Though some of Labour's weightier worthies have weighed in on the side of the no to AV campaign, those who dismiss AV as a Liberal enthusiasm ignore Labour's historic commitment to electoral reform. It is a commitment that, in many ways, runs deeper than that of the Liberal party – at every stage in its history, Labour has backed electoral reforms to give more real power to voters.
At the heart of the case for the alternative vote, now, as it was when a Labour government sought to introduce it in the 1930s, is a recognition that when the encouragement by candidates of tactical voting becomes the norm at general elections, as is the inevitable consequence of first-past-the-post in a more than two-party system, political principles are subordinated to game theory.
Electoral reform was one of Labour's earliest priorities. Labour's early leaders, Keir Hardie principally among them, saw electoral reform as central to Labour's mission to empower the many, not just the few. Hardie was famously chastised by the conservative media for his determined advocacy of votes for women, as well as for all men.
Alone of the three main parties before the first world war, Labour espoused giving women the vote. Less well-known is Hardie's belief that first-past-the-post was unfit for purpose in a political system with more than two parties. The Liberal prime ministers of the day did nothing to change it.
In contrast, the Labour government of 1929-31 marshalled an electoral reform bill through the Commons which would have introduced the alternative vote (AV). There was no talk of referenda in those days (that had to wait for Tony Benn, who dreamed up the idea in the early 1970s). But the House of Lords prevented the bill from becoming law before the government fell.
Most of the critics of AV at the time were Conservatives. Winston Churchill's scepticism of the alternative vote was not because of any devotion to the principle of first-past-the-post. In fact he wanted proportional representation – in the partisan hope that it would elect more urban Liberal MPs at Labour's expense.
By the 1940s, with Labour a serious party of government, Britain had reverted to a two-party system. Labour gave priority instead to reforming Britain's undemocratic system of "one voter – several votes". Voters owning business premises had multiple votes in the general election depending on the scale of the premises they owned, and voters with a university degree had extra votes through which they could vote for the university MPs who sat in the House of Commons alongside conventional constituency MPs.
It was a system that gave extra votes to sections of the upper and middle classes at the expense of working-class voters. The 1929-31 Labour government had attempted to abolish the university constituencies but was blocked by Conservative and Liberal MPs. Only in 1948 was a Labour government able to abolish the "one member, several votes" system.
More recently, electoral reform was an important part of Labour's programme to modernise Britain in the 1960s. Harold Wilson's government's reforms lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in time for the 1970 election.
Only with the "who runs Britain" election of February 1974 did first-past-the-post become unrepresentative. It was the first election since 1931 where the two main parties had not enjoyed the confidence of the overwhelming majority of voters. But in the flush of "victory", the fact that Labour had secured more seats than the Conservatives, on fewer votes, meant Labour MPs advocating electoral reform risked accusations of disloyalty.
Yet even in the 1970s, issues of democratic reform remained at the forefront of Labour's programme. Labour governments during the 1970s tried twice to push bills for devolution in Scotland and Wales through parliament. And it was Labour that introduced direct elections to the European parliament (it had inherited a system from the Conservatives under which MEPs were appointed by the government, as if they were quangocrats). Jim Callaghan's government gave parliament a free vote on using proportional representation for the Euro elections, the first time a non-FPTP system had been considered for the election of parliamentarians since 1930-31.
It was not until the 1983 general election that three-cornered election contests where the victor was clearly opposed by the majority of voters became widespread. Voters in seats such as Dewsbury, Darlington, Leicester East and Bradford North were saddled with Conservative MPs elected on a minority vote (34%, for example, in Bradford North).
As Keir Hardie recognised, if there are more than two parties in serious contention for a seat then first-past-the-post destabilises the democratic process. It led to "tactical voting" becoming an accepted part of the British political lexicon. It has forced candidates to draft leaflets to voters explaining not their policies but why, on the basis of real or fictitious local polling figures, only they, and not another candidate, can "get out" the sitting MP.
That is not politics – it is tactics.
The case for electoral reform is at the heart of Labour's politics now just as it was a century ago, and as it has been throughout the intervening period. At times, democratic priorities have altered as external circumstances have changed. In 1948 it was more important to remove plural voting than to reform first-past-the-post, which, under what had effectively become a new two-party system, was functioning well. But as Hardie argued a century ago, and would argue again now, the system is broke. It is high-time to fix it, so that our polity better serves the many, not the few.