THE disclosure today of the overwhelming rejection by Labour Party members of proportional representation for Westminster elections is predictable, despite the pledge in their manifesto to hold a referendum on introducing such voting reforms.

For as Labour learned to its cost, particularly in Scotland, in the new-style voting for the new national assemblies and in the shambolic European elections - which employed a warped method of PR - letting go of the old first-past-the-post system entails a surrender of power by those in power.

And, for all the much-vaunted democratic values of PR, this upshot is basically an anathema in British politics which are essentially a confrontational power struggle.

Yet, why should Labour, the winner by a mile in the last Westminster race, continue its dalliance with PR - having first of all set up the Jenkins Commission on electoral reform, pulled the PR-advocating Liberal Democrats into their sway by boosting their hopes of more and then found it has been granted such a huge majority?

The answer, it seems, from the revelation today that in-party consultation shows three quarters of members are opposed to change, is that there is an innate, and politically understandable, reluctance in the party to give up the control it enjoys today.

Indeed, cynics may see the toe-in-the-water exercise allowed at the Euro elections - entailing so-called closed lists of candidates drawn up regionally by party chiefs, so that few people now know who their MEPs are - as a deliberate device to expose the failings of proportional representation. In fact it was such a predictable fiasco that it is hard not to believe it was a calculated fuse for PR to be demolished altogether in the eventual referendum Labour promised.

That promise was made when it could not be sure of the power it enjoys today and so crafted such a means for making deals with the Lib-Dems in the case of a hung parliament or slender majority.

But the bottom line of Labour's clear rebuff of PR today is a message to the other parties that says: We are in charge now and we are not going to make it any easier for you to make it any different.

That has been the story of PR down the years.

Parties favour it in opposition. When they get power, particularly overwhelming power, they have second thoughts.

And why shouldn't they? That's British politics, after all - more's the pity.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.