Q & A with Mary Southcott
The former parliamentary and political officer for the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform discusses the fight for electoral reform in the 1990s and why Labour needs to revisit the issue today.
IFTC spoke to Mary Southcott, the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform’s (LCER) parliamentary and political officer from 1990 to 2020, about how to change attitudes from within the party, the Plant Commission’s 1993 report, and Labour’s bind over electoral reform today.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
How did you first get involved in electoral reform advocacy?
MS:
It goes back to 1987 when I was a Labour party candidate in the Bristol West constituency when various people wrote to me and asked if I was in favour of electoral reform. I wrote back and said “if I could be convinced that this wasn’t just a Liberal Alliance (now Liberal Democrats) idea to get more votes, then I think the Labour party ought to address it.” That was my position.
I was interested because Bristol West, where I was standing, was linked with Bristol North West, where everybody was told to vote Labour. In my constituency, everyone was told to vote for the Liberal Alliance. I put up the vote, but a lot of Labour party activists voted tactically against me.
There were things I thought were really important in our constituency, which housed at that time St Pauls, where we had had an uprising—riots in the newspaper’s terms—in 1986. I’d been involved in that as a candidate and tried to mediate between young black leaders and the police.
To me, it made no sense to have a place like St Pauls represented by a Conservative, or indeed the Liberal Alliance. The only thing they did was to go into Labour areas and tell them Labour can’t win. I thought what does it say about our voting system that allows that to happen.
Then you became the Parliamentary and Political officer for the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform (LCER)?
MS:
They wanted a parliamentary officer, but I didn’t just want it to be about MPs. I wanted it to be grassroots up as well as top down. So I suggested adding in the “political”.
As the LCER we said we needed to widen the remit of the working party set up to look at voting systems for the European Parliament, the devolved assemblies, including London, and the Lords. That committee was changed by a vote at the 1990 conference, and became what we call the Plant Commission under Raymond Plant.
The story about Raymond Plant is he was phoned by the Deputy Leader Roy Hattersley and asked if he knew anything about voting systems. Plant said no, and Hattersley said “oh, just the man we need.”
What was your strategy for changing party attitudes from the inside? Did you target the constituency branches or rely on senior figures like Robin Cook and Jeff Rooker (LCER chair and Labour MP for Perry Bar) to persuade the Parliamentary Labour Party and the leadership?
MS:
The reason why we were successful is because we did both and we were able to stand on the shoulders of the Charter 88 movement. They had a lot of support so we could go to their conferences and talk about the issue, picking up a lot of support as we went. I don’t think one would have happened without the other.
However, at the time I was irritated by the fact that we could get resolutions on everything but the voting system. The agenda that some in the Labour party took up from Charter 88 was Lords reform and devolution, whereas, I was specifically saying, if we don’t change the voting system, none of this is going to make sense.
We played every conference. We rolled out to the regions and nations. We went to all the trade unions that would have us. We published good arguments for electoral reform, why it wasn’t just about proportionality, it was about enfranchisement, making votes count.
Robin Cook often used to say in the 1980s that we won all the arguments but lost all the votes. A system that allows that to happen is one that puts people off politics in a massive way. It’s not just that they have a constituency that is ignored during a general election because it’s not a target marginal, but that they actually don’t matter to most of the political parties.
The Plant Commission’s final report in 1993 recommended the Supplementary Vote (SV) system which was only slightly more proportional than FPTP. Was that frustrating for you?
MS:
I worked with individual members of the Plant Commission and I think that Raymond Plant wanted change. He was leading everybody to that position. A consensus-seeking process was going on which acknowledged we have to change.
When Margaret Beckett came in, having not attended a single one of the Plant Commission sessions, she used her vote against change. By then it was obvious that they were having to concede, and so the minimalist form of change was chosen.
I don’t think the Supplementary Vote should even be used to select mayors—and Priti Patel agrees with me as she wants to change it back to First-Past-the-Post (FPTP). In a way, the SV system duplicates what is wrong with FPTP, in which you have to guess whether you tactically vote or you vote for the party that you want to vote for but maybe can’t win in your constituency. You vote for something you don’t want against something you don’t want more.
There was never a conversation about supplementary vote. It was the wrong answer to the right question. It was the answer for the people who had lost the argument for FPTP.
