Alternative Vote is a smoke screen

It may sound positive that the government is planning to introduce legislation to force a referendum after the next general election. However, the Alternative Vote is no more than a sticking plaster for our broken electoral system.

To my mind, in a representative democracy, proportionality must be the keystone of the electoral system. Without proportionality it is arguable whether the system is either representative or democratic. The Alternative Vote does not produce proportionality.

I understand why MPs want to keep the notion of one MP representing one constituency; but this fails to meet the reality that most people vote for a party or a principle: it is only in a small minority of cases that personality plays a part. Yet it is this notion that stops MPs declaring in favour of the Single Transferable Vote, which has larger constituencies served by multiple MPs. However, even in such a system, it would be feasible to allocate a portion of the super-constituency to each of its MPs. This could even be done on a preference basis. Thus an MP would still be MP for Little-Piddling-in-the-Water, which [s]he represents, but h[er|is] electorate would be wider than this.

I suspect that the real reason that MPs from the Labour and Conservative benches do not favour proportionality is that it is not in their own interests. Proportionality would mean that there would seldom be a majority government made up of a single party. Critics argue that you never know what you are going to get with such systems since coalitions tend to be formed after the election. One answer to this is that parties should, by law, have to declare the parties that they would form a coalition with. Such a system works well in Ireland. What is more, there is not that much space between Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrats - there has not been for a decade - especially with regard to the economy. What differences there are are implementational rather than theoretical.

The bottom line, it seems to me, is that a government does not have a mandate from the people if it does not represent at least 50% of them. The Alternative Vote is a dangerous step because it gives the illusion that things have really changed and further reform may not happen for another 100 years.