Saturday, October 25, 2003
"Found a cure for being sure"
I went to the first Director's Dialogue. Partly because Howard Davies seemed like an interesting, intelligent man when he spoke to us at the postgraduate induction, and partly because I'm trying to fill in some of the many gaps in my understanding of British politics and how things work here. Rt Hon Oliver Letwin MP, apparently the Left's favourite Tory, was interesting and intelligent too.
His answer to a question from the floor made me rethink voting -- what it's for, how it should work, what would make more people do it. The questioner asked him about proportional representation and whether, given Letwin's support for people being able to choose their education and medical providers, and to vote on local police authority, whether he also supported voting reform.
Previously, I was in favour of PR. I like healthy opposition parties that can actually provide a check on the ruling party. I also like (hypothetically) the idea of feeling like my vote actually counts. It would avoid the weirdly distributed results of "first past the post" where, for instance, a province ends up with one party holding 97% of the seats with less than 60% of the popular vote.
Letwin's position was that, yes, first past the post has cost his party seats for the last two elections, but he will continue to support it even if that leaves the Torys out in the cold for the rest of his life. His reasoning is that after 1949, West Germany's proportional representation system meant that there was essentially no change in government policy for 50 years -- there was no clear majority, so the elected parties kept forming coalitions. I don't know enough about post-war Germany to evaluate that, but whatever.
In Letwin's view, the great strength of democracy is that if the government is seriously off track, it doesn't take that many voters (under first-past-the-post) to kick them out and opt for a change. I hadn't looked at it that way before, and it's a good argument. It just seems to work weirdly in a more-than-two party system.
Bruce Anderson of the Telegraph thinks Letwin is one of the only interesting potential candidates for the Tory leadership. Howard Davies asked him about his ambition, and he claimed not to want to be Prime Minister. He also acknowledged he didn't expect anyone to believe that until there's an opening and he refuses to run.
In other Prime Ministerial news, today is Jean Chretien's 10th anniversary as Prime Minister, and the 10th anniversary of the first time I voted. For the Natural Law Party, because I was 18, and foolish, and didn't feel my vote was going to matter anyway. Plus wouldn't it be cool if we could all yogic hop our way to world peace? I might have voted more wisely if there'd been some form of proportional representation, but I can't guarantee it.
