But perhaps the most fundamental of the constitutional questions is how Britain is to be governed in an era of party fragmentation in which the electoral system either fails to yield a single-party majority government or yields one enjoying barely more than a third of the popular vote.
This question arises because of the social changes that have transformed the two-party system of the 1950s into the multi-party system of today. Such a system undermines the case for “first past the post,” an electoral mechanism designed for a two-party age, which works erratically when more than two parties enjoy substantial electoral support.
Britain in the 1950s was certainly a two-party system. Over 90 per cent of us voted Conservative or Labour. To adapt the famous couplet of WS Gilbert: “Every little boy or girl born alive/Was born a little Labourite or a little Conservat-ive.” In 1951, there were just six MPs—all Liberals—who did not belong to the Labour and Conservative parties. By 2005, there were 92, of whom 62 were Liberal Democrats. In 2010, there were 85 MPs who did not belong to the Labour or Conservative parties. Fifty-seven of these were Liberal Democrats.
Today opinion polls indicate that in England, there are, for the first time ever, five parties with more than 5 per cent support— the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the UK Independence Party and the Greens. In Scotland, with the Scottish National Party, there are six parties with over 5 per cent support. Multi-party competition on this scale is quite unprecedented. We face a totally new electoral situation.
The decisions that really matter to people are taken behind closed doors. Instead of people choosing the government, the politicians do.As a result, the chances of one party securing an overall majority in the 2015 general election are small. Indeed, there is already much talk of how a new government is to be formed if no single party achieves an overall majority. Will there be another coalition, a minority government, or a minority government supported by a “confidence and supply” agreement with smaller parties? The political complexion of the next government may not be known until some time after the general election. It could depend as much on complex negotiations after the election as on the actual votes secured by the various parties.
On the day before the 2010 election, in an interview with the Independent, David Cameron said that in a hung parliament, “the decisions that really matter to people are taken behind closed doors. Instead of people choosing the government, the politicians do.” The Conservative-Liberal coalition which came to power in 2010 was in part an outcome of the arithmetic of the election result, but it was not determined by it. No one voted for it, and no elector was given the opportunity either of consenting to the coalition or withholding his or her consent.
With a hung parliament, the function of general elections alters. Instead of directly choosing a government, the election alters the power relations between the parties thereby affecting their relative strength in post-election negotiations. A series of hung parliaments would introduce a system of indirect election in place of the direct election of governments. It would fundamentally alter the working of British politics.
There is an obligation on the parties to adapt to this new situation. If the government formed after a hung parliament is to be in accord with the canons of democracy, the parties must tell the voters before rather than after the election with whom they would consider forming a coalition, or supporting by a confidence and supply agreement, and also which items in their manifestos are negotiable and which are not.
But even if the 2015 election does not result in a hung parliament and, contrary to most predictions, a single party succeeds in winning an overall majority, the government that emerges is unlikely to be based on the support of more than 35 per cent of the voters. It would then be a government that nearly two-thirds of the voters have opposed. No government since 2001 has gained the support of 40 per cent of the voters. In 2005, Labour, although winning a comfortable majority of 66 seats, gained just under 36 per cent of the vote. A single-party majority government, therefore, if it comes about, will not exemplify the principle of majority rule, but of rule by the largest minority, a minority amounting to just over one-third of the voters.
One consequence of the rise of a multi-party system is that only a minority of MPs represent a majority of the voters in their constituency. In 1955, in the heyday of the two-party system, only 37 MPs were elected on a minority vote. But in 2010, only one-third of MPs represented a majority of those who voted in their constituency; 433 MPs did not. That is the largest percentage of MPs elected on a minority vote since the 1920s, when the party system was also in flux. Moreover, not one MP since 1997 has secured the votes of a majority of the electorate in her constituency. In 1997, just 14 MPs enjoyed such a majority, while in 1951 there were 214.
The Conservative Party has proposed that no trade union should be able to call a strike unless it is supported by 40 per cent of its members in a ballot. If that criterion were applied in general elections, it would render every government since 2001 illegitimate, and all but 16 of the MPs elected in 2010, since the other 634 MPs failed to secure the support of 40 per cent of the electors in their constituency.
Why has the transformation come about? Such deep changes in party systems generally follow from changes in society. The rise of multi-party politics in Britain results from a profound social transformation that has taken place since the 1950s—the transition from a société bloquée dominated by large nationwide socio-economic blocs based on occupation and class to a more socially and geographically fragmented society that Cameron has characterised as “post-bureaucratic.” It is hardly surprising if party allegiances have also become more fragmented. The gradual unfreezing of the class structure has weakened party identification and undermined tribal politics. There are not many voters today who say “I’ve always been Labour” or “My family have never voted anything other than Conservative.”
Just as the great nationalised monopolies have broken up in response to consumer demand for wider choice, so the monolithic party allegiances of the past have been dissolving, admittedly at a glacially slow pace. Voters have come increasingly to shop around, seeking the best deal to meet their individual preferences, rather than the preferences of their class or occupational group. This greater fluidity is perhaps the most important of the many changes in British society to have occurred during the postwar period and it has had dramatic consequences for electoral behaviour.
