Ken Ritchie: Still time for vital referendum bill to bring in fairer voting

"MEN make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please," said Karl Marx. In place of "men" he may as well have said "electoral reformers".

The last decade has been filled with missed opportunities, half promises and innuendo from the government as to its plans on voting reform. New Labour saw an opportunity to build a new politics in its 1997 manifesto, and promptly forgot all about it when Peter Snow's swing-o-meter revealed the scale of its mammoth majority.

Reformers want to change politics. We want a better politics. But the opportunities to make the case and press for change are few and far between. Earnest reports can be written, meetings organised and even PowerPoint presentations delivered with gusto, but sadly for all of us working for reform, to create the new politics often means sitting down and breaking bread with the old.

And so history brings us bang up to date, post expenses crisis, to a little room in the Royal Society of Arts. In there yesterday Gordon Brown offered us another taste of the New Politics, and with it a firm commitment to a referendum on the "alternative vote".

The default setting for reformers is often to damn any reform on the table with faint praise. And you'll find no shortage of it from our colleagues across the sector. But although a change to the alternative vote (AV) is the most timid reform Brown could have proposed, it does represent an improvement in our voting system and any improvement is worth having.

We appreciate that voting reform isn't going to drop fully formed into our laps because politicians suddenly see the light. No amount of pie charts will convert the unconvertible. But whether Brown's motives are partisan or principled, the fact is we have a little progress. AV will be familiar to millions of voters in Scotland since the single transferable vote arrived in local government elections in 2007.

AV lacks the sophistication and proportionality of STV, but it is quite clearly progress. It won't destroy safe seats at a stroke as STV would, but some seats will become marginal and some marginals will become more so, and plenty of MPs will feel less comfortable than once they did.

There will be no case for tactical voting when you can actually vote with your heart down the line. And that old fallacy of first-past-the-post – that by voting for one party you hold all others in equal contempt – will be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Westminster requires emergency surgery. If the attendant physician today is not prepared to deliver the late intervention, then a quick fix will have to do the trick. AV is not a final destination for British politics, but the proposed referendum is a real stepping stone we have to see delivered – and in this parliament.

We do regret that after more than 12 years of Labour in office we've reached this stage with only a few weeks of parliamentary time available before the next general election. But it is more than possible for this legislation to be passed before the election, if the political will is there.

We urge the government and the opposition parties, and all those who want action on reform, to do everything in their power to ensure that this legislation is passed in the coming weeks.

This referendum could have real symbolic importance in restoring confidence in politics. The expenses scandals of 2009 have dented faith in Westminster and it is important that MPs, before they seek re-election, realise the necessity of a move to a system of politics in which MPs have stronger democratic mandates and greater accountability to those who elected them.

• Dr Ken Ritchie is chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society