INTRODUCTION
I am grateful to the Society for the opportunity to mark the centenary of the Enabling Act and the beginning of the Church Assembly with some reflection on an often ignored but highly valuable feature of that inauguration: the Single Transferable Vote or STV.Footnote 2 I tried on one respected registrar recently an illustration of what the task must be like for those who do not welcome it. Was it, I suggested, like a blind person doing a jigsaw where the pieces were all shaped differently from each other – in other words, where the blind person could ensure that it was put together accurately, but on the other hand never saw the picture? The response was that that picture reflected accurately how it had in fact felt to that registrar. That might suggest that this lecture should be explaining and commending STV as general good practice, but in the event the process and virtues of STV have here to be largely taken for granted.Footnote 3 I offer here one short commendation of STV.
If a constituency is electing four representatives at one go, and everyone has four votes (ie a ‘multiple x's’ scheme), then around 30 per cent of people who agree with each other (whether through organisation as a party, or simply as individuals with the same choices as each other), may very well elect all four successful candidates and up to 70 per cent of the electors will have elected no-one. Using STV, through the transfers the electors arrange themselves into five groupings, each of 20 per cent of the electorate, and in four of the groups they will have elected one successful candidate. The last group to reach 20 per cent will have elected no-one, being left supporting the runner-up. But how does 20 per cent of frustrated electors compare with the 70 per cent who are very possibly frustrated with multiple x's? For the moment, STV greatly outstrips other electoral systems and we (the Church of England) have practised it for almost 100 years.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
The Creation of the Church Assembly
We begin with the creation of the Church Assembly. The previous Representative Church Council (‘RCC’) invented it early in 1919, and then the Enabling Act of Parliament conferred legislative powers upon the Assembly at the end of the year. Elections followed and the Assembly first met on 30 June 1920. So what stages had led to its method of election?
The RCC had brought together in 1903 the Convocations of Canterbury and York, each with an Upper House of Bishops, and a Lower House of proctors, or clergy representatives, with a House of Laymen, formed from two separate Canterbury and York Houses of Laymen. The clergy in Convocation were chosen in each diocese by arcane methods to be examined below. The House of Laymen was elected indirectly from an electoral base of laymen in each diocesan conference, elected by multiple x's, with numbers related to the size of each diocese, but three votes when there were three vacancies, six when there six.
A national church structure of this sort arose in part through the difficulty of legislating for the Church of England through parliamentary Acts. Should not the Church of England distinguish itself from the State and create its own machinery of government? So in 1913 the RCC asked the archbishops to appoint a committee to examine the possibilities and make recommendations. Lord Selborne chaired the committee, and completed the Selborne Report on Church and State in 1915, recommending the outline of a future Church Assembly. However, in 1913 the RCC had also changed its existing rules for electing to the House of Laymen.Footnote 4 The electors each still had as many votes as there were vacancies; but a concern for proportionality led Sir Edward Clarke, the famous Victorian advocate who had defended Oscar Wilde, to propose that up to three of an elector's votes could be given to one candidate, and this was adopted as giving greater hope to minorities. Clarke actually stated that they had adopted proportional representation. So when Selborne's Committee reported in 1915, they recommended that elections to the future House of Laymen should follow existing RCC practice: that is, multiple x's with electors able to give up to three of their votes to any one candidate. The First World War delayed events, but in 1917 the RCC commissioned a committee to draft a legal constitution for the RCC to adopt and authorise in order to provide a governmental body, onto which Parliament could by legal Act bestow the desired legislative powers.
STV and parliamentary elections
So how does this bear upon STV? Well, enlightened secular forces were simultaneously at work.Footnote 5 STV had made few inroads into public life in the nineteenth century, though the first bill to introduce it for parliamentary elections came to the Commons in 1872. No word of its merits seems to have reached Church circles. However, while the RCC was recommending a national Church Assembly, in 1916 the then Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, asked the Speaker of the Commons to convene a conference of members of both Houses to seek to
provide an electoral basis which will make that Parliament reflective and representative of the general opinion of the country, and give to its decisions a moral authority which you cannot claim from what I may call a scratch, improvised and makeshift electorate.
The terms of reference were to examine, and, if possible, submit agreed resolutions on the following matters:
i. Reform of the franchise;
ii. The basis for redistribution of seats;
iii. Reform of the system of the registration of electors;
iv. The method of elections and the manner in which the costs of elections should be borne.
