Any attempt to understand why a particular election produced a particular result has to contend with two fundamental difficulties, that a)
different people vote x or y for an enormous number of often mutually incompatible
reasons and b) that the particular institutional form of our democracy, as well
as the wider political and economic make-up of society, affect outcomes in ways
that often seem to have little to do with the real spread of public opinion or the
distribution of votes. The result of an election is always the result of an
interplay between ideology, economics, random circumstance, concrete history
and changing institutional forms, and this interplay is itself always subject
to changes in the relative weight of each of its parts. The only way to
decipher the result is to give each component its due and, by analysis, to
begin to assign to each its relative importance. It is often instructive to
examine objective factors, such as the determining character of institutional
forms first, before moving on to the subjective factors which organise people’s
responses, in our late capitalist society, to the prospect of democratic
participation. In this post, I’ll take a look at the failures and foibles of
our electoral system and draw some broad conclusions about the relationship
between the way the country voted in 2015, and the reality of how we shall now
be governed.
A Bankrupt Democracy
As with the banks in 2007-08, so too with our democracy
today. Democracy means first and foremost that we should not be ruled; it
argues that we should manage ourselves as equal participants in a shared and
interdependent communal life. For most of us who believe in democracy as a
fundamental value, one core organising principle is that people should be able
to participate in making decisions in proportion to the degree that those
decisions affect them. With this in mind, ask yourself: when was the last time
you participated in a decision about taxation, policing, the provision of
public services or the privatisation of the NHS? When were you last consulted
about whether or not we should go to war, frack for oil or stop or start building wind
turbines? When did you last vote on whether or not there should be gay
marriage, open-door immigration, or unlimited freedom of speech? Have you ever
in your life felt that you had any say about what you are paid, your rights as
a worker, about the way in which the goods you buy are produced, or about the
exploitation and extraction of the natural resources that fuel our economy?
Your answer to all of these questions, unless you are either very dishonest or
very rich, should be never, and yet
you are intimately affected by each and every one of these issues. If you are a
glass half-full sort of person, you may say that you participated in all of
these decisions by voting at the last general election. If so, then you have
exercised your rights as a citizen of a democracy exactly once in the last five years, and perhaps a handful of of times over
the course of your adult life. The decisions, of course, go on being made
without you every day, in the hallowed halls of government and in the
conference rooms of corporate real estate.
In capitalist society, we make an
artificial distinction between decisions which are ‘political’, and decisions
which are ‘economic’. Economic decisions, which are supposed to pertain to the
production and distribution of goods and services, must be taken individually
in a market economy, and are thus protected from what is explicitly viewed by
many liberals as the harmful
influence of democracy. Everything else, that is, the limited range of issues
we permit the label of ‘political’, is decided, at the highest level, by that
which is sovereign. While our Queen
is still nominally the sovereign, the sovereign function is performed (leaving aside the undead monstrosity that is
the House of Lords) by the House of Commons, the UK’s elected parliamentary chamber.
In a democracy, of course, the people are supposed to be sovereign, and parliament
is clearly not the people. What justifies the principle of a sovereign
parliament, in the minds of its supporters, is that it is supposed to represent the people, creating a
situation in which the people’s will is carried out, but circumventing the supposed
technical difficulties of deliberation and decision making among millions of
people (you would think, from the way in which this point is belaboured, that
the reason we have MP’s is because you can’t fit sixty-four million people
inside the House of Commons). Such a democratic system is called representative democracy; its legitimacy,
such as it is, stands and falls on whether our parliament does, in fact,
perform the function of representation.
There is much to be said about
whether representation, and in particular local
representation is even a goal worth having. Tony Benn, rightly considered a
hero of the Left, believed that it was, and on these grounds strongly opposed
the idea of proportional representation. I think the case for direct democratic
control is stronger than the case for representation, especially for Left
politics, but let’s accept for the moment that representation is the proper goal
of democracy. How did this election fair? The first thing to do is to take a
look at the share of seats won vs the number of votes cast for each party.
Below are the figures for 5 major UK-wide parties, plus the Scottish National
Party.