But we did very productive work with the Plant Commission. We were seeing success. More people were joining the LCER. I think we were up to 4,000 in the 1990s, joining a single-issue group in the Labour party, which is quite amazing.
When John Smith was guided, we hear by Peter Mandelson, to offer a referendum, we shifted completely from talking about electoral systems to talking about that.
Keeping the referendum in the manifesto was difficult because the FPTP people wanted to drop it. The clever thing, which I’m responsible for, is we went to all the leadership candidates in 1994 and asked them what they thought about changing the voting system. I didn’t get anything back from Tony Blair, but I phoned him in Sedgefield.
“I hear you’ve been chasing me,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“I want to know your position on electoral reform,” I told him.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say you support a referendum on the voting system,” I said.
And he said, “okay. I can say that.” He was fine with it.
I don’t think he supported electoral reform, but he saw the cultural reasons why we needed to consult the people.
When it was published in the newspapers that he supported the referendum, it became about trust in politicians and politics. Once you promise something, as he did as a candidate for leadership, then you need to exercise some influence over making sure that happens. Tony Blair was responsible for keeping the referendum promise.
Do you think Labour can untangle itself and commit to electoral reform today?
MS:
I think it needs to. It won’t win an election if it doesn’t. The local elections in May showed the Labour party is not going to get a massive majority. It will either have to govern as a minority or form a coalition. Coalitions are really unpopular in the UK, so I think minority confidence and supply might work. We can persuade the other parties, but Keir Starmer has to go to them with the promise of electoral reform. Ed Davey has already said that a promise to deliver electoral reform will switch the Liberal Democrat vote in target Conservative-Labour marginals.
What I see, which is against Labour party policy of course, is massive tactical resourcing and massive tactical voting as a consequence of advice from the Daily Mirror or the Observer showing people where they need to vote and how, in order to defeat Boris Johnson or whoever succeeds him.
I don’t believe Labour has to withdraw its candidates. We can rely on Labour supporters to tactically vote for the Liberal Democrats. Labour voters are sufficiently aware to do what they did in Chesham and Amersham, Shropshire North, and Tiverton and Honiton.
Keir Starmer must know, as do his office staff, that talking about tactical voting is only a result of having a rotten voting system. If we didn’t, there wouldn’t be any talk of tactical voting. What we are doing is introducing more dishonesty into our politics. We know this. The electorate sort of knows this. We have a system that allows us to all pretend that this is democracy, and it isn’t.
We haven’t just had the union Unite rejecting FPTP, the Communication Workers Union (CWU) has also rejected FPTP. This is a two-stage process for the unions. So one conference rejects FPTP and the next endorses proportional representation (PR). They don’t normally do it together. However, in June, UNISON, the public sector union, did just that and endorsed PR.
Whether this support will be sufficient to take electoral reform forward through to the Labour manifesto without GMB or the other big unions supporting PR will depend on the relationship these unions have with the Labour party and the relationship between the unions, the constituencies, and the leadership will be affected by the current circumstances and strikes.
Would agreement between Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and others on electoral reform be sufficient for a future Labour or coalition government to change the electoral system without a referendum?
MS:
I think we can do it without a referendum, but only if Labour has PR in its manifesto. That’s the crucial thing.
We need to build consensus for not having a referendum with the other parties. If the manifestos of each of these parties that want electoral reform, including the Labour party, say we are going to introduce legislation, then that should be enough.
It’s really important that the Labour party argues for this in terms of enfranchisement, making votes count, and changing political culture from a binary one to a pluralist one. It can do that by recognising that binary is off putting. Yes or no. It’s never the answer.
There are two priorities the party is trying to juggle. The first is to win back the “Red Wall” seats. Electoral reform is not going to do that. But the other is to maximise the anti-Tory vote in constituencies that we can win. Electoral reform does that. It ticks that box.
Politics has to change because it is at an all-time low. The Conservative government is mobilizing its base in a Trump-like way. They’re talking about courts in the European Union. They’re talking about strikes. They’re talking about Rwanda and migration. They’re pushing all the buttons for the Tory base. Conservative politics has learned a lot from Trump, and that is not good news for British democracy.
We are close to seeing some success in changing the whole paradigm of British politics.