The Conference reported in January 1917 to the new Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, unanimously recommending many changes, three of which were live in national consciousness: first (and very obviously) the enfranchising of women; second, some rough equality in the size of constituencies; and third, and much less expected, the use of STV in multi-member constituencies in urban areas and the use of the alternative vote in single-member constituencies in rural areas. These principles were duly written into the Representation of the People Bill in 1917. However, a Commons amendment on a free vote that summer excised STV in multi-member constituencies by a majority of seven. Nevertheless, MPs did formally still bring in STV for parliamentary elections – except for constituency seats. So was STV eliminated? The answer is no: STV continued. The university seats, all 12 of them, were all changed into two- or three-seat electoral bases, electing by STV. That ran right through until the abolition of those seats in 1950, a testimony to justice in representation, but a justice unwanted by the power politicians.Footnote 6
Church Assembly elections
This parliamentary evidence hung over the RCC. When, following their November meeting, they appointed a committee to carry out the Selborne recommendations, its members were faced with principles rather different from Selborne's. So when they reported with the proposed scheme in October 1918, they had had to address two major areas of disagreement. A vote of 24 to 20 had left women disenfranchised, but, when in February 1919 the RCC were authorising the scheme, an amendment included the women, and the name became the House, not of Laymen, but of Laity. The new Church Assembly would follow Parliament in including women.
On STV the committee did slightly better: the split vote was in favour of STV, and it got written in. In just one attempt to reject it, a Mr Dixon stated: ‘The method of proportional representation was a very complicated and very difficult one for the scrutineers to carry out’ – and, of course, Parliament had rejected it. Selborne himself pitched in, saying that it was a tragedy Parliament had rejected it. Edward Clarke defended it too. The amendment was rejected after minimal debate. All the aggro was centring on a totally different issue: the qualification for the lay franchise. Should it be baptism, or confirmation, or actual communicant practice? So STV got written in almost without discussion.Footnote 7 The Church Assembly, having effortlessly followed the State, was now in a position to exhort the State.
Parliament passed the Enabling Act at the end of 1919, so the Church Assembly was first convened on 30 June 1920. But, although the laity had now been elected by STV, the convocations were still unreformed. From time immemorial each diocese had been represented in the Lower House by the dean, another member of the cathedral chapter, all the archdeacons and just two parochial clergy (in the North it was two per archdeaconry). Each diocese had its own inherited way of choosing the two proctors for the parochial clergy; and no-one knew how to revise the constitution of the convocations. So the Assembly created its first Measure under the Enabling Act, and wrote in that the convocations had power to reform their own constitutions. This went through the Assembly's Revision stage and Final Approval in November 1920, through the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament and the Lords and Commons without hindrance, and received Royal Assent on 23 December. So the convocations altered their lower houses: ex officio members were now simply the dean and two archdeacons, and the proctors for the clergy were proportionate to the size of each diocese; following the laity in most respects, they wrote in that elections were to be by STV. The convocations were (until 1964) dissolved with Parliament, so the Assembly in February 1921 petitioned the King to dissolve the existing convocations immediately, to allow newly elected bodies to replace them.Footnote 8 Dissolution happened in April, and the new convocations were elected by STV for the July meeting of the Assembly.
So far, so good. But in 1923 the Assembly established a committee to report on how the parochial church councils were doing, and in 1924 extended its remit to include the rules for electing the Assembly itself. This Committee reported in 1926, recommending a new Measure for Rules of Representation in the Assembly, with a draft which abolished STV and went back to multiple x's. In their ‘Notes’ they wrote:
An election by proportional representation, by the method of the single transferable vote, is very complicated in practice; it gives much trouble to presiding officers, and is not easily intelligible to the average voter. We are not convinced that the advantages are sufficient to outweigh these practical drawbacks, and we think it ought at least to be open to the Assembly to adopt a simpler method of election. It is true that the election of Proctors to the Convocations are now conducted by the method of proportional representation; but the Convocations are entirely free to change the method at any time.
It is the standard cry: ‘very complicated’. But STV was giving justice. Admittedly elected persons usually favour the system that elected them, but the Assembly members had seen in the use of STV a fully just, genuinely proportionate, representation. Some individual's vigorous advocacy must have carried the committee, but in the Assembly debate the opposition was such that a new committee was appointed ‘To consider further the Rules for the Representation of the Laity, with a view so to frame legislation as to avoid serious controversy and fundamental change’. So the proposal to abolish STV collapsed.
