(Reuters) - Proportional voting is not the answer to an electoral quirk that could see Labour winning most seats in parliament but not most votes in next month's election, Justice Secretary Jack Straw said in an interview on Friday
He indicated he would personally oppose offering radical voting changes to woo the support of the Liberal Democrats in a hung parliament, saying the proportional representation desired by the opposition party had undesirable consequences.
"I'm not in favour of it," Straw, one of Labour's most senior politicians, told Reuters. "It can give small minorities disproportionate power, as we have seen in some other European countries".
He refused to be drawn on whether he could serve in a Labour cabinet that did offer proportional representation.
"I'm not going to take part in speculation about all the ifs, the if-whats. What we are all involved in is working very hard for a majority Labour government".
Other senior Labour politicians, like Home Secretary Alan Johnson, have said proportional representation would be a price worth paying to stop the return of a Conservative government.
The Lib Dems are likely to demand widescale voting reform in return for supporting a minority Labour administration if, as polls indicate, the May 6 election ends in a hung parliament with no party holding an outright majority.
The Lib Dems, now riding high in opinion polls, have long campaigned for reforms to make voting more proportionate. They gained less than 10 percent of parliament's seats at the last election in 2005, despite winning 22 percent of the vote.
Straw said Labour was already proposing changes to the electoral system that would address part of its failure to allocate parliamentary seats in line with the level of votes gained.
Support for the usually third-ranking Lib Dems has risen sharply since their leader Nick Clegg outshone Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Tory chief David Cameron in the first of three pre-election television debates last week.
Opinion polls now show Labour trailing while Lib Dems and the Conservatives are vying for first place.
But election experts say those levels of support would paradoxically result in Labour winning around 270 seats, the Conservatives 250 and the Lib Dems just 100, in a 650-seat parliament.
The disparity in part comes from the first-past-the-post voting system, where the winning candidate in each parliamentary seat only has to gain more votes than their immediate rival and not an overall majority.
Dating from a two-party era, it disfavours third parties such as the Lib Dems when their support is distributed evenly across the country.
To address this Labour is offering a referendum on a new voting system called Alternative Vote where candidates are ranked in order of preference.
"It is unquestionably fairer and produces greater legitimacy in a multiparty situation," said Straw.
Labour would also act to encourage more people to register to vote -- it is estimated that more than 3 million people eligible to vote are unregistered -- as well as consulting on how to improve the construction of electoral constituencies.
Labour currently needs fewer votes to win seats than the Conservatives because its support is concentrated in urban seats, where the electorate and turnout tends to be smaller than Tory strongholds in rural and leafy suburban areas.
Despite boundary changes introduced for this election, analysts say the Conservatives need to be at least 11 percent ahead in polls to be sure of winning a parliamentary majority.
"There is nothing inherent in favour of Labour (in the electoral system)," Straw said. "In the 1940s and 1950s it worked in favour of the Conservatives, when famously they got fewer votes than we did in the 1951 election but they got more seats and formed the government. It was then pretty neutral and it has now moved our way".
Editing by Peter Griffiths
Reuters
