The result of the elections and referendum on Thursday 5th May could have significant and long term effects on the political status quo in the United Kingdom. The Scottish Nationalist Party has won a majority in the Scottish Parliament, the nation has voted against the first referendum in a decade and probably our first and last opportunity to change the system by which MP's are elected to Westminster, and the national stability of the Liberal Democrat support base has been severely shaken.

AV Referendum special

It cannot be argued that the result of the referendum was not definitive. It is absolutely clear that the electorate do not want AV as the electoral system for elections to Westminster. Assessment concluded....well, not quite. There are farther reaching consequences to the defeat of the YES TO AV campaign than simply a loss on this topic of electoral reform. Referendums are particularly ambiguous and have a tendency to simplify rather than distinguish results. 

Firstly, constituted within the vote for and against AV was also a more general but hidden vote on the electoral future of our system. The debate on electoral reform is a century old, lasting back to the formation of the Labour  Party and before universal suffrage, but it has taken us until 2011 to have a national referendum on the issue. Political reform has always been a 'backburner' issue for many elected governments because economics, law and order, health or defence take precedence over it. However, with the election of New Labour in 1997 and the report of the Jenkins Commission on electoral reform, political and constitutional reform has grown in salience. There are many controversies in the political reform debate, but electoral reform was always one of the most pressing alongside reform of the House of Lords. So it makes an important point that, despite the recommendations of the Jenkins commission, the Labour government failed to fully address the issue until there thirteen years were up. Ultimately, parties in government with a majority are unlikely to want to shake up our electoral system because it threatens their vested interests in maintaining the status quo which has seen them into power. The strong prospect of a hung Parliament and the importance of electoral reform to the Liberal Democrats meant that the issue was set to resurface once again. So, with electoral reform proving to be a decisive factor in party negotiations, the three main parties recognised the time had come to finally put the debate to rest. On the 5th of May 2011, the British electorate did just that, and with some conviction smothered any argument in favour of electoral reform for the foreseeable future (much to the delight of the 'old' parties).

Secondly, this was the first truly national referendum since 1975 and opportunities for direct democracy don't come round very often, more so if five year fixed Parliaments are introduced. A highly common criticism of our political system at the moment is that MP's, politicians, parties and government are all out of touch with what the people want. That it is too easy for MP's to switch off to the concerns of their constituents and act according to their own interest or to their party's, especially in safe seat constituencies. These notions also form a large part of the reasoning for why the public are disenchanted with politics, why we react cynically to it and why there was a hung Parliament last year in one of the most critical elections since 1983. What a victory this referendum was for those vested interests and for governmental disengagement. By neglecting such an opportunity so negatively, we have signed the warrant for our own arrest.

Of course, on reading this you may think that in fact, public opinion was expressed quite decisively and as I stated at the start of this piece, voting (especially tactical voting) in this referendum had far more motivations than just whether you believe AV to be the right electoral system for our national elections. I will address these alterior motives and the consequences of the result in these respects, largely on the liberal Democrats, in my next piece. However, the point still stands that even if we were not aware of it, for our MP's, the NO vote held far reaching implications about the salience of the electoral reform debate and public attitudes, and we voted these subjective, self-interested observations through quite contently.