Britain is now a far more geographically and socially fragmented society than it was 60 years ago. In 1951, outside Northern Ireland, there was a fairly standard Conservative-Labour battle in every constituency, with the Liberals reduced to the role of impotent onlookers, while the nationalists seemed to many to be irrelevant, cranky even, and, as Clement Attlee suggested in the late 1950s, “out of date.” In 2010, by contrast, there was a different electoral battle in the different parts of the United Kingdom. In Northern Ireland, the battle was between parties representing the mainstream Unionist and Nationalist communities. Only one party sought to straddle the two communities, and that was the Alliance Party, a sister party to the Liberal Democrats, which succeeded in winning its first parliamentary seat. None of the other parties that won seats in Northern Ireland had any connection with the parties on the mainland.
In Scotland, the electoral battle was primarily between Labour and the SNP. The Conservatives could do no more than hold on to their single seat in Scotland, and were serious contenders in only a very few of the constituencies north of the River Tweed. The leading party at Westminster, therefore, remained the fourth party in Scotland. In the southwest of England, by contrast, the electoral battle was between the Liberal Democrats, the majority party in the region, which, before the election, held 12 out of the 25 seats, and the Conservatives, with nine seats, while Labour, with just four seats in the region was very much the third party. In 2015, much of the competition in east coast seats will be between the Conservatives and Ukip.
The geographical fragmentation of Britain is also between the cities and the countryside. In 1951, the Conservatives were strongly represented in urban areas. In 2010, they entered the general election without a single seat in the large cities of the Midlands, the north or Scotland. They were totally unrepresented in Birmingham, Bradford, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. Although the Conservatives gained 97 seats in the 2010 election, those cities still stubbornly refused to return a single Tory MP. It is often suggested that the Conservatives are insensitive to the problems of urban deprivation in the inner cities. If so, that is hardly surprising, since they have so little representation there.
The electoral system exaggerates the imbalance in strength between the Labour and Conservative parties in Scotland. It therefore threatens the very unity of the country.As a result of this fragmentation, the 2015 general election will be fought not primarily on a national basis, but within regional enclaves. The government which results will probably not only be formed on just over one-third of the popular vote, but will probably also be forced to rely upon a narrow basis of regional support, rather than enjoying a national mandate. That will make it more difficult to achieve the ideal of “One Nation’” to which all parties pay lip service.
First past the post penalises not only minor parties, but also major ones in areas where they are weak. In 2010 in the south of England outside London, for example, Labour won one in six of the votes, but just 10 out of 84 seats. In Scotland, it was the Conservatives who won one in six of the votes, but they won just one out of the 59 seats. This has led many to conclude, erroneously, that the Conservatives have no support north of the border. Distorted representation makes the UK appear more divided than in fact it is. It exaggerates the contrasts in political behaviour between the cities and the countryside and between England and Scotland. And it exacerbates the West Lothian problem, which results from the fact that Scottish MPs can continue to vote on English domestic matters such as education, health and housing, while English MPs cannot vote on Scottish domestic matters because they are devolved to Holyrood. The electoral system exaggerates the imbalance in strength between the Labour and Conservative parties in Scotland. It therefore threatens the very unity of the country.
In the 2010 general election, Labour won 41 of Scotland’s 59 constituencies on 42 per cent of the Scottish vote; the Conservatives won one seat on 17 per cent of the Scottish vote. A proportional system would have given Labour 24 seats and the Conservatives 10. Proportional representation, therefore, would alter the dynamics of the conflict between England and Scotland and make it far more manageable.
First past the post used to be defended on the grounds that, whatever its theoretical unfairness, it did at least yield strong and stable single-party government. That defence is no longer available and the traditional model is now of historical interest only. First past the post works with a rough and ready logic when two parties with national appeal share most of the vote. In a multi-party system, it does not work.
Since the referendum in 2011, in which the “alternative vote” system was rejected by a two to one majority on a derisory turnout of 42 per cent, it has been assumed that electoral reform is a dead issue. Yet it could, like Lazarus, rise from the dead in 2015 if, as is likely, the outcome of the election seriously misrepresents opinion, either by installing a prime minister supported by just one in three of the voters, or by failing to give fair representation to a minor party such as Ukip, which could win over 10 per cent of the vote, but hardly any seats. Such an outcome could threaten the legitimacy of the system.
First past the post no longer yields majority rule either at national nor at constituency level. It serves the interests not of the voters but of the two major parties, of political insiders and the political class. It is no longer fit for purpose.
Perhaps we are now, 800 years after Magna Carta, approaching a moment in which we can reconsider the constitutional arrangements by which we are governed. We face a number of interconnected constitutional problems, all demanding a solution. There is a growing conflict between new social forces and traditional constitutional forms which tend to uphold the status quo. It is becoming increasingly clear that our constitutional structures are relics of a previous era, and that we need to bring them into alignment with the realities of the modern age, whose watchword is fluidity and whose leitmotif is a politics of openness in place of the tacit understandings of the past.
The democratic spirit in Britain is not dormant. As the Scottish referendum showed, there is a huge reservoir of civic potential which the political parties have largely failed to tap. It is the institutions and the mechanisms which seek to represent the democratic spirit that are at fault. The links that have in the past connected citizens with those institutions are, slowly but surely, being undermined. Disenchantment with politics flows from the conflict between a maturing democracy in which voters are accustomed to wider choices than in the past and a political system which still bears all too many of the characteristics of a closed shop. The task now is to channel the democratic spirit in constructive directions. Constitutional questions, then, are likely to remain at the centre of the political agenda whoever forms the government after the general election. These questions need to be confronted by a constitutional convention if they are to be answered successfully.