Seats won (of a possible 650) and % of seats:
Conservatives: 331 (51%)
Labour: 232 (36%)
SNP: 56 (9%)
Lib Dems: 8 (1%)
UKIP: 1 (0.2%)
Green Party: 1 (0.2%)
Votes won (of a possible 100%):
Conservatives: 36.9%
Labour: 30.4%
SNP: 4.7%
Lib Dems: 7.9%
UKIP: 12.6%
Green Party: 3.6%
If we expect our representation
in parliament to reflect the way we vote, these results should sorely
disappoint. The difference between the percentage of seats and the percentage
of votes is staggering. The Tories won over half the seats in parliament with
just over a third of the vote. Labour received a modest 6.5% less of the vote
than the Tories yet ended up with only two thirds of the number of seats. The
SNP received double the number of seats that their share of the vote would
imply. The Lib Dems received almost double the number of votes of the SNP, but
a seventh as many seats. Far and away,
however, the parties most abused by the first-past-the-post system that we
insist on retaining were the Greens and UKIP. Both parties received a single
seat each with 1.15 million and 3.8 million votes respectively. Effectively,
this means that UKIP paid 3.8 million votes for their solitary seat in
parliament; this versus the 34,000 votes the Tories paid for each of their
seats, and the 2500 votes the SNP paid for each of its seats. Labour and the
Lib Dems in particular are currently engaged in the most painful internal
soul-searching; how can they have failed so badly? The short answer is that
they didn’t do that badly at all, but that it doesn’t matter because our
electoral system does not reward, and is not designed to reward, parties in
proportion to how many votes they win.
What it can it mean for
representative democracy when 3.8 million people are effectively represented by
one person in a parliament of 650? This is where things get tricky, because in
theory, every UKIP voter who does not reside in Clacton,
where UKIP got their single seat, is being represented by a different member of
parliament: the member in their own constituency. Every UKIP voter, which in
this case is the vast majority of UKIP voters, is therefore being
‘represented’, whatever this can possibly mean, by an MP from a party they
didn’t vote for, and whose policies they may be fiercely opposed to. Moreover, every voter who did not vote for the
person who won in their constituency
is being represented by someone from another party. Generally speaking, significantly
less than half of MP’s win more than half of the votes in their constituencies,
meaning that the majority of people in the majority of constituencies did not
vote for their MP. Insanely, this means that considerably more than 50%, and in
2015 probably more on the order of 70%, of voters are not currently represented
by a member of parliament that they voted for. In what possible sense, then,
are the vast majority of voters in the UK being represented at all?
Democracy and Scale
A key thing to remember is that the first-past-the-post
system, which is continually throwing up these sorts of absurd results (the
1951 general election, for example, in which Labour earned over a million more
votes than the Tories but in which the Tories gained more seats and formed a
government), is not designed to represent individual voters, but rather areas
of the country, constituencies. This
has always been one of the two central arguments for first-past-the-post (the other being the formation of a ‘strong’,
i.e unchallengeable, government), that it treats constituencies as relatively
autonomous and permits the majority in each constituency to be directly
represented in parliament.
Whether or not you think this localist
compromise is appropriate will depend on whether or not you think that the majority
opinion in your constituency should receive direct representation in our
national parliament. In our modern era of nation-states with significant
government centralisation, and amidst a contemporary political discourse which
places issues such as devolution, regional ‘powers’ and membership of
international political bodies such as the EU centre stage, it is
understandable that many people feel as though local representation in national
parliaments is a good thing. There exists a fear in some quarters that were
that not the case, the voices of majorities in local areas would be lost amidst
the larger national debate, and that any semblance of democratic self-determination
would be lost. Of course, the lines which divide constituencies are often
completely arbitrary and subject to change, and it would be a huge assumption
to claim that people have their primary identities and loyalties in their
electoral constituencies, as opposed to regional-national identities (Welsh,
Scottish, Irish) or religious and political affiliations. Moreover, electoral
constituencies do not always, if ever, map directly onto local council
administrative areas, which is where one would assume autonomy would be
centred, were it to exist.
The attachment to notions of
local self-determination, here projected onto the idea of regional
representation in larger parliaments, is not inaccurate in its diagnosis of a
local autonomy deficit. In an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world,
regional autonomy of all kinds, and at all levels, is being both asserted and
denied, demanded by populations at the same time as it is rendered implausible
by all manner of political, economic and historical forces. In this particular
case, it comes down to a problem of democracy
and scale. What is the appropriate unit of representation in a democracy? While
some may argue that constituencies (or the majority view therein) should be directly
represented at the higher level of parliament, notice that they do not also argue
that local councils should be elected on the basis of majority representation
within wards or villages, or within individual streets, cul-de-sacs or
households. We accept more or less universally that the appropriate unit of
representation at the constituency level is the individual; the make-up of a local council reflects the proportion
of individual votes cast for each party, no matter the distribution of
majorities gained in smaller geographical divisions. Why, then, should a
different principle apply at the national level? Because a nation is bigger?
Recall that a fundamental goal of
democracy is that people should have a say in decisions in proportion to the
degree that the outcome of that decision affects them. I don’t need to have a
say in what you name your child because it doesn’t affect me, but if you are
going to build an airport next to my house, I will expect to have some input.
