We have a well understood way of electing MPs and forming governments for UK-wide elections. Not that you’d know it from the comments of some, particularly those opposed to the coalition.
Here’s how it works. We elect MPs by first past the post. Those MPs then decide who forms a government. If a Prime Minister can get the support of a majority of MPs, he or she can form a government. If the PM loses that support, the government will normally fall.
That system has produced some odd results over the years (as do all systems, depending on your view of what’s odd).
In 1951 Labour got 48.8% of the vote under the same system – more votes than any other party – and found themselves in opposition.
In 2005, it returned Tony Blair and Labour to power on just over 35% of the popular vote, with a healthy majority.
In 2007 Gordon Brown became Prime Minister despite no-one voting for him to be PM – not even the other Labour MPs.
In 2010, the Conservatives got the most votes and seats, but didn’t command a majority of MPs in the Commons, so they did a deal with the Lib Dems and formed a coalition.
All these are odd, but all are legitimate within the system we have. Whether its Churchill, Blair, Brown, Cameron or Clegg we have little choice but to work within the system and, since this is politics, use it to maximise power and influence.
Because, unless one party secures over half the votes and over half the seats across the country, something’s got to give somewhere. Either one party will get to run the country despite being supported by fewer than half of those who voted, or two or more parties will work together.
In neither case have a majority of the population voted for the exact outcome.
This is all fair enough, but the question arises – why are Labour people in particular moaning so much about the Coalition being illegitimate? I guess the people doing that could be the Labour equivalent of those on the right who complained Gordon Brown shouldn’t be PM.
But if you’re going to complain about the Coalition, what you’re really complaining about is the way we choose governments in the UK. That’s a very fair thing to do, of course, as long as you’ve got an alternative. Few in the Lib Dems think the current system is perfect, or even half-way decent.
If you think coalitions are a bad thing, there are ways you can reform the system to avoid them. One easy way is to create a winner’s premium: you might award the victor an extra hundred seats, or something along those lines.
It seems legitimate to me to argue for something along those lines on the basis that you oppose coalitions. I’d disagree, of course, but it could be proposed.
What isn’t legitimate is to support the current system with all its foibles, but decide one of the results (which happens to be one that sees your party out of power) is dreadfully wrong.
I accept there’s an argument about coalitions not being ideal under our system: they’re sufficiently rare that the voters don’t expect them and so don’t cast their votes with that outcome in mind.
A system where one party can rule alone on well under 40% of votes also isn’t ideal and hardly reflects the will of the people.
My (hardly original) suggestion would be that, whilst far from perfect, a more proportional voting system would go a long way to solving both of these.
We’d have more coalitions, but voters would expect it. People could vote not for the one party they wanted to rule alone, but for the party they most wanted to have a share of power.
And we’d get away from the situation of a party running the whole show with barely a third of the popular vote.
All systems are compromises. No system is perfect, or even nearly perfect. Which one you go for depends on what you want it to achieve.
So my challenge to people who view the coalition as illegitimate is to stop blaming Clegg, Cameron et. al. for using the system to get power – everyone does that, not least Blair and Brown – and to say how you’d reform it.
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18 Comments
No, coalitions are better than majority governments. They consistently borrow less.
http://joeotten.blogspot.com/2010/06/and-labours-cuts-begin.html
I don’t blame Cameron and Clegg purely for going into coalition, it’s the way that they used the opportunity to strip away policies that they told their voters they believed in, but actually didn’t.
I tentatively back PR-squared-
http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/electsys.html
http://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2010/05/10/as-pr-becomes-centre-stage-what-about-this/
So this works by depriving voters in some areas of their chosen representative? Specifically those in marginal constituencies are most likely to end up being represented by a loser. I think this is possibly worse than FPTP, TBH. It has all the downsides of FPTP and then the added kick in the teeth of not even getting the winning candidate.
Or you could have a separation of powers, directly elect a Prime Minister (by FPTP or AV) who would no longer need the Confidence of Parliament to govern – having a direct mandate from the people – but would still need Parliament to legislate.
You’d end up with issue-by-issue pacts in Parliament but probably not a governing coalition.
Never understood why the LibDems are so in favour of a Parliamentary system rather than proper separation of the Executive and Parliament.
@John Richardson: Yes, it isn’t perfect. I said tentatively because I’m undecided- but I support PR-squared over something like PR that would tend to consistently deliver hung parliaments- because parties expecting a hung parliament can pretend to support anything and never have to see it through, without the backlash that would come from openly going against what they told the voters.
I don’t want a system in which policy boils down to which negotiator can hold eye-contact long enough, especially when those negotiators secretly want to ditch some of their own policies and will lie in order to trick policies out of the other, and al behind closed doors.
If you don’t like a system that can produce coalitions, how would you change it?
FPTP doesn’t creat coalitions very often. None in the 20th century… one so far this century…
That’s good enough for me….
Brutally short analysis: it’s crap.
I’m not going to do a full analysis against standard criteria for every nutjob voting system that appears. For a vague understanding of why it doesn’t work: it obliterates small parties like the Welsh, Scottish and Irish ones, forcing people to vote for one of the “big three” instead, it’s not preferential, and it encourages insincere voting.