POST-WAR DEVELOPMENTS
So the rules continued, and for nearly 30 years I find no serious attempt to amend them. But on 13 November 1952, in the Assembly's debate on the Report of the Rules for Representation of the Laity Committee, W H Coles moved on behalf of the Committee:
That the Committee be instructed to include in the Measure a provision that the method of voting at elections to the House of Laity shall be such as to provide that each person entitled to vote shall have as many votes as there are persons to be elected but may not give more than two votes to any one candidate.
He argued that proportional representation was difficult to operate and made little difference in practice; and that the two votes for any candidate would ‘give some protection to minorities’. The debate was adjourned until February 1953, when Mr Coles reopened the debate with a similar speech. But others in the debate were mostly opposed. F D Campbell Allen (Diocese of London) denied Coles:
two reasons for this serious constitutional change. The first was that proportional representation was complicated and difficult to understand, and the second that it made no difference to the result. In his experience of elections to that House in London, both as returning officer and, on many occasions, as a candidate, he had never found … that any elector had suggested that the procedure was difficult to understand. It was the simplest thing to put no. 1 and so on, on the list of candidates … hardly ever got a spoilt paper … [and the outcome would be completely different].
G Knowles (Diocese of Bath and Wells) added that the system was ‘capable of being understood by a child of ten … if they were not careful they would have a tyranny of majorities’. Even the Earl of Selborne (Diocese of Portsmouth) pitched in, recalling battles for the Enabling Bill in 1918–1919. Not understood? ‘He had never seen there was anything in it for the voter to understand.’ Mr Coles then acknowledged what had not been explained: that the Committee was divided and, as he now put it, wanted to ‘know the wishes of the Assembly’. The motion was put and ‘The Chairman said the motion was lost by a considerable majority.’
I am not commenting on what the membership of the Houses of the Assembly looked like, but I emphasise that, when major issues came to the Church of England and got referred to the parishes, the kind of configuration of voting in the parishes and in the Assembly matched each other. At the centre, true representation in proportion to convictions widely held was provided by justice in voting.
GENERAL SYNOD
So we come to General Synod days. I was a candidate in the convocation elections in 1964 and in a by-election in 1967 and got my head round STV – which, it appears, not all candidates had. Then, when the Synod was founded, I was elected in the Northern Province, among the growing numbers of evangelicals on this national body, which reflected both the actual growth of evangelicalism round the country, and also a more intelligent participation in the electoral process by evangelical clergy. From 1970 onwards three of us – Peter Dawes, later Bishop of Derby, Michael Hodge, who represented Rochester, and I – took steps to complete our own understanding and to educate others. We joined the Electoral Reform Society in the great days of Enid Lakeman, and we introduced STV in other parts of public life where we could: thus at St John's College, Nottingham, we had from 1971 a council elected from an association by STV.Footnote 9
A shrieking anomaly of the voting practices which Synod inherited from the old Church Assembly is that, as far as I can discover, the Assembly had always chosen its own standing committee and similar bodies by multiple x's. Thus any solid phalanx of, say, 35 per cent of the members could by block voting elect a much higher proportion of representatives, right up to 100 per cent in the standing committee. So in February 1973 I moved an amendment in a debate on standing orders to provide that all internal elections of the Synod should be conducted by STV. We had a good debate. Not only Michael Hodge and Peter Dawes spoke compellingly, but unexpected support arose from others. Maurice Chandler replied for the existing standing committee, not exactly opposing, but gently sidelining the amendment with lightweight irrelevancies: I had put in nothing about a chairman's casting vote; I had not allowed for different houses to express separate opinions; I had not advanced any new arguments. The Synod got his message and defeated my amendment, by 125 to 120. Astonishingly, the standing committee itself came back in February 1975 and proposed from the platform exactly what I had been asking, and carried the Synod without a division. Since then all internal elections of the Synod have been conducted by STV, to everyone's great benefit.
