“Britain’s First Past The Post voting system could be scrapped if Labour wins the general election, under plans which have been outlined by Gordon Brown. The prime minister wants a referendum on changing to an Alternative Vote system, where candidates are ranked in order of voters’ preference”.

Whereas superficially this proposed referendum to move to what appears to be a fairer voting system appears to be a step in the right direction, I believe the Alternative Vote system – in the context of English politics – to be fundamentally undemocratic.

Why? How AV works is the voter gets the list of candidates & ranks them in order of how much they want each candidate to win. The candidate who received the fewest ‘1′ preference votes then gets all their ‘2′ preference votes transferred to the other candidates accordingly, until one of the candidates has received over 50% of the votes available.

In a system where there are a multiplicity of parties – ie, where views within parties are sufficiently diverse that splits have occurred – that’s fine. But in English politics, and to a certain extent the other nations of the UK, we are, to all intents and purposes, a three party system. Sure, we’ve got the Green Party, the British National Party, the Unofficial Monster Raving Loony (Rainbow Alliance) Party, & Dr Richard Rogers’ Common Good Party, etc, but we only have three serious parties. And by and large, if supporters of Conservative or Labour are likely to put a second preference on their ballot forms, more often than not they are most likely to allocate that second preference to the Liberal Democrat candidate rather than to the other serious party or one of the amateur candidates.

Which means that in all but the safest seats, the LibDems will be favoured disproportionately to their actual support. All credit to the LibDems, they are saying the plan doesn’t go far enough.

It’s possible that if AV is introduced more serious parties might emerge – most likely as a result of the broad coalitions of the three main parties fragmenting, leading to such as the Judean Peoples’ Front and the Peoples’ Front of Judea, alongside the Popular Front of Judea. But would that really be such a good thing? Party politics is divisive enough, without it being made even more divisive; all that would happen would be the introduction of coalition governments comprising the same actual people, but just paying their subscription fees to more parties.

If Gordon Brown is serious about improving democratic accountability, then not only does he need to think about something better than replacing one flawed vote counting system with another flawed vote counting system, but also think more radically about the whole relationship between the People and our elected representives, and the system of cabinet government with winner-takes-all.