Thin as Straw
I was going to just hurl a little invective at Jack Straw’s Graun piece and move on. Hey, he doesn’t like PR, so what? A turkey like him is hardly going to vote for Christmas. Anyway, expecting a NuLab insider to remember what it was like to believe in something as a matter of principle was always a long shot.
But way beyond the arguments over PR, Straw has inadvertantly nailed what’s wrong with British politics. His deliberate misrepresentation of inconvenient arguments, his debasing of serious debate by obfuscation and teleological anti-intellectualism, is typical of NuLabbers. They didn’t invent it  remember the Tories ribbing Gordon Brown when he dared mention three words with too many syllables for the Sun‘s column layout  but they have perfected it. And none better than Straw yesterday.
He knows it’s dishonest and irrelevant to draw comparisons between the Israeli electoral system and what might be right for ours. It’s empty scaremongering for the ill-informed. But that’s what he did. He knows it’s plain wrong to imply that under PR there would be no MP–constituency link. But that’s what he did. He knows the old ‘pivot party’ argument doesn’t stand up to evidence of what’s actually happened elsewhere. What became of the German FDP, the theorists’ favourite ‘pivot party’ of the 1980s? The one that was deemed so central to the system that they could expect to be in eternal power, with the SPD and CDU falling over each other to offer concessions. Oh, that’s right: they got booted out in 1998 and haven’t danced their power-drunk pivot dance since.
He knows, most importantly of all, that the aim of PR isn’t an equal share of power, as he mumbles half-way along his trot through the fallacies, but a fair share of representation. There’s a whole library of difference. But he said it anyway.
And buried in the twisted detail he reaches the point where his self-regarding, self-serving prose achieves an orgasm of bathos:
[FPTP] enables a proper “contract” to be established between parties and their electors through their manifestos. For all the hyperbolic (and usually inaccurate) charges of “lying” that are thrown around at elections, parties and their leaders are careful and precise about what is promised in their manifesto, because, if elected, that document is the programme for which the country has voted and on which the government will be judged.
Well, we’ve had our say on your manifesto, Jack. And on the previous two  on the contractual promises you made and then ignored or watered down. Oh, and on your last minute txt msgs, too. 64% of us didn’t like what you had to say in the slightest. If you were anywhere approaching a real democrat you’d recognise what the verdict means.
What is it about The Sharpener that keeps on driving me to the defence of terrible old reprobates like Jack Straw? For the first time in decades he writes a sober and (on the whole) sensible piece in a newspaper, pointing out the perils and defects of proportional representation as a system for electing members of the electoral college that chooses and sustains the government, and all he gets here is a stream of invective and some highly questionable rebuttals.
Polly Toynbee, in her even feebler counter-blast (if you can call it that), couldn’t resist some tired old stuff about manifestoes, either. But Straw makes a perfectly fair point. Under FPTP, the main parties offer programmes for the next parliament. By and large, the party that wins more votes than any other is then committed to that programme and generally has a sufficient majority in the Commons to carry it out. If it fails to do so, the electorate knows whom to blame. Contrast this with the situation under PR. Several parties offer their respective programmes to the electorate. As invariably happens in Britain, none of them wins an overall majority of the votes cast for the various parties and programmes. After the polls have closed, the party leaders seek to paste together alliances and coalitions capable of mustering a majority and so of forming a government. To tempt the smaller parties into an alliance, the bigger parties conduct an auction of policy concessions and bribes. The smaller parties make counter-offers and lay down conditions. The horse-trading, taking place behind closed doors, eventually produces a compromise programme that reflects, not the votes cast for the original programmes, but the extent of the willingness of the parties to betray them, and the price demanded for others’ support. The compromise programme that results is one that not a single party campaigned for before the election and that not a single voter voted for, because it didn’t exist. By the same token, the coalition or alliance that forms a government had the support of not a single voter, because that didn’t exist, either. The coalition government that takes office can’t be held accountable to the electorate for its failures to carry out its programme because no party promised to carry it out — indeed, even after the horse-trading has produced a winning majority, no one party has the votes in parliament to carry it out. Straw made the point more briefly, writing of manifesto rather than programme (and so laying himself open to the predictable sneers), but the point is valid all the same. The PR enthusiasts complain that under FPTP, we get governments that have won barely more than a third of the votes cast. But under the system they advocate, we would get governments that not a single voter had voted for: zero per cent.