There remained, however, one new election to Synod to be regularised. During the first quinquennium of Synod the old regulation still ran that suffragan bishops could be elected to the House of Clergy. After some argy-bargy, the House of Bishops agreed to admit a limited number of suffragans to the Upper Houses of York and Canterbury, chosen by election from the serving suffragans in each province. The first such provincial elections came in 1975 but, not being internal within the Synod, they were conducted by a multiple x's election. The nine suffragans in the Synod for that quinquennium were the last ever elected by multiple x's. The procedure was soon sorted and from 1980 to 2005 six suffragans were elected by STV in Canterbury, three in York. I had my own opportunity in that category.
However, just as STV was becoming normal within the Synod's life, so the first possibility of trouble arose. In February 1976 we were forming the Crown Appointments Commission to advise on the appointment of bishops. This included three clergy and three laity as permanent members to be elected by General Synod by STV. However, the Standing Orders Committee, by the chairman's casting vote, proposed that in each case at least one of the three persons elected should come from the Province of York (York has always feared being sidelined by Canterbury). But STV is not suited to reserved places. Michael Hodge, representing the losing side in the committee's split vote, moved an amendment to delete the requirement. In my speech I said that, as a northern proctor (I lived in Nottingham and represented Southwell), if I knew in advance that a Northerner was necessarily going to be elected, I would certainly use my own preferences simply as between Southerners (and, I might have added, if others saw it that way the voting for Northerners might be nugatory). In essence, STV allows minorities to decide on what basis they wish to elect by preference, but they decide that themselves, and to be told in advance that they had to give an elected place to a Northerner inhibited them from deciding by their preferences that they wished more strongly to give expression to different churchmanships, or to different academic abilities or to different ages – the point being that discovering what groupings exist only arises through the actual voting.Footnote 10 Fortunately, the Synod accepted Michael Hodge's amendment, and the reserved place for a Northerner was eliminated, but a risk arising from failure to understand STV had become visible.
Next I offer different an illustrative personal experience. In 1985 I was made a suffragan bishop about four days before the lists closed for the synodical elections. I stood for a suffragan seat among the southern suffragans, and was not elected. Clifford Longley wrote in The Times that a ‘freak result’ of STV was that I had not been elected. I took pleasure in writing to the editor that there had been no ‘freak result’ as STV cannot give freak results; the reason for my defeat was much more simple, namely that the electors had not wanted me. I submit that people who commend a system under which they have themselves been elected may indeed have prejudiced judgements – but watch out for those who commend a system under which they have been defeated.
During the following five years, in which I was not a member of Synod, the whole business of a reserved category of persons to be elected to a synodical committee arose again, and it caused considerable pain. In 1985 Faith in the City led the Synod, after a struggle, to form a Committee for Black Anglican Concerns, chaired by the first black bishop of the Church of England, Wilfred Wood, alongside whom I had been consecrated. The committee sought a fuller black membership of General Synod – where those from any minority ethnic community were almost non-existent. They were warned that recommending co-options would be unpopular and might be hurtfully rejected; so in November 1988 they proposed instead that 24 black persons should be elected in the diocesan elections to the Synod. These would be candidates running in the election, but with their numbers made up to 24 from defeated candidates if there were not 24 elected. Peter Dawes, by now Bishop of Derby, tried to replace the procedure with straightforward co-options, but lost on a split vote. The motion then passed by 214 votes to 74. So a draft amending Measure was brought to the February 1989 meeting of Synod to provide for these 24 protected seats.
This would have produced exactly the scenario I had envisaged in relation to protected northern members of the Crown Appointments Commission – only in an exaggerated form. I do not say no-one would have voted for black candidates, but there was always a chance they would not. Those who could see that the 24 would arrive in Synod whatever their voting support might be, would surely have used their preferences entirely on standard candidates. The situation was even worse as, without any definition of colour, near-white candidates could have looked for a cushy place through labelling themselves ‘black’. In the event the draft legislation was defeated by 12 votes in the House of Laity – not, I fear, through arguing the logic of STV, but a combination of fear of being paternalist on the one hand, and of Parliament declining it on the other. The defeat was, I submit, constitutionally vital, but was of course experienced as a terrible slap in the face for our ethnic minority Anglicans. I shared with Wilfred in the disappointment and then had ten years on the Minority Ethnic Committee trying, among other tasks, to salvage the good name of Synod and the purity of STV.