Yes I didn’t like the comments made by its supporters that it would stop “fringe” parties. An electoral system shouldn’t be designed to lock out whatever parties aren’t dominant at the time of its adoption. I wonder if it would be better to put constituencies into regions and have PR-squared for each region rather than nationally? Could help solve some of the problems of PR-squared, though it would have problems of its own.
The problems of systems that tend towards hung parliaments dwarf the problems of PR-squared, though.
@ Braveheart:
You are wrong about FPTP. Yes, in the past it has usually produced majority governments. However, it is unlikely that it will continue to do so, unless we get back to a situation where well over 80% of the votes are cast for one of the two main parties.
Wherever one might see the LibDems going (I am fairly optimistic), I don’t think that two-party politics is going to return, and FPTP is going to produce coalition governments more frequently, too.
As Iain said: if you don’t want coalitions in future, FPTP is not the answer. The only answer would be a winner’s premium (as Iain also points out). To my knowledge, that system was first used by Mussolini in Italy. Not my favourite model, I have to say.
We have the confusion of what we are electing: It won’t be resolved ’til we have different houses. One for constituencies (delegative, FPTP or AV or even an elected councillor) and one of national government (representative, PR). Otherwise we are merely approximating a government from two different constitutional concepts.
Mike, I’m impressed that you know what Dave Cameron and Nick Clegg secretly believe. What else do they secretly believe, and how do you know?
Having said that, if two leaders did secretly dislike some of their own policies, it would be pretty stupid of them to redline them in negotiations and trade away policies they did like.
But as it happens we were quite clear what the price was: Fair taxes, a fair start for children, economic reform, political reform. It was on the front cover of the manifesto, and was at the core of the answer to the “hung parliament question”. It is hard to find any of it that didn’t get into the coalition agreement.
If we move to some sort of fairer electoral system which means than no one party can form a government, then inevitably the British electorate will have to learn to live with either coalition or minority governments. The current difficulties in predicting what should happen in five years time, when the present coalition ends, is that neither the British public (but not the Scots) nor the British political parties have any real experience of how to make the transition from one party government to multi-party government. For instance, in Germany, the electorate know before the election what the most likely combinations of parties will be. Currently the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats tend see themselves as potential coalition partners, as do the Social Democrats and the Greens. If you vote Green you know that the thrust of the government programme will be socialist but with the strong Green emphasis, whereas if you vote Free Democrat you know that the Christian Democrats will be in the driving seat, but with a strong Free Democrat commitment to free enterprise, low taxes and personal freedom. Similar situations exist throughout much of continental Europe. It really isn’t difficult, just different.
If we had a system that produces coalition governments (STV for example), we would have had a choice between a coalition with Labour or with the Tories, which would have strengthened our negotiating position with either.
So yes, that would be good.
Your premise is flawed. Just because a lot of people oppose this particular coalition it doesn’t follow that they dislike coalitions in principle.
Well, this is interesting. There is no such thing as a perfect system of representation. Democracy is in itself imperfect, As Churchil said, Democracy is an imperfect system. It’s only merit is that it is better than any other.
Precisely. The desire for representation to arithmetically reflect party support in the country is in itself unreasonable. A party vote is not only about support for a politcal platform but a personal expression of identity, and a desire to have our economic and social interest reflected in the outcome. It is about strength and relative importance of an opinion and not its mere expression. The elector expects the Government to take hard decisions whether they agree with them or not. We have a Parliamentary system not a Government system reflecting some spread of opinion . It is a system of government which serves us well. Who cares whether it arithmetically reflects an abstract national opinion. We expect the Government to get on with the business of government. If we dislike it we can turn them out. Long live the elector and down with party hacks!
@charliechops1
Your view seems rather outdated, since we are simply no longer in a two-party political landscape. People who *never* find their opinion represented in givernment because of this unfair election system do care passionately, and wouldn’t share your view. Under FPTP, if we throw out one government and get another, many people still never get anything they’d agree with. You may be one of those people who are happy to vote for one of the two big parties every time, but an ever increasing number of people in this country aren’t.
The problem is, other than the people who simply don’t understand how our constitution work, I’ve not heard anybody describe this coalition as illegitimate.
The same sort of person that says things like “In 2007 Gordon Brown became Prime Minister despite no-one voting for him to be PM – not even the other Labour MPs.”.
This is not a strong coalition, it is unequal. A proper PR system may produce better results, but as it currently stands the public are getting a twisted view over what a coalition actually entails. Which makes it even less likely to hbe supported.
The tories are playing a very clever game by aligning “coalition” with “cuts” with the electorate.
@Tony – all three parties supported cuts. Labour, lest we forget, spoke of making cuts deeper than under Thatcher and had £44 billion worth lined up. The Lib Dems at conference last Autumn voted for big cuts. This isn’t some Tory thing, it’s something all three parties agreed on, until after the election when Labour saw the electoral benefit of pretending everything was rosy and no cuts were needed,