is "managed" through pre-marked back-up preferences.]
People manage their constituency vote, they manage their regional vote. And very few of them get it wrong – so they’d manage STV fine.
I think Labour needs to see the writing on the wall. We need the leadership to have a conversation. And then we’d really be talking business."
Some questions and answers have been trimmed for brevity. [My comments are in square brackets - Tom Monto]
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