Denis MacShane: Labour must debate poll reforms... and not be the poodle of Nick Clegg

LABOUR needs a thorough debate about voting reform now that thereferendum on electoral reform has been announced.

It would be a mistake for leadership candidates to nail themselves to an alternative vote (AV) or a first-past-the-post (FPTP) mast. AV was spatchcocked into Labour's manifesto in a desperate last-minute bid to paint some radical hues on to the good ship Gordon Brown. But voters, not unreasonably, asked why it took 13 years for Labour to discover the most timid of all voting reform systems.

The late Robin Cook argued for a wider version of PR but, as with his proposals to elect the House of Lords, the Labour government

establishment between 1997 and 2005 was uninterested.

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The 1929-31 Labour government proposed AV, but it was shot down in the Commons, with Winston Churchill pointing out that the least popular candidate can overtake the most popular candidate on the basis of transfer votes from every other political faction that failed to win support.

How strange if the second or third preferences of BNP or Ukip voters prevented progressive Labour candidates from being elected.

There is no perfect electoral system. Full PR gives the nightmare of Israel's government but also the relative stability of a Swedish coalition. The commentator Martin Kettle points out that social democracy lacks a majority in most European countries. But 'twas ever thus. The last time the Danish Social Democrats had a majority was in 1909. France, Italy and Germany were ruled in the 1950s and '60s by enduring Centre-Right coalitions.

In Britain, since 1945, Labour has ruled for 30 out of 65 years. This

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is as good a record of longevity in power than all European Left

parties outside of Scandinavia, if not better, and better than Australia or Ireland, where electoral systems are closer to AV than Britain's first-past-the-post system.

This suggests that electoral reform may not be the Koh-i-noor of democratic politics. It is policy and, yes, personality that decide how people vote. This is not to argue that electoral reform should be resisted, but to set the debate about AV and other systems of voting in a broader context as part of a wider programme of policy.

Martin Kettle argues that the Left cannot win on its own. But nor can the Right, as Angela Merkel is finding out as she struggles to hold her own party and her flaky Liberal coalition partners together. In 1951, just three per cent voted for third parties. In 2010, two-thirds of voters said no to the Conservatives and to Labour.

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So coalition agreements may be needed under any system of voting, as we now discover. Kettle is right to argue that the Left is lost if it falls back on its 20th-century citadels – public sector unions and the apparatus of state employment – and ignores the worried savers and the middle salary earners who do not buy the thesis that ever-increasing taxation is a noble good.

The number of ISAs has doubled to 14.2 million in the past decade. Even in a poorer area, such as Rotherham, the average savings of my constituents who bank or save with Lloyds or Halifax is 5,381,

compared with 6,296 nationally. The "wellderly", as Harriet Harman brightly called them, are savers, voters and cautious in their politics. The Left ignores this group at its peril.

So where should Labour position itself on the question of a referendum? The party needs its own debate and its own internal referendum on AV. It cannot be imposed as party policy by the unilateral diktats of leadership candidates.

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We have seen harsh Tory policies attacking the poor or taking the axe to engineering manufacturing in South Yorkshire. The policies are pure neo-con American Enterprise Institute. But they are being implemented and imposed by Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander and Vince Cable.

They are serial political adulterers, faithless to their manifesto and values and showing nothing but contempt for their voters, to whom they promised no VAT rise and then implemented the opposite.

Now these anti-poor fig leaves for latter-day Thatcherism want us to endorse their line on AV. Are my enemy's policies to be mine? Are we certain we should ensure a permanent Lib Dem place in government? Or is the better answer for Labour to craft a triptych of politics, personalities (based on equal political place for women as well as men) and policies that can appeal as much to the holders of 14.2 million ISAs as to Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT?

Politics is about contest. For Labour to become Nick Clegg's poodles by backing his AV referendum will divide the party and confuse the

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country. At the very least, Labour should hold a full internal debate and then an open discussion at the party conference with a vote.

Denis MacShane is a former Europe Minister and the Labour MP for

Rotherham. This is an open letter that he has written to all Labour leadership candidates urging them to consult the party before committing themselves to supporting the Tory-Lib Dem referendum on electoral reform.