Voting Reform: Labour’s Unfinished Business
Antony Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Modern British History, traces the history of support for electoral and constitutional reform within the Labour Party, and argues that this remains a major item of unfinished business for the Labour Party.
The Labour Party, the Constitutional Reform Tradition, and Reform of the Voting System for Westminster Elections
The argument that reform of the electoral system at Westminster is primarily a preoccupation for smaller parties, and an alien import from traditions outside the Labour party, is a familiar one. It was much used in the late 1990s at the time of Tony Blair’s acknowledgement of the formative role of liberalism in the creation of the Labour party. Internal critics used the launch of the Jenkins Report on reform of the voting system for Westminster elections in 1998, to suggest that supporters of PR were secret Liberal Democrats, a view that drew on the deep wounds and scars felt by the defection of the Social Democratic Party in the 1980s. During this period, voting reform was depicted either as a minority interest, or as a distraction from the real business of meeting the aims and aspirations of voters, or of reforming national institutions like the NHS. Such views were in a long tradition. For some within Labour, support for voting reform by groups like the Communist Party of Great Britain and, specifically, a move towards a Single Transferable Vote system (STV), ran the risk of seeing the party supplanted by groups further to the left than Labour. For many historians of the party, debates about parliamentary reform from the 1950s onward were simply overshadowed by the work of Anthony Crosland and T.H. Marshall, who in formulating approaches to the economy placed an emphasis on voters as consumers, rather than as citizens. In these readings the Labour party’s traditional emphasis on constitutional matters was sidelined, rather than foregrounded.
This view overlaps with a standard view of the party’s history that depicts it as both cautious and conservative on constitutional reform matters, and as privileging welfare and social reform over matters of the constitution. Moreover, the history of the party is strewn with the corpses of commissioned reports on constitutional reform that were never implemented, notably the report of the 1932 Fabian Research Bureau, the 1995 Plant Report, the 1998 Jenkins Report and the 2000 Wakeham Report, all of which included some element of voting reform: the Plant Report recommended a supplementary vote system for parliamentary elections, the Jenkins Report an Alternative Vote + system (AV+), and the Wakeham Report a list system for regional representation under proportional voting systems for a partially elected House of Lords. On these issues the Labour party has been judged for its failure to deliver a fairer voting system. In this view, Labour is frequently represented as a party of reluctant parliamentary reformers with ill-defined constitutional aims who, in the words of David Marquand, embarked on a ‘revolution of sleepwalkers’ during the Blair/Brown governments. Martin Pugh has developed this argument still further, stressing the debt the Labour party owed to the Conservative party in its origins, and highlighting an unacknowledged conservative strain in Labour politics that sought stability and continuity, rather than profound change. Some historians point out that all too often, the role of backbench Labour MPs has proved instrumental in defeating reform legislation and proposals for constitutional change, rather than in encouraging them, notably over House of Lords reform under Harold Wilson and devolution in the 1970s.
