Re: Voting reform and the far right: be careful what you wish for? by Claire Jones.
The underlying proposition of Claire’s article appears to be that voters can only be trusted with a fairer voting system if the far right is unlikely to benefit.
The left and centre must earn the voters’ support. If PR is fairer, we should not allow fear of the right to influence our decision.
Sherwin Smith, Wallingford
Reply from Claire Jones:
Thanks for your comments, Sherwin. Just to clarify – the central aim of the article was to stress-test the arguments offered by PR advocates for PR’s resilience against the far-right. It concluded that many of the defences offered are weak. This aspect of the article was a purely structural point that doesn’t entail any value judgements about the merits or otherwise of the far-right, i.e. it could have been written by a far-right advocate.
As it happens, I am not, of course, a far-right advocate and am therefore also interested in the consequences of PR’s failings and possible remedies. So, the article also considered these points in passing, though they will, I hope, get a fuller airing in part 2.
For now, and for the record, I absolutely disagree with your claim that ‘we should not allow fear of the far-right to influence our [voting] decision[s]’. We absolutely should – if we want to protect real freedom of choice and a healthy democracy then we need to have red lines for parties, one aim of which is to destroy the very democracy that put them there. These red lines should also reflect scientific knowledge (e.g. on climate change) and our basic values (e.g. on equality and respect for others).
For this reason, no, I would not want to trust a British public, angered and alienated by years of chronically poor living standards, and steeped in press and social media disinformation, participating in a voting system that included parties driven by falsehoods and the denial of human rights. Ideologies that repudiate climate change are dangerous as are those driven by racism and misogyny (and these attitudes are drivers behind many iterations of far-right politics).
However difficult it is to find the exact point where our red lines should be drawn, this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be drawn at all. For balance, we do need parties that have concerns about immigration, but not where these concerns are underpinned by xenophobia and racial hatred. The red lines we draw up may even have to be arbitrary. Some complain that, for example, the legal cut off point for the termination of pregnancies is arbitrary. Perhaps it is, but we’ve sought fit to choose a cut off point anyway rather than abandoning women’s rights to their own bodies.
Similarly, in politics, we need to have the courage (and maturity, wisdom, etc) to say no, in principle, to the expansion of certain ideologies in order to protect democracy itself. An excellent metaphor for unfettered voting systems is the social media platform X which, once detached by Musk from any regulation, went from being a useful, global community for the exchange of ideas to a cesspit of uncontrollable falsity, tribalism and cruelty. Voting systems without red lines have the same vulnerabilities – ‘anything goes democracy’ is ultimately no democracy at all. It’s just a child with a handgun.
Hopefully this clarifies things, Sherwin.
All the best,
Claire.
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