Two more threats have come along since my time on Synod. The first relates to the appointment of bishops. I was involved in two diocesan vacancy-in-see procedures in the 1980s and had to work hard to get the election of the diocesan four to the national Crown Appointments Commission done by STV. There had been rumours of dioceses where only suffragans and archdeacons got elected – clearly an upshot of block voting with multiple x's. STV should cure that and it was introduced by Regulation in 1993, and then the numbers were expanded to six in 2003. So all should have been well. But a debate in 2008 arose from a sense of imbalance: dioceses where senior staff still dominated in the election of representatives, or even one or two where the laity had almost extinguished the clergy. The new regulation required a minimum of three lay persons to be elected, and a maximum of one senior staff cleric. The Synod debate shows no sign of awareness of the distorting factor of protected places; the vigilantes had all retired. The chickens came home to roost in Bradford in 2010 when there were but three lay candidates, and it was unclear whether they had to be elected as a component of the statutory six or whether only three others had to be elected. The election had to be re-run, and the next stage was increasing the size of the vacancy-in-see committee, in the hope of raising more than three lay candidates. Even so, were I on such a committee, even as a lay voter I would be saying ‘Well, insofar as we need lay representation, we are going to get it – so I will give my preferences to sort out between the clergy candidates.’ That, if multiplied, could result in a derisory use of high preferences for lay candidates. To me the grievous factor is that no speaker in the Synod debate even spotted the distortion: seemingly in the central bodies of the Church of England we have the treasure of STV, but in somewhat earthen vessels.Footnote 11
The second instance is more recent – in 2014 the revised Canon H 2 provided for the universities and theological colleges to be represented in the convocations by four elected clergy, of whom at least one must come from York and one from Canterbury. This safeguarding of North and South is arguably imposing on the electors a favouring of a chosen minority, when they themselves might have wished to differentiate on a quite different basis, as, for example, to ensure that a woman was among those elected, or that theological college staff were not crowded out by university teachers. To decide in advance what minorities need protection is subtly to deprive the electors of their right to choose. So in my days as a northern teacher of theology I would have been saying ‘Oh, so I get a Northerner in automatically, so I will use my preferences among the Southerners.’Footnote 12 And the upshot of that would have been, as with the Black Anglican proposal in 1989, that candidates from the protected constituency were likely to attract a derisory number of first or second preferences at the count.
GENERAL SYNOD MOTIONS ON STV
However, even though the Church of England is ignorant or careless in respect of our own treasure, I still nurture a hope that we might value it enough to desire to get a message across to the nation. I have three times been involved in General Synod calling upon the political parties to adopt STV. Here is a quick run-down of those occasions.
In February 1976, Peter Dawes moved ‘that this Synod believes that the time has come for a change in the parliamentary voting system and urges all political parties to adopt a preferential system of proportional representation as a policy commitment for future public elections’. This had Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark (on a rare appearance in Synod), supporting it. No-one spoke against it. It was carried overwhelmingly. In November 1983, following the absurd General Election earlier that year, Peter Dawes came back with a similar motion, reaffirming support for the 1976 motion with similar wording. This time there was opposition: William van Straubenzee, a distinguished Tory MP and member of Synod, made an absurd defence which played into our hands. This time Synod voted by 251 votes to 61. Then came a third occasion. In 2000 we were promised a debate on the constitution, but, after some questions and pressure in Synod, the Board of Social Responsibility brought forward a bland toothless resolution supporting democracy, asking us to be responsible members of it, hoping that we would have what they called a good debate. The platform motion which came in November 2002 and had its main debate in February 2003 did indeed enshrine motherhood and apple pie. A Wakefield member put in an amendment that moved us on from ‘playing a full part’ in our democracy to calling on the parties to adopt proportional representation. I put in an amendment to the amendment (which the would-be amender resisted) which added to ‘proportional representation’ the words ‘by the single transferable vote’. The Synod adopted my amendment, amended the main motion with it, and then passed the whole motion, now with teeth, by 226 votes to 6. And I think we have heard no more since. Quite apart from my own retirement, Peter Dawes and Michael Hodge are also long gone.
I do not comment here on the results in Synod. You will know that Anglicans of every hue and every theological outlook have got there; and, once there, they have to hear each other and agree with each other, and know each other. And their electors recognise that the range of abilities and outlooks from each diocese is, in fact, fair representation. In short, the voters get what they vote for.