So is the point about the Israeli and (especially) the German experience. A system that would effectively guarantee the party with less support from the electorate than either of the two main parties, straining to win more than around one vote in five, a permanent place in every government, plus the permanent power to decide whether the Labour or the Tory leader goes into No. 10 or stays there, seems to me pretty hard to defend. And the German experience in 1982 when Genscher, the Charles Kennedy of the day, turfed a Social Democratic Chancellor (Schmidt) out of office and installed a Christian Democrat (Kohl) in his place, without even bothering to sanctify the change with an election, is extremely relevant. What crafty variant of PR would protect us against that sort of perversion of democracy? The fate of the Free Democrats 16 years later, which you triumphantly hold up in refutation of the point, could hardly be more irrelevant. The FDP had been holding successive federal German governments to ransom for years before the scandalous events of 1982, and continued to do so for all those years after them.
FPTP isn’t perfect. No electoral system is perfect. But the principle that the party which wins the most votes almost always gets to form a government with a majority sufficient to enable it to honour its promises, and to have no excuses for any failure to do so, makes pretty good sense. PR doesn’t.
Jack Straw uses enough bogus and flaky arguments to try to jutify what he, Blair and the rest of them did over Iraq (and incidentally also over Kosovo) and in the assault on our civil liberties, to keep us all busy exposing and refuting them. Let’s not waste our time attacking him when for once he makes some valid and serious points on another subject altogether.
What about PR for a wholly-elected second chamber? Now there’s a cause worth fighting for!
Brian
Thanks for taking the time to post this long rebuttal, Brian. Needless to say, I disagree; most importantly on your central contention that 36% in favour of Labour’s manifesto is somehow assent to implement it. Surely, if you’re a democrat, it’s exactly the opposite? None of us may have given explicit authority for a coalition programme, but using the parties as proxies for our opinions is far more likely to produce the consensus view that we have, as a nation, expressed implicit support for. We don’t, in any case, give assent only to what’s in the manifesto – we give the elected party/ies our assent to govern as they judge fit. Just because handing power over interest rates to the Bank of England wasn’t in Lab’s 1997 manifesto doesn’t make it an illegitimate act. Unless you propose referendum democracy as the answer, there has to be an element of proxy behaviour allowed to the parties…
…which leads me on to coalitions. What you call auction and bribing I would call a process of political negotiation, conducted in view of the public and media (if they can’t even keep the AG’s advice secret, what chance the story behind coalition negotiations remaining behind closed doors?). In any case, politics is dynamic and fluid: I don’t agree the LDs would play the role of kingmaker in perpetuity or would hold all the cards. I noted elsewhere that a Tory-UKIP alliance would be quite possible if an external EU event (e.g. the euro collapsing) caused an alignment shift. Also a Lab-Con alliance (along, say, a moderate authoritarian, anti-liberal, moderate free-marketization of public services axis) would be quite conceivable.
On top of all that, only an extreme form of perfectly proportional PR (a la Israel) would make coalition almost inevitable. Moderately proportional systems, such as all those currently on the table, would produce one-party governments at levels of support in the low-mid 40s. That is why it was dishonest of Straw to use the Israel analogy: they have perfect closed list PR with a low threshold (1.5%, I think), plus most of their so-called ‘pivot parties’ are extremists. Nobody sensible is arguing for that sort of system.
It’s not true that the public do not know in advance what likely coalitions will form after elections. There is even evidence that electorates offer them explicit consent. In Germany, for example, where voters place two crosses, a significant proportion of the ‘list vote’ for the Greens comes from those who voted SPD for their ‘constituency vote’. The 1982 situation in Germany you highlight could easily be avoided by making parliamentary dissolution compulsory after a no-confidence motion. In any case, I think a comparison with New Zealand, where PR was adopted in 199(?6), is far more instructive – I point you here.
Finally, if you believe FPTP is much the better system, why support PR for the Lords? There would in effect be a second chamber more representative of national opinion that the first. They could legitimately block every piece of government legislation sent to them. Surely a negotiated coalition in the lower chamber, bringing the parties together in a new system of politics, would be far more conducive to long-term stable government? It’s not the answer to every problem within the UK polity, but it’s a start.
I think we have stated different positions of which each is tenable, but which simply reflect differing views of how a political system is likely to work best; and de gustibus, non disputandum. However, on one point:
>> if you believe FPTP is much the better system, why support PR for the Lords?
I have just written a long and polite reply to the points in the preceding comment, but for some reason only the first couple of paragraphs of it have appeared. It’s too late at night for me to write it all again, and I foolishly failed to keep a copy. Oh, well.
Good night!
Brian
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