The Labour Party manifesto is likely to be published in early to mid-June.
Will it include any serious electoral reform? Any of the following would count as major and the market would resolve to YES if the manifesto promises these changes or a referendum on these changes:
A change to the voting system within single member constituencies for Parliament (eg. AV, SV, any other form of transferable vote system)
A change to the voting system for Parliament which includes multi member constituencies, top ups or party lists (eg. Any form of PR)
Direct elections to the House of Lords (ie. voters vote for candidates or parties)
A change to allow "direct democracy" where citizens can force a binding referendum against the wishes of the government
Changing the voting age won't count for this market as it's covered here - /SimonGrayson/uk-general-election-2024-will-the-l
The following are the sort of things which wouldn't meet the threshold of "major" reform:
A relatively minor change to the franchise such as allowing EU citizens the same voting rights as Commonwealth citizens
Removing the requirements for voter ID
Changes to the way we elect local government positions (eg. reversing the changes which made the Mayoral elections FPTP rather than AV, changing the way councillors are elected)
If the definition of major reform isn't clear, please ask about any other examples!
When it comes to electoral issues like this, it's significant for them to appear in the manifesto since the Salisbury Convention means that the Lords shouldn't block any policy that was in the governing party's manifesto. So if Labour include the policy in their manifesto and win the election, they should be able to pass this as law unless they choose to do a u-turn.
1,000
1.00The manifesto is out and there is no commitment to major electoral reform.
There's a long term ambition to properly reform the Lords, but the only pledge in the manifesto is to make some pretty minor adjustments (excluding hereditary Lords and eventually putting a retirement age in place) and investigating further reform in the future.
Resolves to NO.
@BrunoParga An end to FPTP would be transformational in the UK. It would change the way that parties would need to campaign and I’d argue that it would be the biggest act of electoral reform of our lifetimes!
@BrunoParga Single member districts have an affect, but FPTP has a big affect as well.
I know a lot of friends and family who are going to be voting for a different party to their first preference because of FPTP. I’ve been canvassing this week and our main message on the doorstep is that under the current voting system a vote for anyone other than Labour won’t help to beat the Tories in our constituency.
I agree that proper PR or any move to multi member constituencies would be an even bigger change, but I maintain that a change to AV would still be pretty big.
@BrunoParga But we might have to agree to disagree here. I’ve updated the wording of the market so that it’s clear that a change to the voting system within single member constituencies would be sufficient for this market to resolve to YES!
@SimonGrayson that seems like a good edit.
About AV itself: we don't have to speculate. If AV was a change comparable to PR, Australia (AV) wouldn't have politics that's much more similar to the UK than to New Zealand (PR). Australia has only two parties (the Coalition and Labor) and getting lots more votes doesn't guarantee getting more seats; also, third parties are in practice excluded. New Zealand has a multi-party system with coalition governments.
AV is not all that you believe it is.