AV: The most worthless votes...

I'm happy that David Cameron has stated that during the Referendum on the Alternative Vote next May, he will campaign on behalf of the existing First Past The Post electoral system. I am, though, disappointed that such a referendum on this issue was necessary to cement the coalition.

I firmly believe that an electoral process must be as understandable as possible to the electorate delivering a clear, decisive result that is immediately understood by all. FPTP is a fairer system for what I would term 'conviction constituents', i.e. those who have a clear political view. As a Conservative, I don't want an alternative vote. I want to vote for my Party. I have one vote. Why should someone else who has already voted for their preferred candidate be allowed to vote again because their candidate came last and was eliminated?

As Lord Alexander commented in the 1998 Jenkins Report (in his Note of Reservation opposing this aspect of the Report):

AV comes into play only when a candidate fails to secure a majority of first preference votes. It does not, however, then take account of the second preferences of all voters, but only of those who have supported the least successful candidates. So it ignores the second preferences of the voters who supported the two candidates with the highest first preference votes, but allows the voters for the third or even weaker candidates to have their second votes counted so as to determine the result.

I find this approach wholly illogical. Why should the second preferences of those voters who favoured the two stronger candidates on the first vote be totally ignored and only those who support the lower placed and less popular candidates get a second bite of the cherry?

Winston Churchill himself dismissed the AV system as "the most worthless votes of the most worthless candidates" and further stated that the blind chance represented in the system would lower respect for Parliament. Given the lack of respect with which the last Parliament was treated, can we afford to further damage our Parliamentary system by adopting the Alternative Vote?

Electoral Reform: Getting the priorities right

Cast your mind back to election night. At 2200 BST as the polls closed the main topic of news was not the exit poll (which on reflection was pretty much spot on). Rather, it was reports from up and down the country, including Sheffield Hallam, Nick Clegg's own constituency, of voters locked out of polling stations unable to make a difference.

Initially, it seemed that voters had simply left it too late to cast their vote, but as the stories continued to emerge it became clear that many such disenfranchised voters had queued for over an hour, or had been forced to go home by long queues earlier in the evening only to try and come back and vote nearer the close of the polls. Worse, we saw stories of polling stations forced to close early because they had run out of ballot papers, while anecdotal reports again cast doubts on the validity of the postal voting mechanism.

Today the Electoral Commission has released their report on the 2010 UK Election. In it they state:

Our central message from this report is that the basic building blocks of electoral administration need long-term reform, support and maintenance: it is not enough simply to trust that the machinery of electoral administration will always work well and deliver elections to a consistently high standard; it is not enough simply to trust that those who want to undermine elections will resist the temptation to exploit the system; it is not enough simply to trust that people and systems will be able to adapt and cope with change without proper time to prepare.

In the report, the Commission determine that just over 1200 people were affected at 27 polling stations in 16 constituencies. Meanwhile, the report also highlights inadequate staffing of polling stations, errors in printing polling cards and ballot papers, and errors in counting votes. All in all, more than a little embarrassing given that this was also the first UK election to have observers from organisations across the world. There are pieces of good news of course. The electoral register for the 2010 election increased by 1.3 million to 45.6 million entries while, thanks to the various advertisements to register to vote, the eligible electorate rose by 700,000 in the months leading up to the election. How ironic, then, that given the huge interest generated and the numbers who registered to vote, the mechanisms were in some cases unable to support the interest while in many cases administration was stretched.

While Nick Clegg is promoting AV - a supposedly fairer means of counting votes which is backed by none of the usual exponents of proportional representation and which even the Prime Minister will campaign against - he ignores the Electoral Commission's wider concerns about the pressures on polling stations. 5 May 2011, the date for his unwanted referendum, is the same day as elections to the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, Northern Ireland Assembly and 280 local authorities in England.

Nick needs to get his priorities right!

Hauling in Vince Cable

Less than a week after Vince Cable proposed that a Graduate Tax would be a priority, the Coalition Government has drawn back from the idea. A "senior Conservative source" has told the BBC that a 'pure graduate tax' is an unlikely option.

As I argued after the first announcement, the suggestion as outlined amounted to little more than a tax on income, bore no relation to the actual cost of tuition (there was no upper limit on the money to be recouped), and gave no guarantee that the tax revenue raised would be redirected to Universities. I am delighted that the Conservatives are having none of it.

The only reason to pursue a graduate tax seems to be the Liberal Democrat manifesto promise to abolish tuition fees. Now that they are part of a coalition government, however, the reality is beginning to dawn. The country cannot afford to abolish fees; instead the current system whereby students contribute towards the cost of their own education must stay in one form or another. The proposed graduate tax was a weak attempt by our coalition partners to suggest that they had 'met' their manifesto promise. It smacked of inexperience in government.

Let us hope that Lord Browne's report, when it appears in October, will have been rather more thought through than the rushed views of the Business Secretary.

The biggest risk to our national security?

According to an article in this morning's Telegraph about the future of Trident funding, John Woodcock, the Labour MP for Barrow and Furness, has warned the Government about the potential impact of cuts to the MOD's budget on the military and shipbuilding industry. He commented:

It is alarming that George Osborne is intent on ditching the commitment to proper funding for renewing our deterrent made by the last Labour government. The new Chancellor seems intoxicated by his new power to threaten colleagues with unrealistic and unwise spending contractions.

He had better grow out of this soon or he will do lasting damage to our national security and the drivers of future economic growth.

