The Prime Minister announced on 3 September 2007 his proposal that there should be a Speaker's conference to "consider against the backdrop of a decline in turnout, a number of other important issues such as registration, weekend voting, the representation of women and ethnic minorities in the House of Commons, and that he should also examine in parallel with the Youth Citizenship Commission whether we should lower the voting age to 16."

Nick Herbert MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, said that the Conservative Party would take part in the Speaker's Conference but that it "would need to discuss not just Mr Brown's chosen topics, but also issues such as votes for English MPs and freeing local councils from Whitehall."

I consider this to be a welcome opportunity to put forward our concerns about the voting system used for General Elections. I include also the term's of reference for the new Speaker's Conference a brief summary of past Speaker's Conferences as a guide. For more information please see Speaker's Conference Standard Note- SN/PC/04426.

New Speaker's Conference Terms of Reference
"To consider and make recommendations for rectifying the disparity between the representation of women and ethnic minorities in the House of Commons and their representation in the UK population at large; and to consider such other matters as might, by agreement, be referred to for consideration."

No - not First Past the Post this time.

Thousands of complaints, pages or national press outrage and commentaries on prime time TV!! Daily Mail Editorial - “How hard can it be to work out a fair voting system…… for Strictly Come Dancing, which doesn’t involve defrauding two million viewers of their phone charges? You would think somebody at the corporation might have realised there was no point in keeping the lines open for almost two hours, when their votes could make no difference to the outcome."

Blaming it all on a tied vote for two of the three couples in the semi-final is not good enough as the whole voting process is a mess anyway. It has long been obvious that at a stage with three remaining couples, there is no way that the public votes can save the couple at the bottom of the leader board because of the way the numbers of votes by the judges and the public are converted to points by ranking.

But the worrying aspect of this saga and other similar shows like the X-Factor is that millions of people have become outraged by flawed voting systems for TV shows without realising they are defrauded of their real votes at almost every General or Local Election. The “wrong” results in those elections have far more effect on their lives than do those in the TV shows.

Yet in answer to the Daily Mail question, it is not at all hard to find a fair voting system for real elections – it is STV! So why won’t the media make a similar fuss about the unfairness which defrauds us all of good government?

The Government knows full well the flaws in our voting system for elections yet persists in arguing that electors vote for their preferred candidates to be elected, even though such votes are often used to support Parties rather than individuals, often do not count at all, and worse still can sometimes help to elect others instead. Yet they do nothing about it.

You can help to create a “strictly-style” bandwagon by getting your friends to register with stvAction and propagate the news that there is a fairer voting system – STV.

Today is the 90th anniversary of the first British general election in which women could vote.  The sad truth is that, except for those who live in one of the few marginal constituencies, their votes are valueless and, of course, this is also true for men.  Further, it will be true for 16-17 year-olds if they get the vote so long as we continue to use a 19th century voting system in the 21st century.   Britain needs a voting system in which all votes - by men and women of all ages wherevever they live - have a realistic chance of being effective.  We need the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system.  This allows voters to choose, and express preferences between, candidates of the same and different parties so, if a voter's first preference is ineffective, a later preference may still be effective.  Almost as a side effect, STV would provide a proportional and representative House of Commons, in which one party would be unable to rule on the basis of only 35% of the votes.

Following Barack Obama’s election as President of the USA, there has been some speculation about whether a black person could become Prime Minister of the UK.

Despite the flaws of the American presidential system, an advantage is that it allows outsiders to gain office without first having to spend years working through the ranks pleasing party bosses in the meantime. A disadvantage is that someone with little experience can be elected.

With the British parliamentary system by contrast, one can be reasonably sure that candidates for the highest offices have gained some relevant experience while working their way up the ranks. Consequently whoever will be Prime Minister in ten or fifteen years’ time is probably already an MP. However, there are not many black MPs because a disadvantage of the British system is that party bosses tend to prefer younger images of themselves. This makes it difficult for anybody, except white middle class men, to progress far in British politics.

The Scottish Government wants a proportion of health board members to be directly elected by the public using STV in a bid to make them more accountable and transparent.

Scotsman News Article

Michael Portillo on This Week (BBC 1), 6/7 November 2008: “The Conservative strategy was for the SNP to win seats in Scotland and deprive Labour of them.” What a democracy – Vote SNP and get a Tory Government!  This alone is reason enough to introduce preferential voting, such as STV, so the voters get what they vote for.

Some commentators have compared the mood in the USA this week with the mood in the UK in 1997 when Labour swept the Conservatives from power in a landslide victory, but there is a significant difference.  Barack Obama won an overall majority of the popular vote (i.e. more than half the voters supported him) and this will give a legitimacy to his administration that Tony Blair’s never had.  In 1997, Labour achieved only 43% of the votes; i.e., nearly 6 out of 10 voters had voted against the winning party. Lest readers think this is an anti-Labour comment, I hasten to point out that Mrs Thatcher’s famous Conservative victory in 1979 was similarly flawed.  Her party achieved 44% of the vote so, again, nearly 6 out of 10 voters had voted against the winning party.

Kelvin Hopkins MP (Luton N, Labour) 30.10.08:

"In an intervention earlier, I mentioned checks and balances and the importance of ensuring that we preserve those checks and balances in our democracy. We do not have a written constitution as in America, where there is a separation and balance of powers, and our electoral system does not have proportional representation, which gives immense power to Parliaments because Parliaments have to assemble Governments from various parties. Even before the Governments of Thatcher and Blair we had what was described as an elective dictatorship, because once a party gets power, the Prime Minister has enormous power of patronage, and control of a party and the Government in every sense, so checks and balances are important."

Extract from an Article in the Times on 20 October 2008 by Martin Samuels, the Chief Football Correspondent:

"[Culture Minister Andy] Burnham ... is also for the restoration of competitive balance to prevent the game becoming predictable, as are we all, but achieving it in a free market is complex. Achieving it in politics, however, would require the straightforward introduction of the proportional representation voting system that would end the dominance of the two main political parties and make every vote count at election time. Bizarrely, there is no record of Burnham speaking up for this."