TONY Blair could be the last leader of a British political party for at least a generation to win a clear majority in parliament.
This follows the unveiling of plans for sweeping electoral reforms.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, the leader of Liberal Democrats, said yesterday that a referendum would be held next May to replace the centuries-old “first past the post” voting system with an Australian-style preferential or “alternative vote” system.
The coalition government partners had agreed that Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservatives would be free to campaign for a No vote in the AV referendum, while Mr Clegg’s party would back a Yes vote.
The government will also cut the size of the House of Commons from 650 to 600 seats and introduce more equal electoral boundaries, wiping out a significant pro-Labour and anti-Conservative bias caused mainly by demographic changes and uneven boundaries over the past 20 years.
The changes are expected to strengthen the Conservative Party while bolstering the third-party Lib Dems, making it much more difficult for any prime minister to win the large single-party majorities enjoyed by Mr Blair and Margaret Thatcher.
The Labour Party accused the coalition parties of an “outrageous gerrymander” against Labour, and some Conservative backbenchers were angry at what they saw as the introduction of permanent coalition governments.
Electoral reform was one of the key concessions won by the Lib Dems when they agreed to support Mr Cameron as Prime Minister after May’s general election produced a hung parliament.
With the spending cuts planned by the government expected to lead to at least an initial public backlash, Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg have been desperate to ensure that this parliament runs full term, and Mr Clegg yesterday announced the introduction of fixed five-year terms with rules making it difficult to force an election before May 2015.
Crucially, the government said that even if the AV voting system were approved at next year’s referendum, it would not come into effect until the new electoral boundaries were finalised in late 2013, giving the Lib Dems a powerful incentive to stay in the coalition for at least 3 1/2 more years.
The coalition has survived explosive issues, such as the announcement of heavier spending cuts and tax rises than either of the ruling parties had flagged before the election, but electoral reform is seen as the most dangerous issue of all for coalition unity.
A string of Conservative MPs spoke out against the referendum but government spokesmen said they were confident of passing legislation to enable it.
AV voting is expected to help the Lib Dems because it will allow many of their candidates who finish second on primary votes to come out on top, by winning the second preferences of voters who supported other candidates.
“First past the post” does not take account of second preferences and simply awards each seat to the candidate with the most votes, no matter how low that candidate’s winning total might be.
The AV system asks voters to list all candidates in order of preference and distributes those preferences until a candidate has 50 per cent support, meaning that a Lib Dem who finishes second to a Labour candidate in a tightly contested seat could overtake Labour by being the second choice of Conservative voters.
As traditional enemies, Labour and the Conservatives are much less likely to win each other’s second preference votes.
The Lib Dems now hold 57 seats in the 650-strong parliament while smaller parties have another 28 seats. Under AV they would be likely to maintain or even increase their presence in a smaller parliament, meaning Labour and the Conservatives would face the tall order of winning more than 60 per cent of the remaining seats to form a single-party government.
Mr Clegg said changes would “help correct the deep unfairness in the way we hold elections”.
“Under the current set-up, votes count more in some parts of the country than others, and millions feel that their votes don’t count at all,” he said.
Labour went into the last election promising to hold its own referendum on AV but opposition justice spokesman Jack Straw indicated his party might withdraw support for reform.
“We are not going to allow . . . that support to be used as some kind of cover for outrageously partisan proposals in the same bill, to gerrymander the boundaries of this House of Commons by arbitrarily changing the rules for settling boundaries and by an equally arbitrary cut in the number of MPs,” he said.
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