Firstly, an apology; when I've been tweeting about the Labour leadership contest, and that pair of political brothers in particular, I've been spelling their surname with two "l"s. That I should waste one of those precious 140 characters allotted by Twitter on a spelling mistake is shameful. But hey ho...
I haven't been tweeting about the contest that much, really - because it hasn't exactly been interesting. Labour aren't likely to be back in power for a few years at least, and there wasn't that much difference in policy between the leading contenders that I could fathom, so the short term impact of the contest seemed pretty negligible. Until, that is, the result was announced.
The lead in all the news stories was the same - "Ed Miliband beat his brother David by a margin of just over 1 per cent" - but that didn't tell the whole story. The Labour Party leadership is decided using the alternative vote (AV) system, whereby voters list their preferences. The least popular candidate is eliminated from the competition, and the second choice votes of those who voted for that candidate are then used in place of their first choice votes, and the loop continues thus until only one candidate remains, who is then declared the winner.
David Miliband was ahead throughout the whole process. If it was a first-past-the-post (FPTP) contest, like the election of MPs, he would have won because he had the most votes in the first count. As each candidate was eliminated, David remained ahead, until the very final redistribution of votes. So what does all this mean?
Let's get one thing straight: Ed won, fair and square, and nobody is denying that. But under the FPTP system, David would have won. The point being of course that next year, there will be a referendum on whether to change the MP election system from FPTP to AV. The Labour leadership contest showed how this can change a result quite dramatically; David Miliband received the primary backing of more MPs and party members, yet Ed won.
I'm a strong advocate of proportional representation (PR), and it's important not to confuse the AV system with fully fledged PR. There are many who will look at this result when they come to think about the referendum and vote against AV on the basis that it isn't fair. However, they would miss the point; if David Miliband had received more second/third/choice votes, he might have won. The AV result basically says that while David had more people saying "if I have to choose one person, I'll chose him", more people said "out of all the candidates, I prefer Ed to David", and it is this latter statement that matters more in AV.
The choice we have to make next year is which of those "majorities" should hold more weight; should the winner be the person with the most "first choices" or the person who the majority prefer over their nearest rivals? My view is that AV is a much fairer, more democratic system than FPTP and I think the Labour party leadership election can be used to demonstrate that. Crucially, if Labour campaign for FPTP next year, they'll be committing an act of gross hypocrisy and essentially stating that Ed Miliband shouldn't be their leader. Let's hope they see sense and do the right thing: back AV in the referendum.
