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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2019
I am grateful to the Society for the opportunity to mark the centenary of the Enabling Act and the beginning of the Church Assembly with some reflection on an often ignored but highly valuable feature of that inauguration: the Single Transferable Vote or STV. I tried on one respected registrar recently an illustration of what the task must be like for those who do not welcome it. Was it, I suggested, like a blind person doing a jigsaw where the pieces were all shaped differently from each other – in other words, where the blind person could ensure that it was put together accurately, but on the other hand never saw the picture? The response was that that picture reflected accurately how it had in fact felt to that registrar. That might suggest that this lecture should be explaining and commending STV as general good practice, but in the event the process and virtues of STV have here to be largely taken for granted. I offer here one short commendation of STV.
This text is an edited version of the Ecclesiastical Law Society Northern Province Lecture given on 6 February 2019.
2 At the lecture I asked how many present had presided as returning officers in STV church elections. It proved to be few. I asked ‘Did you like the role?’ and duly encountered little enthusiasm.
3 I referred to two Grove Ethics booklets I had written: no 53, The Christian Conscience and Justice in Representation, which followed the appalling 1983 General Election; and the more recent no 178, An Ethical Case for Electoral Reform, which followed the surprising, but still unjust, outcome of the 2015 General Election.
4 They did not dare touch on clergy elections to the convocations: only the convocations themselves could address that problem.
5 At this point I gave a snippet of pre-history. The politician usually identified as the originator of STV is one Thomas Hare, a friend of John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century. He is credited with inventing the ‘quota’, the ancestor of the quota we use today. I salute him also as the great-grandfather of Bishop Richard Hare, the ebullient Bishop of Pontefract (1971–1992). Richard Hare took a great pride in his ancestor, and in his eighties presented a photo of Thomas Hare to the Electoral Reform Society; the Council of the Society renamed their then premises ‘Hare House’.
6 Interestingly, the Parliamentary debates proceeded on the linguistic convention that ‘proportional representation’ meant ‘multi-member constituencies electing by STV’. No milk-and-water compromise alternatives (such as recent years have seen) had any profile then, and a country with no live experience of STV largely knew what it was talking about.
7 The Parliamentary concerns, reported in the press, probably meant that the RCC was well informed.
8 They could not know in 1921 that General Elections would follow in 1922, 1923, 1924, 1929 and 1931: five further dissolutions in ten years, each with a new proctorial election.
9 At one time even the journals in the student common room were chosen this way, thus helping minorities, such as lovers of the Beano.
10 Christian Howard (from Castle Howard, in the Diocese of York) told the Synod to disregard the speech just made by, if you please, a Midlander. (The Church of England, of course, has no Midlands.)
11 It is of course virtually impossible to get an overall picture of whether the three laity elected each time have merited a place, or whether one or more got in simply by being lay, irrespective of what contribution they could make. The only persons who could give such a picture are properly silent on the subject. It is also difficult to discover whether the senior staff member has been determined in advance by an unofficial ‘primary’ so that the electors on the committee get no discretion to choose between senior persons. In each case, the worse possibility looks to me extremely likely to be happening.
12 The Canon allows that it might be the other way round, namely with the South needing protecting. But the paucity of such theological institutions in the North contrasts heavily with the South, and it is virtually certain that the North was being protected, while the language of symmetry was employed.
13 Since I gave the lecture, we have had the astonishing party-list election to the European Parliament, which has turned normal voting statistics upside down. The amazing figure of 30 per cent of the vote going to the newly formed Brexit Party was shock enough. But that 30 per cent, if obtained across the land in a General Election where four other main parties (five in Scotland and Wales) were sharing the other 70 per cent of the votes, could well deliver upwards of 400 Brexit MPs to run the Government in Westminster. Such is the undemocratic effect of first-past-the-post.
14 On the day I finally edited this material for inclusion, the result of the June 2019 Peterborough by-election came through. There was much exclamation at Labour having beaten off Brexit by a narrow margin, but a glance at the full figures shows the random (and surely unrepresentative?) character of the result: the successful candidate gained just 30 per cent of the vote, and 70 per cent of the electors found they had supported a loser. I think 30 per cent is the lowest figure behind an elected member of the present Commons, but it is far from the lowest in history. It is very difficult – or very naïve – to laud this unjust system as providing representative democracy.
