The claim
“Let me at this point deal with some of the anti-AV myths that have been spread by those opposed to change:
– That it leads to more coalitions…there is no evidence that AV results in more coalitions
– That AV is complicated
– That a yes vote will be seen as a vindication of Nick Clegg
Ed Miliband, Labour Leader, speech to the Labour Yes to AV campaign, March 16, 2011
Cathy Newman checks it out
The Yes to AV campaign has not been going well. While their rivals plaster the country with hard-hitting posters, the Yes brigade have been squabbling about who can bear to share a platform with Nick Clegg. And while the Conservatives are united against voting reform, Labour is hopelessly split over the issue, with leading Yes campaigners apparently undergoing a Damascene conversion to a cause they used to deride.
So Ed Miliband needed to launch a fightback. But has his attack hit home, or has it missed its target. The FactCheck team has been investigating.
The analysis by Emma Thelwell
Launching Labour’s Yes to AV campaign last night, Ed Miliband had the backing of less than half of his MPs. Of the 225 Labour MPs, only 84 think he’s right about AV and plan to vote yes in May.
It’s an issue splitting Labour down the middle – with around 40 still sitting on the fence. Labour’s No to AV camp took out a full page advert on The Guardian’s back page this week, while shadow health secretary John Healey branded the system “perverse”.
So Mr Miliband has his work cut out in coaxing the undecided off the fence.
While the Labour leader admitted in his speech, “AV is no panacea. It isn’t perfect”, he wants to dispel the myths. But how convincing is he?
Claim 1: ‘There is no evidence that AV results in more coalitions’
Using Australia as his case study, Mr Miliband says that the AV system Down Under has “led to fewer hung parliaments than we’ve had in the UK”.
For this argument to stand up, you’d have to consider the Australian National and Liberal Parties to have been a single party since 1922 – when actually they’ve been in a historic coalition together.
Take the two parties separately, and Australian elections didn’t see one party win an overall majority in 2010, 2001, 1998, 1980 or any of the elections between 1949 and 1972.
“In Australia, AV so clearly was going to result in hung Parliaments that the parties entered into permanent coalition in preparation for it,” political analyst Greg Callus told FactCheck.
As a result, the current opposition – the Nationals and the Liberals – is often referred to as “the coalition”.
Australia however, is the only viable comparison for Mr Miliband to use – it’s the only country to use AV elections to the lower legislative chamber except for Fiji, Iraq, Nauru and Papua New Guinea.
But comparisons with Australia are flawed further – you can’t compare Australia’s House of Representatives with the House of Commons – as the latter has more than four times the number of MPs, which has a massive impact on the ability to form a majority (fewer members mean larger and more diverse constituencies for one thing).
Plus, people vote differently under AV than they do under First Past the Post (FPTP) – so any projections on votes or hung parliaments aren’t scientific, they’re guesswork.
Labour’s Yes campaign conceded to FactCheck that the argument was an academic one, with huge caveats. “No one can predict how people might vote under AV,” the director of the Labour Yes told us.
Pollsters Ipsos-Mori go further. AV analysis requires “heroic assumptions”, they say, adding that “nobody knows exactly what the effect of introducing AV will be on election results”.
Sadly, there isn’t an example of a country that’s recently switched to AV from FPTP for us to examine a potential rise in hung Parliaments.
However, it is widely noted that under an AV system the number of Lib Dem MPs would be likely to rise – because they are the third biggest of three major parties and ideologically the centre party, which means they are the second preference of more voters than any other party.
While this would not render a majority government impossible, it would increase the likelihood of hung parliaments – or it could see the Lib Dems form pre-election coalitions as in Australia.
Oxford Professor Vernon Bogdanor said in the FT; “AV opens the door to a new political world in which coalitions become the norm, and single-party majority government a distant memory”.
Meanwhile, the Yes camp could suggest nothing to FactCheck that would prove bringing in AV would result in FEWER coalition governments.
Claim 2: ‘AV isn’t complicated’
Mr Miliband says it is a “patronising argument” to bill AV as a complex system. “Putting 1, 2, 3, in boxes in order of preference is not that complicated,” he added.
No one is suggesting that electorate is too stupid to handle AV as a voting system (though it does require four pages of explanation, versus half a page on FPTP).
The No to AV campaign argues that AV is complex because it is harder to calculate the result and leads to more spoiled ballots.
The Australian Electoral Commission said in its Informal Vote Survey 2009: “Australia traditionally has one of the highest rates of spoiled or informal ballots among established democracies”.
Plus, AV as a system isn’t complicated, but the complication comes where one election day involves lots of elections using different systems.
“If the referendum passes, we would have AV for the UK Parliament, Additional Member System (part FPTP, part PR) for Scottish/Welsh devolved legislatures, STV (Single Transferable Vote) for the Northern Ireland Assembly, PR (Proportional Representation) for the European Parliament, Supplementary Vote (a form of AV) for the Mayor of London, and a variety of FPTP/STV/multi-member systems for local government,” explains Mr Callus.
Expect bigger queues at the voting booth then.
Claim 3: ‘A yes vote will not be seen as a vindication of Nick Clegg’
It does seem futile to argue that a vote for the Yes camp wouldn’t vindicate Mr Clegg – it would be a victory for him and the Lib Dems.
“We can’t reduce the second UK wide referendum in our political history to a verdict on one man,” says Mr Miliband.
FactCheck agrees, but as Ipsos-Mori points out, the “one thing that is pretty certain is that AV won’t always help Labour, or always help the Tories, under all circumstances. But it will probably always help the LibDems”.
Cathy Newman’s verdict
In his attempt to shatter the myths about AV, Ed Miliband has himself spun a yarn. The evidence from Down Under doesn’t work in his favour, and AV does create complications – even if the British public are well up to the task of working it out.
And although Nick Clegg once called AV a “miserable little compromise”, overhauling the voting system remains the raison d’etre of any Lib Dem leader – and the British people know it.
So although Clegg’s name won’t be on the ballot paper on May 5, it might as well be. No wonder Mr Miliband’s colleagues fear privately they’ve lost the referendum before a single vote has been counted.
