AV and the culture of ignorance

I’m totally in favour of voting reform, and my reform of choice would be the introduction of the Alternative Vote (AV), an electoral system whereby every voter counts, not just those who swing between Labour and the Conservatives; a system whereby the all-powerful elector can express his support for the party or individual he agrees with the most, without fear of being drowned out and made irrelevant; a system in which every single victorious MP  can invoke the authority bestowed on her by a real majority back in her constituency, not merely the largest minority. But the media doesn’t seem convinced. Of course, it’s not up to the media to be convinced by anything. That’s not the media’s job. It’s not even the media’s job to be the convincer, to convince ordinary people that voting reform is a great idea. It’s certainly not the media’s job to nurture a culture of ignorance in the public; but that’s what it seems intent on doing.

I get the impression, watching TV news in particular, that the broadcasters themselves have no idea how AV works. You might think that’s because it’s difficult to understand, but that is absolutely not the case. It’s very simple. The fact is that TV news broadcasters do not do their research, because they have found an easier way of filling their airtime. In the place of researching a story properly, they prefer to interview the Man In The Street, or encourage the General Public to phone in and express an ill-informed opinion, which will immediately be broadcast as ‘news’.

In the case of voting reform, it is perhaps understandable that the general public hasn’t fully understood the concepts involved. I mean, you can’t expect Joe Bloggs to find out about these things for himself now, can you? Well, that’s debatable, perhaps, but what seems as clear as crystal to me is that we can and should expect news presenters to find out how these things work, so that they can enlighten their public.

This does not always seem to be the journalists’ view of their role. For instance, having asked a middle-aged lady in the middle of her shopping what she makes of AV, and having been given a reply along the lines of, “I don’t really know how it works. I think it’s probably just the politicians trying to trick us as usual,” do you suppose the interviewer took the opportunity at least to try to explain how AV works to that one uninformed individual? I doubt it. It would be inconsistent with the spirit in which the rest of the news programme was produced: Given the choice of either informing or obscuring, the producers would rather leave millions of viewers totally in the dark. This contributes to the atmosphere of confusion and obscurity which fuels the growing culture of ignorance.

To return to Joe Bloggs, we might forgive him for not doing his democratic duty and informing himself (perhaps on Wikipedia) of the pros and cons of the various electoral systems available to our democracy, since he can always assert that what has eluded even the mighty brains of TV land must be far too academic for a simple fellow such as he. We might, generously, forgive him, but we won’t be able to suppress our anger when he goes on to whinge that the politicians have deceived him, when we know that his taking even the slightest interest in the world around him would have allowed him to see right through their inept deception.

In the current circumstances it is therefore probably too much to ask that the campaign leading up to the referendum on voting reform will be conducted in a spirit of enlightened discussion, since those in favour of reform will be battling not primarily the few valid arguments in favour of keeping First-Past-The-Post, but the culture of ignorance itself which threatens to engulf national politics.

Originally published in Perspectives No. 8, October 2010