Make votes matter

Make Votes Matter, is the title of a leaflet being distributed in the streets of the UK. It is the name of a 'cross-party campaign to introduce Proportional Representation to the House of Commons'. Currently, UK General Elections use the First Past the Post voting system, which has the merit of being immediately comprehensible, but the apparent disadvantage of under-representing small parties whose votes are widely distributed, and wasting the votes of people who oppose the occupiers of  'safe' constituencies. There's a lot more to be said for and against PR and FPTP. I suppose it's understandable, though regrettable that, in today's politics, people think their Member of Parliament cannot be expected to represent them if s/he is from a party they oppose. There's little magnanimity in party politics these days.

I actually don't think the differences between PR and FPTP are worth bothering about. We'd still be voting about things that don't really matter: for Members for Parliament, for their party, for what they say in their manifesto. For people, parties, promises, image, ideology, sound-bites and slogans, rather than meaningful goals. About those goals, I believe, there's far more scope for consensus than about all the paraphernalia that characterise current election campaigns. Politicians rarely do what they say they will do; still more rarely can they be held to account for what transpires to our economy, society or environment. But their campaigning and subsequent activities, as well as consuming great gouts of brainpower, sow the seeds of division: the 'narcissism of small differences'.

I advocate refocusing our attention on goals, and the inevitable trade-offs between them, rather than political parties or the voting systems. I think we should be choosing between outcomes that are verifiable and meaningful to all of us, rather than allow our policymaking to be steered by interest groups - be they billionaires, corporations or government agencies - which are the only bodies that have the resources and motivation to understand our arcane, protracted, policymaking mechanisms. You might almost think that the obscurantism of our political systems is a ploy to keep ordinary people away from positions of power. A political system focused on social and environmental outcomes would represent a threat to the political hierarchy but, I believe, it's necessary for reasons of both efficiency and buy-in.

What would such a system look like? A Social Policy Bond regime would be one such system. It would set broad, long-range targets about which there is almost universal agreement. At the national level it could target better health, universal literacy, a cleaner environment. At the global level it could target conflict reduction, and the prevention and alleviation of disasters, whether natural or man made. Political debate would be about the exact definition of these goals rather than, as now, the supposed means of achieving them or peripheral issues such as institutional structures and funding arrangements. There would be healthy debate, under a bond regime, about priorities and time frames, but the way the bonds work would mean that there need be little discussion of who shall achieve society's goals or how those goals shall be achieved. The market for the bonds would ensure that they are always be held by the most efficient operators. And efficiency is a moving target: what is efficient today or in one part of the world today might be highly inefficient in future years or in a different region. Long-term goals will most probably require an array of diverse, adaptive approaches for their achievement - exactly the sort of approaches that government, or any single ordinary organisation, is incapable of encouraging, but that a Social Policy Bonds regime would stimulate. The bonds would lead to the creation of a new type of organisation, whose structure, composition and activities would be entirely subordinate to its goal, which would be exactly the same as that of the society that set it; a stark contrast with today's organisations, which have their own goals, independent of, and sometimes in direct conflict with, those of ordinary citizens.