Our esteemed editor Stephen Tall has an article for Comment is Free today discussing the question that Lib Dem leaders have to answer again and again in any election, but doubly so in such a febrile one as the one expected in just over a hundred days’ time.
It can be a tough job, leading the Liberal Democrats. The one question you are guaranteed to be asked is the one it’s impossible to answer: what would you do if there’s a hung parliament? Menzies Campbell, when he was leader, straight-batted it, refusing to budge from his mantra of “our sole aim is maximum votes, maximum seats”. It’s a half-answer that works better at a party conference rally than it does when subjected to a Paxman interrogation, where it sounds evasive and lawyerly.
Clegg has, wisely, junked his predecessor’s stock response. Instead, he’s trying something new: telling the truth, or at least as much of it as he can at this stage discern. He starts from a first principle – one political journalists might like to adopt: that not a single vote has yet been cast in the 2010 general election, and it would, therefore, be arrogant for the leader of the Lib Dems (or Brown and Cameron) to start dividing up the spoils of a battle not yet fought.
What with his début on Mumsnet as well, Stephen’s had a busy day.
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17 Comments
But what Clegg is answering to this question is; ““If voters decide no party deserves an overall majority, then the party with the strongest mandate will have a moral right to be the first to seek to govern on its own or seek alliances with other parties”
Now, what does strongest mandate mean?
Party with most votes?
Party with most MPs?
Or could it possibly be ‘Not the Party losing lots of MPs’?
Well, the rather weird answer at present is; “the British voters will make it demonstrably clear what ’strongest mandate’ means.”
Would that pass Newshound’s Paxo Test?
Most MPs. I suppose he could have stated that more clearly.
I think the ‘strongest mandate’ is like a ‘dangerous dog’. It’s generally going to be pretty obvious when you see it, but try to define it in legally watertight terms and you might as well be hanged for a chihuahua as a rottie.
Andrew, he has been very clear and precise in NOT stating that it is MPs. Read his lips. He is putting it on the record that, “the British voters will make it demonstrably clear what ’strongest mandate’ means”.
Now that is a superficially clever thing to say as it allows him to interpret the result in whatever way he wishes – provided he and colleagues can hold to that line under sustained examination.
B
“the party with the strongest mandate will have a moral right to be the first to seek to govern on its own or seek alliances with other parties”
Which means its up to the party with the strongest mandate, not us…
Bah to all the speculative interpretations of what people who are pushing their own interests think Clegg means at this stage. He is completely correct that it is arrogant to preemptively second-guess the electorate and anyone who does so deserves to be punished by them.
What ‘the strongest mandate’ means will become blazingly clear on the night as the boxes are opened and it becomes clear how ballots were cast. To make a simplistic judgement at this point only exposes ones own prejudices.
As far as I’m concerned ‘the strongest mandate’ could mean either the most MPs or the most votes, or indeed it could mean something completely different which nobody has yet considered.
This is precisely what politics is about – it is not just about figures and statistics, it is also about what is practical and what the mood of the people is.
Under different conditions different things might swing the decision – who knows… failure for either Labour or Conservative parties to gain an overall or workable majority may lead to swift disintergration on one or other and the party system could return to a much more fluid form of factionalism, or they may well decide to form a ‘grand coalition’ (which would also probably lead to splintering). The election of a fourth, fifth or even sixth ‘national’ party will definitely change the stakes (which is not beyond the realms of likelihood).
We shall have to hold on to our hats and ‘wait and see’ – a realignment of expectations could lead to a realignment of our whole political scene.
“What ‘the strongest mandate’ means will become blazingly clear on the night as the boxes are opened and it becomes clear how ballots were cast.”
You may well be right. However the Paxman question might go something along the lines of “so who had the strongest mandate in February 1974 Mr Clegg?”
And of course some highly important sources say that if you have lost your majority you have lost the moral authority to govern
We would obviously prefer to see the party with
most votes get precedence but the reality is that that might put us in an even
more unenviable position.
Supposing Labour come away the largest party in a hung parliament but with the Tories polling more votes, Only the Labour leader can hope to govern alone. A Tory PM would be consistently defeated by Labour in the house unless in formal alliance with a smaller party.
The options for Nick in these circumstances would either be to allow Labour to try and govern as the party with most seats OR to actively support the Conservatives in a formal coalition. Even a Confidence and Supply deal would not be sustainable as the government would be reliant on third or minor party MPs on every vote or risk losing to the larger Labour bloc.
The guy writes one sentence and you’re all second-guessing. Sheesh.
Since everybody seems to have forgotten how the UK electoral system works, a reminder: we deliberately do not use the popular vote to select governments, because the popular vote is dominated by the large cities – over 10% of the population lives in London alone. We consider such a situation to be unfair on those who live in rural areas. The popular vote is hence irrelevant, no matter how much the tabloid press likes to bang on about it.
The party which gets to form a government is the one which has the most MPs in Parliament. This is not an opinion or a position statement, it’s part of the how the system works (although there is a special case that the Queen personally makes the decision if matters are unclear – one of the few powers that the monarch still has is to resolve such ugly situations, so that the country does not go without a government). There is no requirement for the government to have a majority, although minority governments are historically considered undesirable by politicians and the media.
Now, the role of a coalition: say party A takes 40% of the seats, party B takes 30%, and party C takes 20%. A has the most seats, hence would normally be the one which forms a government. However, if parties B and C form a coalition (a form of temporary super-party), then they have 50% of the vote, and their coalition gets to form the government.