COMMENT AND RECOMMENDATIONS
So here is my sermon: we have had disgraceful leadership from the political parties in respect of justice in representation. They know that first-past-the-post is quite unjust, that it returns random results and that it deeply affects who can run for election. In West Yorkshire in 2010 out of 18 seats only 1 had a member returned with a 50 per cent vote. Eight members got in with less than 40 per cent. The two major parties cling to an unjust system in the hope – perhaps a faint hope – that it will give them a thumping majority and unchecked parliamentary power. When they stand back, however, their deepest assessment is that their system is unjust. Ted Heath had to export STV to Northern Ireland, where it has done much good (yes, it really has). Tony Blair commissioned the Jenkins Report, then never brought it to Parliament. He provided a supplementary vote for the election of mayors, and David Cameron carried it on for police chiefs. Blair produced an additional members system for Scottish and Welsh elections, and turned the European elections over to the party-list system.Footnote 13 All this activity was admitting that almost anything would be an improvement on first-past-the-post, but the beneficiaries of the present system have until 2019 been devoted to it for their own benefit in elections to the Commons. They may, however, now face a situation where the unfair benefit has passed to others.
So what does the Church of England do? In the Anglican Communion's ‘five marks of mission’, mark number five is ‘to seek to transform the unjust structures of society’. You have a Synod which, given the chance, used to call upon the political parties to espouse justice in representation. But, in the 43 years since the first synodical motion was passed, the Archbishops’ Council, the House of Bishops and the Mission and Public Affairs Division have, as far as I know, all failed to sign up to it and promote it. We experience here a curious cartoon reversal of a charge often brought against Christians. We are generally told we ought to practise what we preach. True, but in this field we are in great need of preaching what we practise: justice in representation. For what happens when a parliamentary election comes? Here we stand on the moral high ground; but we abandon it for the election. Listen to the bishops and leaders. It is cartoon candy-floss: ‘Christians should be involved in politics’; ‘Your future lies in your hands’ (it almost certainly does not: your vote will be wasted, you will quite probably elect no-one); ‘It is the duty of Christians to get out and vote in a democracy’ (even in a distorted election? Perhaps, but surely registering protest?). The great demanding guidance from our leaders is ‘Be thoughtful and responsible in casting your vote.’
What, you may ask, can the legal experts whom I address in this lecture do? First of all, be clear in your mind that voting systems are not level-choice alternatives, like whether you drive an automatic or a manual car. They are instruments of justice or injustice in representation. They enable the people in a democracy to get a government representing the wishes of the people – or not so representing them. It is astonishing how governments will take any number of more or less cosmetic steps in the supposed interest of fair elections: enormous care taken to stop people voting twice; insistence on personal registration; tweaking constituency boundaries to equalise numbers of voters in each; tremendous care taken over sealing ballot boxes and over the count. We have an enormous insistence that 52 per cent for Brexit is absolutely determinative (which seems to be believed by Remainers as well as by Brexiteers), but the single-member constituency returning an MP with 37 per cent or 42 per cent of the vote (that is more or less what was happening in the sampling I took of the West Yorkshire results in 2010), and that multiplied across the country – or alternatively the safe constituency where, with a carnivore mopping up 65 per cent of the vote each time round, and the other 35 per cent of voters knowing that voting for the vegetarian is a noble gesture but no actual use – that is the scenario in which we are engaged, it is a saddening scenario in which our Christian leaders are more or less complicit and it cries out for a sustained prophetic opposition. And in the Commons possession is power: the manifesto which brought in a government on, say, 39 per cent of the vote can then be represented as a mandate by the people.Footnote 14 And does your MP represent you?
So what can you do? Registrars, I bid you value your opportunity to participate. Look, it may be a headache, it may take time, but it is a hundred times worth it. Suppose a surgeon objected to some surgical operations on the ground that they were lengthy or required concentration; we would be saying to them ‘yes, but great results come from them, so be glad it is your skill and revel in the chance to do them’.
And let's work at a culture of challenging simple references to ‘holding an election’, so that we reverse the British atmosphere that ‘election’ means first-past-the-post. In Ireland speaking of an election means preferential voting; the defining of our terms will help the change of our culture. If you run a meeting with a choice between three lines of action, use preferential voting. We hold the high moral ground. Nothing could be more dismal than that we should practise justice without knowing why, or even without knowing that it is justice. We hold the high moral ground: let us shout from it and prophesy against the structure.
