Discussing AV: Rupert Read and Darrell Goodliffe

In the interests of broadening the discussion I asked Labour blogger Darrell Goodliffe and Green Rupert Read to set out the case for each side of the AV referendum. I asked them each to lay out their case either for a yes or no vote and then gave them a right of reply.

Rupert Read: There’s a good old saying: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But BRITISH POLITICS is BROKEN. Our electoral system is unfit for purpose. (It was designed for a two-Party system: it can’t cope with a multi-Party system.) We need to fix it: Ergo, vote #Yes2AV: http://www.yes.greenwordsworkshop.org/

So: What’s the case for voting NO? These are the two lines I hear:

1) ‘AV is good for extremists’.

Simply a lie. See me recently on ITV, from 8 minutes in, here. AV is the worst of all possible systems for extremists such as the BNP. Which is presumably why the BNP are vigorously opposing it... AV, a system in which voters can ‘gang up’ on unpopular Parties, will help ensure that the BNP never gets elected to Westminster - and moreover, if introduced in local government elections, would lead to the defeat of virtually all their Councillors. AV would drastically reduce the bane of ‘tactical voting’ that’s a necessary evil for voters when a multi-party political system is squeezed into a two-party electoral system. In the process, it would shut the door on the electoral prospects of the BNP... But if you want Nick Griffin to wake up with a big smile on May 6th, then vote NO...

2) ‘To hurt the LibDems, vote NO’.

The NOtoAV campaign, understandably (given that they have no constructive arguments to offer) are trying to turn the AV referendum into a referendum on Nick Clegg. This is a cynical way to treat a hugely important constitutional question; but there’s another reason, less obvious, why it’s wrong: Nick Clegg's Party will not benefit from AV. Under AV, you can give your first preference to whoever you want to win. The Lib Dems might gain votes in areas where they are weak, under AV, as they will no longer be perceived as a "wasted vote" in those areas. But they will lose first preference votes in areas where they are strong, as people will no longer be compelled to vote for them tactically in order to cast a vote that is not "wasted". Losing votes where you are strong loses you seats; gaining votes where you are weak does not. (See Liberal Conspiracy, Rupert's Read). ...It simply isn’t true that AV will be good for Clegg’s Party!

…Look at those who are in favour of AV: Virtually all the ‘progressive’ elements in Labour, including of course the Milibands and Compass plus Hilary Benn, Jon Cruddas, John Denham, Sadiq Khan, Michael Meacher, John McDonnell, Joan Ruddock…; the Greens; plus most of ‘civil society’ including notably organisations such as Operation Black Vote. Look at those who are arraigned against AV: the entire right-wing press, the Tories, BNP, Taxpayers Alliance, a bunch of ultra-right-wing businessmen and climate-deniers who are funding NO… and the most tribal, uninspiring elements of Labour: Prescott, Beckett, Blunkett… Darrell, do you feel happy in the company you keep: Griffin, Cameron, Hague (Open Democracy), Murdoch, Dacre, Guido Fawkes (Rupert's Read) and Matthew Elliott?...

 

Why I am NO to AV....

Darrell Goodliffe: Cards on the table time; I support electoral reform (to AV+ or a Additional Member System). However, a change to AV is the wrong change to make and since that is what is on the ballot paper it's AV compared to First Past the Post we have to discuss; not FPTP v our dream system.

A Yes Vote will not lead to further reform: Labour AV supporters overwhelmingly favour a stance of 'AV and no further'. The Liberal Democrats are facing an electoral apocalypse; whichever system the next election is held under and the Conservatives, well we all know what they want. Also, the Yes camp 'upselling' AV as something it isn't; proportional in any way shape or form, means that if it triumphs, people will rightly ask what's the point of another change rather than clamour for more. I am sure comrades reading this will pipe-up 'what about the Greens'....which leads me to my next point....

AV and smaller parties.... AV does not increase the chances of more MP's from smaller parties being elected. This is due to both the 50% threshold and the preference system. I am a member of Labour. I would under AV happily cast my second preference for the Greens. This would however, be pointless because my second preferences wont matter a jot; Labour will not be eliminated before a conclusion is reached where I live. However the preferences of the smaller parties under AV are unfairly weighted because the smaller parties are most likely be eliminated. It is inconsistent to claim AV will benefit the Greens and not the BNP in the same breath; the BNP's vote nationally is much higher than the Greens (sadly!)and therefore its their preferences that will need to be chased more often. Preferencing without proportionality is undemocratic and gives the second preferences of small party voters an unfair weight and makes some votes more 'equal' than others.

AV won't end tactical voting.... All it will do is shift the site of the tactical battle to peoples preferences, especially those people who vote for smaller parties. This is exactly what happened during the Labour leadership election where supporters of the three candidates who were never really in the running were assiduously targeted by the camps of both the Milibands.