It is in Barrow, of course, that the latest addition to the Navy's Submarine Fleet, the Astute Class, is being manufactured, while the Vanguard Class, the UK's ballistic missile submarine (which launches Trident), was also built here. Nevertheless, while Mr Woodcock is right to raise this issue, I think his ire is misplaced. While his party did indeed renew our deterrent, it was not so long ago that members of his own Shadow Cabinet were card carrying members of the CND. Had their views not been decisively rejected, lasting damage would have already been done to our national security.

It is the Conservative Party that has consistently supported and defended the UK's independent nuclear deterrent. And it is this Coalition Government which will ensure that the submarine-based deterrent will remain at the heart of our nation's defence. By contrast, it was the former Labour government that continually deferred a Strategic Defence Review (the last was in 1998) that might have laid this issue to rest. While cuts are needed and the dialogue between Liam Fox and George Osborne will doubtless continue, in general Mr Woodcock can rest easy for the foreseeable future under the Coalition - though of course he may want to check the views of some of his colleagues who may still be carrying their old membership cards! They represent the biggest risk to Trident and Britain's security.

UPDATE: Had to post to add this gem of a quote from Menzies Campbell via the Guardian (my italics):

Maybe it's the shape of the missiles but every time Trident is mentioned there is an outbreak of priapism on the Tory backbenchers. There is a real risk that the whole strategic defence review will be skewed because of the obsession with Trident. It makes no sense whatsoever to exclude Trident, the strategic deterrent, from a proper strategic review.

Ooh err...

A Licence to Waste Money

The news that Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has warned the BBC to expect a decrease in the TV licencing fee should be greeted warmly. Currently standing at £145.50 for colour coverage (it actually went up in April), this is a licence for the BBC to waste money. While the public sector as a whole faces cuts, the BBC has hitherto been left alone. No more.

Only yesterday, the Telegraph reported the huge sums wasted on flights for senior BBC Executives to and from South Africa for the World Cup, not to mention the overall costs of covering the world cup itself (did it really need so many presenters to go out to South Africa?). This is added to the huge sums paid to mediocre presenters such as Jonathan Ross - who thankfully bid farewell to the Broadcaster last night - and the amounts wasted on digital channels such as BBC Three and 6Music, and even 5Live Sports Extra, which many licence fee payers cannot access by conventional means - such as the car radio.

The only shame is that we have to wait until the licence fee review next year; with actual cuts, if they are introduced, only as early as 2012.

Graduate Tax?

Vince Cable's suggested yesterday that the forthcoming Browne review of University fees and funding should examine "the feasibility of variable graduate contributions". The announcement has been welcomed in some sectors, in particular by the National Union of Students, but it is hard to see how such a tax could be in students' best interests, and difficult to see how Conservative MPs could support any such motion should it come down to a vote.

University funding is in a poor state at the moment. Working in Higher Education myself, it is not difficult to see how the current situation has been reached. The country warmed to Blair's vision of Higher Education for everyone, with his ambitious target of 50% of school leavers going in to HE. The funding of such a picture, however, failed to materialise quickly enough and the funding to Universities has been stretched beyond capacity. Either the current cap on student fee income is lifted - which will see fees at redbrick universities rocket at least doubling in many instances - or the government must propose an alternative funding mechanism.

Politically, the LibDems campaigned to abolish student tuition fees altogether which makes the option to raise the cap a bit of a non-starter for our coalition partners: hence the graduate tax on earnings once a student enters full-time employment. Cable's argument is that a graduate will earn on average an additional £100,000 in income over their lifetime, making an initial investment in education appealing. But students already repay their existing tuition fee in a similar way.

At present a student will take out a student loan from the government to cover the £3225 annual fee and will only start to repay that fee once their earnings hit £15,000. Unlike the graduate tax, however, this is a loan. Once the loan is repaid (and of course the top earners will repay such a figure within a few years of graduating) that's it. The graduate tax, meanwhile, will continue to take a set percentage of income irrespective of how much that individual has already contributed. A high flyer will, no doubt, repay their student fee many times over under this proposal.

Cable argues that this is fair. Commenting to the BBC, under the current system, he argued, "if you're a school teacher or a youth worker you pay the same amount as if you were a surgeon or a highly-paid commercial lawyer... I think most people would think that's unfair." In other words, lawyers should pay more for their education because they earn more. Hang on, though, isn't that another income tax? Doesn't that highly-paid commercial lawyer already pay more to the government through current taxation? So why should he pay even more through a graduate tax, which he may be tied in to for anything up to twenty years?

There is another problem. Assuming that any graduate tax will be accompanied by an abolition of the tuition fee/student loan, this leaves Universities without any income up front, except from the Government. As the Government is already under financial pressure and unable to provide additional funding, how does a graduate tax provide further income? Further, as this is now a tax, rather than a loan, what guarantees are there that HE will see the return directly? Not to mention, of course, that as the tax will be payable on graduation, it will be years before Universities see any benefits. A graduate tax, variable or otherwise, does nothing to address the current funding problem for Universities.

The problem is real. But while the government is forced to cut spending, there seems no possibility of additional direct funding for Universities. Universities must instead continue to tighten their belts and concentrate on additional revenue through third stream funding. Meanwhile, the Coalition - Conservative MPs in particular - must rethink the proposed graduate tax, which does little to address the current failings, and represents a stealth tax on income for the middle classes.