I used to be a "back-teether" on electoral reform. The term comes from Robin Cook, for whom the long night of Thatcherism was the decisive reason for being fed up to the back teeth with Britain's electoral system. It enabled a minority to pretend to be a majority, employing all the resources of a winner-takes-all political system in which there were few effective checks and balances on what a crazed government could do. The rhetoric of strong government masked the reality of elective dictatorship.
I am no longer so sure about this line of argument. This is not for the obvious reason that Labour has become the beneficiary of first-past-the-post, enjoying the massive disproportionality of an electoral system in which less than 44 per cent of the vote delivered a landslide of two thirds of the seats. I can see that some of my colleagues might view this as reason enough to be well disposed towards the existing voting system, but it is not the reason why I am having second thoughts.
Electoral systems should not be seen in isolation. They have to be set alongside the other elements in the political system of which they form a part. The problem with the first-past-the-post system is that it has been the gateway to the larger system of unconstitutional and centralised power that has characterised British politics. It therefore made sense to argue that the only way to change this system was through the enforced pluralism which would result from a more proportionate electoral system. Political reform required a big bang and electoral reform would provide it. We might lose the "strong" government which was the traditional claim for the existing system, but there would be a huge gain in accountable government-and this was what was desperately needed.
The problem with this argument is that we are now getting political reform without electoral reform. It was clearly not true, although I once believed it was, that a Westminster government with a secure majority would never legislate to surround itself with a constitutional framework of new checks and balances. Yet this is precisely what is happening, on a scale and at a pace that is astonishing. Freedom of information, the European convention on human rights, devolved governments in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, an elected mayor for London and possibly elsewhere, the prospect of a reformed second chamber: put all this together and a different kind of political system begins to emerge.
It is one in which a Westminster government will no longer be able to behave like an elective dictatorship. It will be faced with other centres of power and a panoply of restraints. Pluralism and constitutionalism will have arrived, but without the big bang of electoral reform. There is a further consideration. Not only will political reform have been achieved without electoral reform, but it becomes reasonable to ask if the familiar merits of first-past-the-post-a strong centre, governing coherence, clear lines of electoral accountability-actually come into their own once the rest of the political system has become more decentralised and plural. An electoral system which once produced the worst excesses of government in Britain could perhaps be seen as having a stabilising role in a structure of government that has been transformed.
This is at least an argument that electoral reformers should consider. Nor is it unworthy to want to ensure that effective government is maintained. Samuel Beer of Harvard university, a veteran observer of British politics, recently warned that it is possible to have too much pluralism as well as too little-and not to throw out the baby of effective government with the bath water of unconstitutional power. As an old New Dealer, he knows that progressive governments have to be able to govern. If we can retain this capacity, while inserting enough checks and balances to protect us against the abuse of majoritarian power, then might we not get the best of both worlds?
All I am arguing is that this question must now be asked. It is not enough to go on reheating the same arguments without taking account of the way in which the political world is changing. Electoral reform is not a branch of mathematics. Horses for courses is the only reliable rule as far as voting systems are concerned (which is why we are currently devising different systems for different purposes). A recent study has shown that if the 1997 general election had been run under the additional member system preferred by most reformers, Labour would not have won a majority, whereas if it had been run under the alternative vote that is emerging as the default option, then Labour's majority would have been even more disproportionate than it was. Did the country really want either of those outcomes? Would either have been good for the country? All this makes me realise that I am no longer a back-teether on electoral reform. Just a cautious front-teether. n
Tony Wright
