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Single Transferrable Vote = Labour Party Harmon-y.
June 25th, 2007 at 01:59
I was shocked today when Harriet Harman somehow won the deputy leadership today. Not because it was her who won – she (was?) an easily forgettable political nobody who’s only memorable feature is her slightly unusual mouth. I was shocked because for the hour or so leading up to the announcement, Sky News, who’s coverage I was following, consistently claimed that Alan Johnson had won.
“Alan Johnson wins deputy leadership” was kept on screen until about ten minutes before the official announcement when it suddenly changed to “Sky Sources: Harriet Harmon wins deputy leadership”. Presumably “Sky Sources” were the BBC. If you were to flick channels you saw that BBC News 24 had on screen a still picture of Harman with the caption “Confirmation that Harman has won deputy leadership” or something like that.
I think its interesting that the Labour voting system uses the single transferable vote system. By “interesting” I mean, “I’m about to make a moderately interesting but unverifiable point, so quickly revise STV on the linked Wikipedia page to avoid looking stupid”. Er, basically, when you vote you rank the candidates you want 1, 2, 3, and so on, and the vote counting is done in rounds, so that for example, when Hazel Blears got the least number of votes out of the 6 candidates, the people who voted for her’s second choice are added on to the remaining contestants totals. And then the least popular of the remaining five is eliminated and their voter’s second choices are added on to the other candidates… and so on.
Why is this interesting? Well, unless my knowledge of statistics is at fault (likely), or my knowledge of politics is dodgy (pfffft!), then an STV system would surely mean that the most mediocre candidate is going to be elected? The person who is going to please everyone, but isn’t really anyone’s favourite, but may be everyone’s second third choice. Its like if there were an election of Britain’s favourite celebrity bar using the single transferable vote system and Gary Linkekar won. Nobody really hates him, but nobody really likes him either, so loads of people put him second after their more polarising choices of Jeremy Clarkson or Davina McCall or whoever.
This “theory” was actually demonstrated today after John Cruddas and his (sort of) radical left wing agenda were knocked out and his votes transferred.
I think this is bad because it surely means that there’s going to be boring people in power? I’d prefer it if we could either easily like or dislike someone, as long as they’re pushing for change. If the boring middle-ground candidate is elected then surely things are going to get stale? They know that if they suggest anything too radical, not everyone will like them, or will at least not be as indifferent towards them. I know this is the problem with democracy at large, but STV strikes me as something that would magnify this.
Look at that- I’ve almost made quite a good political point. The building blocks are there, I just can’t articulate the excellent point in my head.
Anyway, the person I feel sorry for at the end of this is Hazel Blears. Aside from being someone who must have to constantly crane her neck and suffer the embarrassment of asking for a booster seat to be installed in ministerial cars, not only failed to get a new job today, coming dead last in that, but unless I’m mistaken, was also sacked from her current job. In front of thousands of people.
Gordon Brown said today that the deputy leader will also be the Chair of the Labour Party… which is Hazel’s job, isn’t it? Way to add insult to injury, Gordon.
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. Kenelm.