The impulse towards local self-determination comes from the sense we all have
that we should be able to make decisions which affect only ourselves, or our
immediate neighbours, without interference from people far away who are not
affected. In practice, of course, we routinely and grossly underestimate the
impact our individual choices have on others; one of the best examples is how
our individual decisions to purchase meat and dairy products affect the global
use of water and farmland, to the serious detriment not only millions of people
in other countries, but to our shared chances of a sustainable global future.
Even taking such common underestimations into full account, however, it is
clear that there are a range of
decisions made by individuals and communities which, since the outcomes of
those decisions have only local impacts, should not require ratification from
distant centres of power.
It is important to remember that
the sorts of decisions which individuals and communities may make which affect only
their locality (whether or not loud music should be played at night, for
example) are not the kinds of
decisions which are made, or which ought to be made, in national
parliaments. The decisions made there affect everyone in every locality; and the most fundamental of these
relate to taxation, foreign policy, public budgets and fiscal policies, and the
common laws by which we live day-to-day. Each of these areas of decision making
impact everyone in the UK, and a democracy which abides by the rule of ‘input
proportional to impact’ will therefore need to consult the entire national
electorate on these issues. Of course, this rather obvious point does not in itself
recommend a more proportional form of representation. After all, aren’t the
individuals that comprise the national electorate being consulted precisely by virtue of the fact that each and
every constituency is equally represented by its MP?
In short, no. The problem is that
just because it may be democratically appropriate for a majority within a locality to have the final say
on purely local matters, that same local majority ought not to be considered a
discreet entity when the borders between localities are quite rightly dissolved
upon the presentation of a national issue to a national electorate. What may be
a majority view in one locality may be a minority view nationally, and it makes
no sense to pretend that local majorities have democratic precedence over
national majorities when the issues themselves are national in scale. If there
were a rule in place which required MP’s to win over 50% of the vote in each
constituency, we could be reasonably well assured that the majority opinion
across the country was accurately reflected in the distribution of seats in
parliament. Since MP’s only rarely win over 50% of the constituency vote,
however, this would result in a majority of constituencies being unable to
return MP’s. In reality then, and of necessity, MP’s are only required to secure
more votes than any other candidate to win their constituency; if, on average,
this figure is 40%, this means that 60% of people in each constituency, i.e. 60% of the country, are not represented
in parliament. Worse, since the figure will in fact vary between
constituencies, some localities will be better represented than others, which
undermines the very foundation of the localist compromise (i.e. equal
representation for each locality).
A Two-Court System
We balk at the idea of one-party rule in countries like China; the very
concept is an offence to our most cherished democratic values. And yet we
assent, largely without thinking, to what is effectively a five-year cycle of
exactly that; rule by one party. Is this how things must necessarily be, given
the nature of our democratic institutions? It is difficult to imagine how it
could be otherwise, and so we must ask why on earth we accept a condition which
causes us great pangs of sympathy when it is suffered by people in other
countries.
Along with
the localist compromise which, as I hope I have shown, falls very short indeed
of achieving democratic representation, the other traditional argument for
first-past-the-post is that it facilitates a ‘strong’ government. By ‘strong’,
of course, is meant a government which does not have to give any ground
whatsoever to its enemies; within a parliamentary system, this means achieving
an outright majority of seats. With such a majority, an incumbent government,
provided it can keep its own ranks relatively in line, can do more or less
whatever it wants provided it doesn’t spark a revolution. The only real
limiting factor to what such governments can do, besides the perennial
requirement of ‘not sparking a revolution’, is that it needs to be electable
again in five years time. This requirement lulls many into believing that
governments are deeply accountable to the people. This could well be so in a
society which accurately represented its people in parliament, but when a
government can achieve an outright majority with just 36.9% of the popular
vote, as the Tories just did, they know where their goalposts are likely to
stand come the next election. We therefore have a situation in which encumbent
governments knowingly play to the sympathies of minorities within the
electorate whom it knows will, if shrewdly advertised to, will put it back into
power at the expense of the majority. Marginal seats, given this utterly
predictable pattern, become kingmakers as, at the same time and for the same
reasons, relatively safe seats, in which there really are strong local majorities, are ignored (uselessly large
majorities, from a parliamentary perspective, pile up around safe MP’s –
clusters of safe MP’s with enormous majorities in urban centres have long
bedevilled Labour).
At every
level of the parliamentary game, a greater and greater proportion of voters are
chipped away from the final representation of the electorate; the sculpture
that remains is a gross caricature of the people. First, there is the entire
electorate, the supposedly sovereign demos.
