It is too soon to predict exactly what will happen in Scotland and Wales following this May’s elections. Alex Salmond has now been elected as the Scottish First Minister, but it is anyone’s guess what will happen in Wales. I strongly suspect that neither nation
will go back to the polls prematurely – the cost and risks would be too great.
Negotiations are still being conducted as I type. Such talks are regularly presented as being either chaotic or somehow sinister, but are they? In coalition in Scotland between 1999 and 2007, Labour and the Liberal Democrats worked to a formalised partnership agreement and can point to a whole string of manifesto commitments that they achieved. Salmond’s decision to go it alone means that he will have to negotiate his programme with the Scottish parliament as he goes. That will not be easy, but minority administrations are by no means a rarity around the world.
By contrast, where a single party has a clear overall majority, the legislature’s role is much diminished. Instead of negotiated programmes, we end up with macho programmes where the main objective is maintaining party unity. Governments from all parties rarely do this by reasoned negotiation with their backbenchers; for the most part, strong-arm tactics become the order of the day. Even on the few occasions where governments lose votes in the Commons, it usually has more to do with the whips miscalculating than anything else. Opposition parties meanwhile, while occasionally indulged, are rendered largely irrelevant.
A proportional voting system would enable Labour to more explicitly nail its progressive colours to the mast. Traditional Labour supporters in the heartlands would actually matter.
That isn’t to say that moderation doesn’t remain the key to winning elections under proportional representation. Salmond may yet come to rue his decision to insist on a referendum on independence, which has cost him a coalition with the Liberal Democrats and flies in the faces of the two-thirds of Scots who voted for unionism. But it does mean that the compromises made by elected politicians reflect the votes cast rather than the opinions of marketing gurus.
It has been suggested that directly electing the executive would do away with all this unappealing horse-trading. There are indeed reasons why we might want direct elections of this type, but the messy business of negotiation will remain – look at the problems George Bush is currently facing with a Democrat-controlled Congress. Directly elected mayors can circumvent this to an extent with the rule that councils can only overturn their decisions with a two-thirds majority vote, but this rule has sapped London’s assembly of authority and rendered it an irrelevance in the public eye.
We can’t even assume that first-past-the-post guarantees majority government. People like to cite 1929 and 1974, when the electorate’s ‘mistake’ in electing a hung parliament was quickly corrected. We should instead look at the last two Canadian general elections. In 2004, Canadians produced a hung parliament; in 2006 they did the same thing again. Like Canada, the UK now has a firmly established multi-party system: the combined Labour/Conservative vote was 68 per cent in 2005 compared with 90 per cent in 1950. Simply barracking the electorate into voting minor parties out of existence is unlikely to work, but will lead to greater instability (even in the second 1974 general election, the national swing was just two per cent). In Scotland and Wales, the electoral arithmetic makes it even less likely that another election will change anything; instead, people have to concentrate on making the system work.
The bottom line is that, regardless of which electoral system is used, electorates make complex, even beguiling decisions at the ballot box all over the world. There is evidence that citizens actually prefer systems that force parties to sit round the negotiating table. In a recent poll commissioned by Unlock Democracy, we found that 76 per cent of the public likes the idea of parties attempting to work together on constitutional change. Among Scots, who have had eight years of this sort of thing, 86 per cent prefer that approach. Perhaps trenchant party tribalism has simply had its day.
I strongly agree with this. It is disingenuous of Gordon Brown to promise Parliament greater powers of scrutiny without changing a voting system that ensures MPs would not fully use them. However, the link between the MP and his/her constituents is also important and we need reform that preserves the single-member seat. AV for constituencies perhaps, and some other method for the upper house? But this might mean a party list system for the Lords, effectively shutting independents out of it. Time for a lively debate about how we do this.
More power to parliament may not necessarily mean more substantive democracy — irrespective of whether the form of voting system is FPTP, PR, AV or whatever — as long as there’s voter apathy and increasingly decreasing turnout! Look at India : essentially following the Westminster/FPTP format. But because of people’s intense activity in electoral politics, all the governments formed in the past few decades had to be coalitions of a dozen or so parties across the spectrum; broadly reflecting the (complex) reality on the ground. Whereas, I gather that in Italy they were thinking of scrapping PR because it was throwing up atypical situations! So the content/substance of people’s participation may be more relevant/critical than a hair-splitting debate on the form of voting.