AV doesnt ensure MP's elected by 50% of the electorate... Again, the Yes camp wants to have its cake and eat it; it says, 'Don't worry, AV is just like FPTP because you don't have to use your preferences'. However, if people don't then MP's will be elected by less than the magic 50% because those votes will simply stop being counted in the later rounds. This destroys another argument; that AV ends wasted votes. In my example above, all my subsequent preferences were wasted because my first choice wasn't eliminated and if somebody doesn't cast all their preferences then their vote isn't counted if their first choice Party is eliminated so theirs is too.

Change cannot just be for changes sake. It has to be the right change and the brutal fact is that AV is the wrong change; above anything else that is why I will be voting No on May 5^th....

 

Rupert's response to Darrell: 

Let me take Darrell's arguments in turn:

"A Yes Vote won’t lead to further reform": Irrelevant. The question is whether AV is better than FPTP. As I've shown, it is. …But furthermore: is further reform MORE likely if AV is voted down? If anyone agitated for PR during the next generation, after AV had been defeated, the answer would come back clearly: ‘Britain has rejected even the modest move to AV; so it is POINTLESS offering voters PR’…

"It’s inconsistent to claim AV will benefit Greens and not BNP": Plain wrong, as I’ve shown. The BNP oppose AV because they are HATED – hated extremist Parties hate AV for good reason… Meanwhile, it’s AV that has enabled Greens in Australia to get their first MP elected.

“AV won't end tactical voting”: Duplicitous wordplay. AV enables voters to vote for who they want, from 1st to last. It will end tactical voting as we know it, in which people vote only for the lesser of several evils.

“AV doesn’t ensure MPs elected by 50% of electorate”: Technically true, but deeply misleading. Under AV, virtually all MPs WILL be elected by a majority of voters; under FPTP, most MPs are elected by a minority.



Darrell's reply to Rupert:

I certainly would’t deny Rupert’s point that British politics is broken. Nonetheless, we have to ask a little more than if something is broken. It would be a poor doctor that just proclaimed a patient to be sick and not even offer a cure or, potentially even worse, offer the wrong kind of cure. My submission is that AV is not the right medicine for British politics.

I deal with Rupert’s first line-of-attack in my main text so won’t expand on that. Regarding AV and the Lib Dems; AV will objectively help the Lib Dem right, as most leftish Liberal Democrats have de-camped to either Labour or the Greens. So, Orange Bookers will use AV to cement their alliance with, and electoral dependence on the Conservative Party - AV is shown once again to weaken the left as a whole and strengthening the right, which will be the net effect of its introduction in other areas too.

Nonetheless, we have to judge AV on its merits as a system; the only effect that should be decisive is on our democracy and here its my submission that this ’miserable little compromise’ is deeply damaging and should be opposed.

Going nuclear: in discussion with Chris Goodall

Quite a few of the readers of this blog will be aware there has been a mini-storm over nuclear power recently, with a group of reasonably high profile environmental campaigners calling for a rethink on the question of nuclear power. One of the threads that helped form the green movement were the anti-nuclear campaigns and organisations like the Green Party take a very clear and uncompromising approach in their opposition to new nuclear power stations.

I thought it would be worthwhile opening up a discussion on this issue with Chris Goodall, who is the Green Party's parliamentary candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon and one of those voices calling for a new approach on nuclear.


CHRIS: Reducing the carbon emissions from electricity generation is vital. The Climate Change Committee showed in December that unless the UK almost wholly decarbonised electricity production we have no real prospect of meeting our emissions reductions targets. I haven’t seen any Greens disputing this.

Today about 95% of our electricity is made using fossil fuels. So in the space of about 20 years we have to utterly transform an industry with annual turnover of about £50bn. This is, to put it carefully, a very substantial challenge.

That challenge is currently becoming more difficult not less. Coal prices have collapsed. Carbon pollution permits now cost a third of what they did a year ago. So coal is the fuel of choice for power generators. As all Greens know, this is the worst possible outcome for climate change.

At the same time as coal revival, renewables have suffered reversals. The big offshore wind projects are all struggling to get financed. Any proposed Severn Barrage will suffer in a similar way. Venture capital is not available for many of the most exciting wave and tidal technologies. It seems to me that Greens need to reassess nuclear because we need all the non-carbon sources of electricity that we can lay our hands upon.

About a third of the UK’s existing power generation capacity is due to close by the end of the next decade or shortly after. If the UK doesn’t get replacement low carbon technologies running by about 2016, the lights will (occasionally) go out. It’s a clich矇, but it’s almost certainly true. We will also be forced to keep the old dinosaurs of coal-fired power stations open. In my opinion, it is irresponsible of us not to ask ourselves the question – which is the lesser of these two evils, coal or nuclear? I regretfully conclude that the answer is nuclear. (More details of this argument on Carbon Commentary)

Several people have said to me over the last few days that Green policy is to focus on energy efficiency, principally house insulation. This is good of course, but people may not be aware that very little electricity is used for home or business heating. (Some people off the gas grid use electricity for heating and some factories and warehouses use radiant heating but this is broadly true). Electricity, already about 38% of the UK’s total emissions, is likely to become more important rather than less as we switch to electric cars over the next decade. We are going to need more electricity, not less, and ensuring that this power is made with minimal amounts of CO2 emissions is a vital aim.

