Labour Party adopts STV for key internal elections
A welcome adoption of the electoral system favourite with Liberal Democrats, the Single Transferable Vote (STV), by the Labour Party.
Elections to Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC, the equivalent of the Liberal Democrat Federal Board) will use it in future, as the Electoral Reform Society reports:
Good news from a successful campaign this week: the Labour Party has scrapped First Past the Post voting for its National Executive Committee elections.
It means constituency representatives will now be elected using the gold standard of PR: the Single Transferable Vote.
The ERS campaigned for the move alongside Fair Internal Labour Elections, Open Labour and activists from across the party. This is a major step forward for fair results, and the ERS were proud to back the campaign. The next step is to get Labour to back proportional representation for Westminster, too!
During the Labour leadership campaign, we secured another win: after we wrote to him, Keir Starmer committed to consulting members on PR. Labour remains the more likely of the two major parties to change position on electoral reform.
The widespread use of the alternative vote by Parliamentarians for their own Parliamentary processes still saw many who supported using AV for themselves then opposing it for public elections.
Even so, this move to STV by Labour is a promising step in the wider battle for electoral reform. You can help with that by joining the ERS here.
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when I first got involved in local politics, it was in the parish council rules that the election of chairman should be by the ‘residual ballot’ system, (ie STV by another name), but when I suggested putting 1-2-3 and saving time the Tories would not support it..
The LP have not adopted STV for all of its NEC elections, but only for 9 of its 39 places. The reason for adopting it was not a sudden conversion to PR, but for purely factional purposes. Imposing it on the CLP section weakens the left in the party, adopting PR for the other sections would weaken the right. The other 30 places therefore will continue with FPTP or appointment by the leader.
Joining ERS is a good idea. You could also consider joining Liberal Democrats for Electoral Reform (lder.org) and Make Votes Matter (www.makevotesmatter.org.uk) – the latter are concentrating on increasing support for STV within the Labour Party.