This is the longer version of an article which was recently published in the 'Church Times'.

Constitutional Reform – Top Priority
by Colin Buchanan,previously Bishop of Woolwich and for 29 years on General Synod.

It seems an age since the Archbishops very properly called upon us not to vote for the BNP in the European elections. Beyond that, all they could do was to urge us to vote and to vote responsibly. But since that call, the expenses drama has worsened, the cabinet has fallen apart and been cobbled together again, the government has virtually imploded, and cries have gone up for not just change in rules about expenses, but for the Prime Minister to step down, for an immediate General Election, yes, and for constitutional reform. These in turn have been overtaken by the European election results, and this week various minorities have been revelling in the support they have won under the party list system – but the outstanding winner has been the non-voter. Yet whether in weeks or in month, that General Election is coming.

Christian leaders cannot enjoy simply urging people to vote and vote well. We sound vaguer than the politicians, as though wringing our hands on the touchline without even knowing whom to support. Yet we are absolutely committed to involvement in the political process; we do not believe that the Christian faith can be immured in some private pietistic locker away from how men and women are to live and to be governed in society, and we retain high ideals of honesty, justice and the support of the weak in society. We long to touch society. And yet preachers and writers still have to reflect ‘Can we do anything better than to urge “vote responsibly”? Is that the limit of our prophetic function?’

And the simple truth is: we have to hand a programme backed by experience, and suddenly an opening has been given it. Alan Johnson triggered this in recent public debate – and everyone now is having define how they relate to it. I refer, of course, to constitutional reform. The Church of England has regularly taken our stand for justice in representation, as the means to a truly participatory democracy. In February 2003 General Synod passed by 226 vote 6 a motion which, along with some blandness, included:
‘[We’ call upon Her Majesty’s Government and leaders of the main political parties... to encourage and enable, by legislative and administrative action, and especially by introducing proportional representation by the single transferable vote for elections to Parliament, all members of our society to play a full part in our democracy...’

This is a sharp-edged call for a very specific change in public life. This was no groping around in despair for something positive to say – it was the central body of the Church of England speaking out of its own long experience of the justice of using the single transferable vote (STV) in multi-member constituencies. Our Synod is elected that way (it began with the old Church Assembly back in 1920); the boards and committees of Synod are elected that way. The Crown Nominations Commission, in both its national and its diocesan membership, is elected that way. Those who ever have cast their votes this way know from experience that voting ‘1,2,3,4,5’ by preferences gives an accurate expression of the electorate’s wishes. This is quite unlike the ‘first-past-the-post’ of Parliamentary elections where the crude ‘x’ means the voter has to be totally in favour of one candidate and totally opposed to all the others. In an Anglican church which has seen many splits of style, opinion and even theology, this fair system has preserved the true proportions of the voters at each level of the synods, and – as accords with our own theology of the church – minorities have never been swamped out of existence by over-weening majorities; at the same time voters have been able to express preferences as between individual candidates of similar views, and have influenced the results accordingly. The persons elected are the ones the electors most wanted, and no serious complaints ever arise. Who can say the same for parliamentary or local council elections? Dis-proportional representation is mis-representation.

There is a deeply moral factor in all this. Christians do not believe in subordinating the means to the end. STV is far and away the best way of getting fair means, which in turn entails a fair result.

The secular world has however steadily been catching up with us – and not just in the Student Unions and Trades Unions which are used to fair voting. In the 35 years that STV has been used in Northern Ireland (for every kind of election save that to the Westminster parliament) the system has produced a fair result. For, whereas the minority community there knew until 1974 that they would always be swamped out of any meaningful representation, since 1974, even while bombs exploded, amid all the accompanying recriminations, we have heard not a single voice to complain that this or that party was not properly represented. And, with even less trumpeting in England, the use of STV in Scottish council elections in 2007 has broken the previous stranglehold of one party upon more half of the local councils, and all over Scotland has led to differing health-giving kinds of new sharing agreements between parties.

Oh, and please don’t take that eyewash about needing ‘first past the post’ to get ‘strong government’ which, even if plausible, is a naked preferring the result to the means. And it is not plausible: in the first place, all the signs are that first past the post will produce a randomly unrepresentative assembly – whether one with a ludicrously large majority of one party or one without an overall majority at all. In the second place, there have already been six virtually ‘hung’ Parliaments elected under first past the post in the last 16 elections (and look at the likelihoods now). In the third place we do not necessarily benefit from an unchecked rampant ‘strong government’ (and how much less if they were unfairly elected by a minority of the voters). And in the fourth place, it is difficult to believe the two main parties believe it themselves, for when in opposition they do their best to weaken the government, and indeed revel in the rare occasion they can beat them.. All they mean is ‘strong government by us’.

A call is going up for a referendum on constitutional reform (once promised but never delivered by the Blair government) – and Alan Johnson, who endorsed it, built in the idea of doing it in conjunction with the General Election. So Christians should surely join the call for that referendum – and add in that it is STV on which we need to decide? Are you writing to your MP? The last service the present discredited administration can do for us is to arrange for that referendum to come the same day as the next election, and then go to the country. A Parliament thus newly elected under the existing system would then be chartered by the referendum to reform the electoral system and go back to the country for fair elections. At every point we ought to promote fair voting, call for reform to establish it, and back every move, every initiative, which will bring on the referendum. We may well be at a hinge-point of constitutional history.
Bishop Colin Buchanan, previously Bishop of Woolwich and for 29 years on General Synod, is the Honorary President of the Electoral Reform Society.