When inaugurating my shiny new academic-year diary at the start of September with two forthcoming Labour-related conferences, little did I know that in just over a week the star speakers at both would have publicly declared themselves on the way out.
Following Tony Blair and his appearance at Progress annual conference, Clare Short addressed New Labour in Power – 10 Years On, a symposium I organised at Kingston University. By the end of the week she had committed to paper her idea of leaving parliament in pursuit of the goal of a hung parliament in the Independent.
This Short, sharp shock can certainly be described as thought-provoking. Let’s face it, until recently talk of hung parliaments was confined only to constitutional reform anorakery or A-level politics classrooms. It has now been propelled into an agenda item in the blogosphere and think-pieces in the Fleet Street heavies. But would the consequences of a hung parliament – among them electoral reform – really be in the country’s best interests?
Hung parliament proponents have a vision of dismantling our two-party duopoly for permanent, radical, progressive social transformation which sounds initially attractive. But as any good A-level politics student knows, there are pros as well as significant cons. In my opinion the latter outweigh the former. Would we really get any radical governmental measures if moderating forces were at work with smaller parties (in all probability the all-things-to-everyone Lib Dems) calling the shots? Admittedly we would have had no poll tax with a hung parliament but there would almost certainly never have been an NHS either, as in its day this was seen as a dangerously radical proposition. Disproportionate influence would be wielded by all minor parties. Respect and even the BNP would transcend their current lunatic fringe status to assume potential kingmaker roles.
First-past-the-post is not a perfect system but it has many strengths. It delivers clear, decisive results rather than the lengthy uncertainty of post-election horse-trading in smoke-filled rooms (to mix metaphors) in many nation-states where PR exists. Such stitch-ups have importantly not been voted for by anybody. As things stand there are inbuilt checks and balances. The size of a government’s majority can and has been a bulwark against despotic one-party government – remember Norman Lamont’s lament of Major’s government being in ‘office, not in power’?
In addition to this, even if the wishful thinking of a hung parliament might be a desirable conclusion for some, campaigning for it is surely a non-starter: it simply doesn’t add up. Hung parliaments occur by default: when no party is in a position to form a majority government. Willing for that to happen would depend on a schizophrenic and elaborate tactical voting exercise in which the final outcome drove the process on the basis of backwardly derived calculations of electoral arithmetic. 1992 showed us how unreliable predictions based on last time around can be – on a micro-level in the seat of Cambridge, where I was at the time, Labour leapfrogged the Lib Dems from third place in 1987 to take the seat from the Tories.
The intervention from Short has been slated from some quarters for being little more than sour grapes from a has-been. From my experience she is an eloquent and forceful debater who is unshakably convinced of her views. She is entitled to them, but perhaps the energies of this obviously skilled and talented campaigner would be better served by seeking to improve internal Labour party democracy and reversing plummeting turnouts within the existing system rather than falling for the panacea of smashing it for what might be much worse.