Clegg’s words must be understood in this context. What he is saying is simple and clear when you understand the background: he will not do this – he will not do a deal with party B to kick the largest party out of its winning spot – and he thinks that such an action would be immoral. He holds this to be a self-evident fact: a party with 10% of the seats should not decide who governs the country. People have been talking for ages about the Lib Dems being “kingmakers” in such a situation, and Clegg is saying “I will not do this, it is wrong”.
He is saying that it is party A who has the moral right to govern in this scenario, and it is their choice whether to form a minority government, or to form a coalition with one of the other parties. He is implying that since he does not expect to be the leader of that party, it is not going to be his decision. He is also clearly saying that if the leader of the party with the most MPs (nobody else) wishes to make a deal with him, then he would be open to the possibility if his shopping list of goals are a part of it.
He could have been more clear. The article was written with the assumption that the reader understands UK politics. It’s sad how somebody can make a clear statement of their intentions, and everybody still whines about how a weasel-minded person could lawyer their way out of those commitments. No good deed goes unpunished.
Andrew Suffield
Since everybody seems to have forgotten how the UK electoral system works, a reminder: we deliberately do not use the popular vote to select governments, because the popular vote is dominated by the large cities – over 10% of the population lives in London alone. We consider such a situation to be unfair on those who live in rural areas.
Eh? What point are you trying to make here? The USA has a weighted system which means sparsely populated areas have more power than densely populated ones, but we do not (apart from a few of the remore Scottish amd Welsh constituencies).
Here, rural constituencies have the same size in terms of population as urban ones. So what you write is simply untrue, there just is NOT a biased weighting in favour of rural areas. In recent years it has tended to be the other way round, as inner cities have tended to lose registered voters, so if the boundaries have been around for a while they have tended to shrink in population size while the rural and suburban ones grow.
Our electoral system seemed to work when not only did most people vote for one of the two biggest parties, but also the support for them was fairly evenly distributed. It broke down when it became more clumped, so that the Tories could gain a majority in Parliament with hardly any seats in urban or industrial northern areas, while the significant minority of non-Tory voters in rural and southern England had almost no MPs from their sort of constituency.
Indeed, Andrew seems to be under the delusion that we have a clearly codified constitution, with defined rules for how the government is chosen. The confusion that arose in 1974 did so precisely because no such rules exist. And the idea that “we deliberately do not use the popular vote to select governments” is frankly bizarre. Who’s “we”? And when did we get to make this “deliberate” choice?
Andrew, I don’t mean to second guess. I wish only for clarification.
If, as you suggest, the Leader had meant, ‘the Party with the largest number of seats has a morale right to be the first to seek to govern on its own or seek alliances with other parties’ he could easily have used those words. He didn’t.
What he is saying is, “It will be abundantly clear after the election which party has the strongest mandate. It would be pointless to speculate at this point as to whether that means seats or votes – we are setting out a principle, not a mathematical formula.”
This is not an off the cuff remark. It will have been a carefully crafted set of words.
Electors will feel they have a need to know the meaning of the ‘principle’ and that includes what ‘strongest mandate’ means. Journalists will wish to have that question answered on behalf of their listeners and viewers. Our MPs will wish to know and they don’t.
Party members will want to know because they are Liberal Democrats.
We don’t want a spring conference concentrating on this issue, so Danny Alexander should helpfully use LDV to elaborate the principle now.
Hmm the Lib Dems believe in Proportional Representation so I can see an argument for taking national vote shares into account but don’t forget these votes are for local politicians and tactical voting will affect the vote share of parties.
“What ‘the strongest mandate’ means will become blazingly clear on the night as the boxes are opened”
This is wishful thinking, this is deliberately evading the likely difficulties. However, it is probably the best approach we can reasonably adopt, because it’s the best option of a bad bunch! (And just to be clear, none of this is our fault, it’s the fault of a daft electoral system).
A Tory landslide would of course mean this whole debate is a waste of time. If that doesn’t happen, we can imagine the following possible scenarios:
(1) Labour around 50% of the seats, Tories miles behind on seats, but equal to or slightly ahead of Labour on votes. We are likely to decide to solemnly swear that Labour have the strongest mandate (especially if we can depose Gordon!)
(2) Labour and Tories around 40-45% of the seats each, Tories miles ahead of Labour on the popular vote. We might well decide to solemnly swear that the Tories have the strongest mandate (especially if we can make a good deal).
(3) Labour well ahead on seats but below 50%, Tories well ahead on votes. We will have to solemnly swear that nobody got the strongest mandate after all!
I think David’s summed it up rather well, and also shown why it’s ridiculous to demand crystal clarity from Clegg on this, since his three scenarios, all perfectly plausible, are by no means exhaustive.
Worth pointing out that even with a PR system, it’s not necessarily obvious what constitutes a “clear mandate”. In the recent German election, Merkel was universally proclaimed the outright winner and virtual Chancellor-for-life, although her party’s vote share (barely a third of the total) was slightly less than she achieved in 2005, when she could only form a grand coalition with the social democrats. Go figure.
I would have thought that the issue of the EU would make it very difficult for Conservatives and LibDems to be allies in government, particularly if the Conservatives mean what they say about not letting matters rest over the Lisbon Treaty.
In the meantime LibDem morale will continue to be boosted by pro-EU money and supporters in high places, including the BBC. But pride comes before a fall.
If a Con/LIbDem alliance were to come about, and then were to come to an end over the EU, a General Election thereafter would wipe out the LibDems. They would be – and are – on the wrong side of today’s biggest protest issue – a fatal situation for a third party.