Launch of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections

A new chapter in the campaign for Electoral Reform opened yesterday in Westminster with the launch of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Fair Elections.

The cross-party APPG also published its first report Free But Not Fair: British elections and how to restore trust in politics. Inside, they describe a slowly decaying political environment in which the electorate are becoming more and more estranged from the governments they elect. In a very readable report, they highlight three primary threats to UK democracy: 

• First-Past-the-Post: the current electoral system for General Elections increasingly distorting election results and denying a majority of voters a say in who governs them.
• Dark money and hidden influence: increasingly opaque funding of political parties; lobbying rules permitting unaccountable and hidden influence; and a weakened Electoral Commission for enforcing the rules.
• Disinformation: Outdated media regulation failing to ensure a fair and independent press or cope with the rapid growth of new media platforms.

To address these issues, the APPG has proposed three initial recommendations:

• Establishing a National Commission on Electoral Reform to bring together a broad array of citizens, with the help of experts, to recommend a new fair and democratic voting system.
• Closing donation loopholes and strengthening the Electoral Commission to remove the malign impact of dark money and hidden influence pervading the democratic process.
• Requiring transparency in the handling of 'legal but harmful' content. In other words, requiring media platforms to treat disinformation posts in the same way that they are obliged by law to treat illegal content, namely publishing risk assessments of the content they are displaying.

A wide front of interested parties and organisations attended the launch: our own Sarah Lewis (LDER Chair) and Hina Bokhari (LDER Executive and Member of the London Assembly) were there as well as other Liberal Democrat MPs. The latter make up roughly one third of the APPG including Vice Chair of the Group, Lisa Smart MP for Hazel Grove.

The launch of this new group will hopefully become an important milestone on the long road towards truly fair and equal votes.