Parliament is discredited; its members are dishonoured. Before last year's expenses scandal, people were losing faith in politicians. The exposure of mass pilfering from the public purse accelerated the trend. It embedded the notion that MPs exist only to serve themselves, not the public.
That idea is toxic to democracy. It turns people away from the ballot box in despair. It severs the connection between the citizen and his or her elected representative. Reinforcing that connection is, therefore, one of the most urgent tasks in British public life. It has frayed for many reasons and many steps are needed to mend it, but one such opportunity presents itself next month: a referendum on fixing our rotten electoral system.
On 5 May, we will be asked if we want to adopt the "alternative vote" (AV) instead of the current "first past the post" (FPTP) system for general elections. It is not a revolutionary concept. It poses a threat only to the complacent MP who would rather not reach out to as many potential voters as possible.
With AV, candidates are ranked numerically in order of preference. To be elected, a prospective MP must gain more than 50% of votes. If none crosses that threshold on first preferences alone, the least popular candidate is eliminated. The voters' second – or, if need be, third – preferences are taken into account until someone reaches the 50% line. The winner can then claim a mandate from an overall majority in the constituency.
Why make the change? Under FPTP, the winner only needs to out-poll the nearest rival. That makes sense in a two-horse race. But if more candidates take decent shares of the vote, perverse things happen. If support is split three ways, an MP might be the first choice of, say, 36% of voters. Throw in more parties and the number backing the winner can fall into the twenties. Replicate that across the country and you end up with a parliament that simply does not reflect the will of the electorate.
People know this and many respond by voting tactically – abandoning their would-be first choice and endorsing a second in order to block a hated third. In other words, when trying to get a fair outcome from the current system, the public is already striving for a kind of AV.
There is something demoralising about such crude tactical voting. By forcing people to choose between a "wasted vote" or a reluctant second choice, FPTP entrenches cynicism about the power of the ballot. AV would not eliminate that altogether, but it would formalise the ability to signal shades of allegiance. Labour and Lib Dem sympathisers in Tory heartlands would be visible on the electoral map as never before, and vice versa. FPTP was suitable when support was carved up between two parties. In the 1951 general election, 96% of votes went to either Labour or the Tories. Since then the trend has been greater plurality. Labour won the 2005 election with just 35%. In 2010, Labour and the Tories together took just two thirds of the national vote. With the old duopoly in decline, there is not much to defend in FPTP. Its virtue lies in the link between an MP and his local area, but that is preserved under AV.
Sensing that their product is hard to sell, the No campaign merely attacks the alternative. Some of the arguments are desperate. Their claim that AV is too complicated insults the electorate. Listing candidates in order is not quantum mechanics.
It is also childish to attack AV, as David Cameron did, on the grounds that it is unloved by proponents of more radical reforms. The prime minister delights in reminding people that Nick Clegg once called it a "miserable little compromise". It is true that AV is not proportional representation – the Lib Dems' ideal system, which allocates seats in parliament more accurately according to national shares of the vote. But the history of reform in Britain is written in increments and compromises. The fact that a change is modest is no case for the status quo.
There is a fallacy, too, in one of the No campaign's more compelling lines. This is the idea that the more preferences someone expresses, the more votes he has. Someone who puts a fringe party as their first choice – goes the argument – will be sure of having their subsequent choices counted. Whereas the person who ranked the eventual winner first only got one turn. Thus, it is claimed, the BNP voter gets more bites at the cherry than the Labour or Tory voter.
This is not so. As losers are eliminated the subsequent preferences on the ballots of the failed candidates are indeed reallocated. But that process amounts to a kind of second-round run-off, or recount, in which the first preferences awarded to more mainstream candidates count again – just as much as they did in the first round. If AV offered any kind of advantage to the BNP, Nick Griffin would back it. He is supporting the No side.
Another objection to AV is that, far from promoting extremists, it would lead to blander politics. Candidates would say nothing of substance, aiming to be all things to all people in order to secure their second preferences.
In some seats that might happen, although those would probably be the places where centre-hugging caution already prevails. Meanwhile, sitting MPs, who have relied for years on the mobilisation of a core vote, would be forced to court constituents with whom they might never before have bothered. That should broaden, not narrow, the debate.
It is a fair criticism of modern political campaigns that they duck difficult issues and rely on fuzzy goodwill messages. But that tendency is exacerbated by the current electoral arrangement. Party strategists discount swaths of the country, where the results are predetermined by immovable blocs of Labour or Tory support, and customise their message for swing voters in a few marginal seats. AV would wreak havoc with those calculations.
It is, of course, impossible to say what would actually happen. Attempts to reimagine past elections under AV deliver some curious outcomes. In some cases governments would have had smaller majorities or none. But massive swings are also exaggerated, so Tony Blair's majority might have been even vaster in 1997. But these are misleading hypotheses. Under AV, John Major might not have won in 1992, so the 1997 poll would have been entirely different. Past voter behaviour under the old system is no guide to future behaviour under a new one.
The Conservatives' great fear from AV is the increased likelihood of coalition government. That is doubly odd, since partnership with the Lib Dems has put them in power, and the conditions that made their coalition necessary arose under FPTP.
On the Labour benches, too, there is concern about never again winning a big enough majority to govern alone, while mistrust of coalitions is animated by special loathing for Nick Clegg. The Lib Dem leader's egregious abandonment of campaign pledges is cited as proof that coalition-building breeds dishonesty.
Lib Dem U-turns hardly advanced the public's faith in politicians' promises. But it is absurd to blame the fact of coalition, as if every manifesto of every winning party before 2010 was fastidiously implemented.
Coalitions are here to stay even under the current system. A hung parliament was elected because neither of the two biggest parties commanded enough support to be trusted alone in government. The idea that they should seek remedy for that decline by propping up a system that helps them cheat is lazy and arrogant.
AV is not perfect. No system captures the will of the people with photographic realism. The goal is a fair approximate, and FPTP fails utterly. It distorts, obstructs, obscures and perverts voter choices. It causes tens of thousands of votes to be wasted; it forces people to endorse candidates they don't like, just to punish ones they like even less.
AV will not solve all of the problems of British democracy. It will not undo the harm of the expenses scandal, nor provoke a renaissance of civic participation. It is only a reform. It promises one thing: by taking account of multiple preferences, it would elect a parliament that more accurately describes the political complexion of the nation. That is a start.
There is no ideal option on the menu. Campaigners will try to overlay many questions on to the ballot paper, chiefly partisan jeers about the current coalition and the character of Nick Clegg. These are distractions. There is only one question that matters. Our voting system is obsolete, corrupt, broken. Do we want to upgrade it so that elections are fairer?
The answer has to be yes.