I hope I am not being dogmatic about this. I’d love to see a carefully thought-through plan that bases the UK electricity industry around renewables. (My book Ten Technologies to Save the Planet gives one view of how this might be possible). But Greens like me also need to recognize the huge public opposition to onshore wind, the escalating costs of offshore and the very difficult issues of how to connect large scale renewables to the electricity grid. Our rate of progress on decarbonisation of electricity is so slow that I am personally finding it difficult to work out how 400 terawatt hours of electricity is going to be produced each year without nuclear power.


JIM: The first thing I want to say is that I don't think you're being dogmatic and you’ve been far more nuanced on this than the Independent made you out to be. There are a number of points where we disagree though.

We don’t have space to list where we agree so I’m going to take it as a given that we both want to radically increase the amount of energy we get from renewable sources whilst drastically cutting our level of energy consumption. It seems to me the points of disagreement are more about how much we can cut and how significant a contribution renewables can make to our energy mix.

We are also looking at different time scales. I’d say that if we haven’t already made massive inroads into this problem in twenty years time we’re in deep trouble – and whilst we’re waiting for nuclear to come online we’re still contributing to it. One big advantage of renewables over nuclear is how quickly they can be brought online so that we can make near immediate contributions to the cut in our national carbon footprint.

There are long term problems with nuclear power that we cannot simply dismiss. Whilst I see the logic behind regretfully discounting the long term problems of nuclear waste, an inheritance that we are leaving countless generations in order to survive the current crisis, there are other problems that can’t be put aside so easily.

If the pessimists are right then no matter how good we are at cutting our emissions now we will still be subject to unpredictable weather and rising sea levels. The vulnerability of nuclear power stations to climate disaster (or terrorist attack) does not make them safe neighbors. Unfortunately in times like these this is something we have to insure against, by ensuring that our energy sources do not have the capacity to poison the environment still further should the worst happen.

More importantly nuclear is not carbon neutral so we have a problem if we want it to help us decarbonise our economy. The carbon footprint of building and maintaining nuclear power plants has been consistently underestimated in the media and as the uranium supply gets lower the mining footprint increases [1].

Creating a reliance on an uncommon material [2] not found in significant amounts in this country is dangerous indeed, opening ourselves up to severe market fluctuations and the kind of energy blackmail that Russia has demonstrated with its gas supply. The cost of a resource that we cannot rely on in even the medium term as a global energy crisis kicks in is not good forward planning. More than that climate change requires global solutions and we are simply not going to see the whole world taking up nuclear power. We don’t trust most of the countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America to have it – but also there are not the raw resources to sustain a global take up of nuclear in a safe and sustainable manner.

What are we going to do to help China and India meet their energy needs in a sustainable way? How are we going to make the maximum possible contribution to a global reduction in carbon emissions? If we’re not investing heavily in the technology and production of renewable energy to become a major exporter of the cheapest, most effective technologies possible we’ll be putting our own house in order as the planet plummets towards disaster. If we’re not prioritising renewables we could be in danger of taking a far too parochial view of an international crisis.

But you’re right that there are significant obstacles. The energy industry is powerful and obstructive, the financial crisis has heaped further problems upon us and the government is simply committed to doing it anyway. I don’t think we should accept a fait accompli though when nuclear has so many inherent problems in such dangerous times. I don’t have the space for a full discussion on how we overcome these problems, or to deal with all your points, but I would say that if the private energy industry wont play ball perhaps its time to nationalise. If energy, that crucial public resource, is not brought under democratic control and taken out of the hands of vested interests we may well be unable to meet the challenge that faces us anyway.

To my mind if the government is determined to take a bad course of action it’s up to us to help it change its mind. We can’t wait for nuclear, nor allow it to distract us, we don’t have the time when we could be making real advances by focusing on energy efficiency and renewable technology – not just for us, but for the world.


CHRIS: I’m sure that we are not very far apart. I shall regard it as a failure if we see more nuclear power stations in the UK. The risks are as you say. However, I'm very unsure that the UK electorate is willing to pay the price for an energy policy that is reliant on renewables or to accept occasional interruptions to electricity supply.

In the last few weeks I have had several conversations with Oxford Greens who passionately believe that we should avoid both coal and nuclear at all costs. Rather than have electricity generated by these fuels, these people have said we should accept that we will have to make do with much more limited and erratic supplies of electricity for homes and businesses.

My concern is that this stance will be unacceptable to all but a minute fraction of the UK population. By their resolute and principled stance against nuclear, these Greens are implicitly encouraging the use of more coal. When I make this point, my Oxford colleagues don’t disagree with my analysis. It is better to be ethically right, they say, than to compromise on such an important issue. I profoundly disagree.