As each constituency returns MP’s, somewhere between 50% and 70% of voters are
denied representation. From this parliament of 650 seats, representing roughly
40% of voters, one party alone is victorious and may form a government; since
this party may only have achieved a bare majority, as the Tories just did, that
40% representation is further reduced. A party is now in power that represents
somewhere between 20% and 35% of the total vote, and from within its ranks a cabinet
will be formed, by which all decisions of importance will made for the life of
the parliament. The cabinet does not always get its way; if it did there would
be no need for parliamentary whips. But it gets its way enough of the time that
we can say with some confidence that the day-to-day running of the country is
performed by some two-dozen MP’s who collectively represent about 1.5% of the
electorate. I feel completely justified is calling this what it is: a modern
court. This ‘democratic court’, a textbook oxymoron, has its members refreshed
and reshuffled, with much pomp and circumstance, every five years. What we get
for our votes is, in effect, a two-court
system.
A two-party
or two-court system is the near-certain consequence of the mathematics of
first-past-the-post. Smaller parties, whether left, right or centrist whose
support, while potentially substantial, is scattered around the country, are
systematically excluded from the parliamentary procedure since they fail to
command constituency majorities. Where they do, by extraordinary effort, manage
to gain significant parliamentary representation, such as in the case of the
Lib Dems in 2010, the following election will often see them thoroughly routed
as voters see the results of their third party or protest votes going to waste.
Voters who, angered and disillusioned by decades of two-court rule, legitimately
put their hopes in parties of the left, right and centre who promise to break
away from the Westminster
consensus. On occasion, such parties can muster enormous support; lest we
forget, UKIP achieved an impressive 12.6% of the vote. But when voters see such
gains converted into so sorry a number of seats, and thus into so little
influence, it is hardly surprising that the result is the disillusioned malaise
we condescendingly refer to as ‘apathy’. In the worst cases, third party,
principle and protest voters on the left and right see their votes translate
into victory for the major party they least
wanted to see in power, which creates a strong incentive for them to back the
main opposition party next time around. Centrist voters, while buoyed by the
odd uplift in their electoral fortunes (again, the Lib Dems), are so regularly
beaten down again that they lose faith in the ability of centrist parties to
take power; come the next election, the centrist vote gets redistributed
between the monolithic centre-left and centre-right blocks, restoring the very
binary which they had hoped to challenge.
Inconvenient Truths
What I have
tried to demonstrate in this post is that while we are quite right to
spend time engaged in discussions of economics, class and ideology, of ‘Conservative
Britain’, of the psychological ‘swing’ of the electorate, of fear-mongering,
of successful and unsuccessful campaigns, of party leaders and their
idiosyncrasies, of perceptions, lies, misinformation and propaganda, we risk everything by not seeing as central the hard facts of institutional forms and the strict
limitations they place upon electoral outcomes. The will of the electorate is
so thoroughly distorted by the barriers to representation which inhere within
the system that it becomes almost meaningless to claim that the Tories did, in
fact, ‘win’. If by ‘win’ we mean ‘got into power’ or ‘played the system best’ then
yes, the Tories did win. But if we mean, as we ought to mean when speaking of
elections, that the Tories won the hearts and minds of the people and achieved
a legitimate democratic mandate to govern in the interests of the whole
country, the Tories did not ‘win’ by any conceivable measure; they simply achieved power.
Of course,
we do not live a substantive democracy, and we cannot afford to comfort
ourselves with the idea that the Tories didn’t really convince Britain to back
them. They convinced enough people, within the crippled democratic system that
we have, that they will now rule us however misbegotten their mandate.
Electoral reform must be very high indeed on the agenda of everyone who cares
about democracy come 2020, but we must also face the fact that we could be
facing another several elections
based upon broadly the same set of rules as this one. In that case, it is
incumbent upon us to really thoroughly understand why the Tories won, even if only under the
present degraded system of rules. The difficult fact remains that they won more
votes than any other party and that, in enormous swathes of the country, significant majorities voted Tory. For the Left, we must face a further inconvenient truth:
that a majority of people in the UK voted on the Right in 2015 (50.5%
for the Tories, UKIP and the Northern Irish DUP combined). If, as I think we
should, we also add half of the Lib Dem vote to this figure (to represent the
Right-leaning element in the centre), we reach a figure closer to 55%, and this
following a period of severe economic recession and five years of incredibly
destructive and reactionary Tory rule.
There will be no easy answers to the
question of why the Right appears to be in ascendency. In the next entry to
this series I’ll present a broad-brush overview of what I think are most
important factors. Then, in the fourth and final entry, I’ll try to synthesize these into a more properly Marxian analysis of our electoral (mis)fortunes in
late capitalist Britain.