Gordon Brown’s announcement that he intends to campaign for a form of proportional representation is a disappointing compromise. The current “winner takes all” system used in almost all British elections creates a very undemocratic form of political representation. If you vote for a losing candidate or contribute to an overwhelming landslide in your constituency your vote is wasted. The Electoral Reform Society (ERS) calculates that in the 2005 election that was the fate of 70% of votes cast or 19 million ballots.

The Alternative Vote system Brown will put to a referendum is not much better. It has the whiff of someone wanting to pretend to be radical. Instead of putting a cross you rank the candidates in order of preference and whoever gets 50% of the vote gets elected. Psychologically this may get people used to the idea of giving a preference to a smaller party but it’s unlikely to change the hegemony of the big parties.

The big beneficiary of the current system is Labour. According to the ERS In 2005, the average number of votes per MP elected was: 26,906 for Labour, 44,373 for Conservative and 96,539 for Liberal Democrats. So you could make a case that it is in the interests of the working class to keep this advantage intact. It did after all allow the party to gain 55.1% of the seats in Westminster with 35.2% of the votes. When you take into account the 40% of voters who couldn’t be arsed leaving the house only 1 in 5 voted for Labour. On the plus side the Scottish Tories only got 1.7% of the seats despite getting almost 16% of the vote. It does them good to be on the receiving end of a bit of social injustice from time to time.

Now let’s take some hallucinogenic drugs to help imagine that parallel universe in which the British left’s electoral interventions are not mainly a series of short term party building fronts and instead are a real effort to use elections as a form of building a real organisation. Both the first past the post and the Alternative Vote electoral systems are big hurdles. Those people who are motivated to vote will feel that giving their preference to a new, small radical party is such an obvious waste that, despite their sympathy with its programme, they’d rather stick with the old party that they’ve always voted for. This has certainly been a problem for the Socialist Alliance and Respect. In this year’s elections the same factor will put the squeeze on any attempts to challenge Labour from the left on account of the strong possibility of a Tory victory.

The current voting system is a brake on the realignment of working class politics in Britain. A method which creates a closer match between popular support and the number of elected representatives is both more democratic and allows for the differentiation to take place within the parties of the working class and the bourgeoisie. From that point of view the open party list method seems to be the fairest. The percentage of seats won is tied to the number of votes cast for a party either nationally or regionally.

That would make politics a lot more interesting.