Andy Burnham has announced a national commission on electoral reform, and made a commitment to put changing the voting system in Labour’s next general election manifesto.
The implication seems to be that he wants to enact reform without a referendum. That aspiration is understandable. The UK last held a referendum on the voting system in 2011, when the coalition government put the Alternative Vote (AV) system on the ballot paper. As research has shown, reformers can fairly argue that AV was defeated then, at least in part, by widespread misinformation. Referendums don’t have to be like that: notably, New Zealand has done much better. But the scars of 2011 run deep.
