The long boredom of the summer recess is over and Parliament is back in session. (Do remind me to tell you about the great idea I had for a new reality TV show to run during the next summer recess.) Anyway, Parliament is back, debating mostly electoral reform of one kind or another: the AV referendum, fixed term Parliaments, etc. So I guess it’s time for me to write about electoral reform again, too.
I believe I’ve made my views on FPTP clear in the past, but for the record, it’s an appalling, undemocratic, unrepresentative voting system. It’s about as unfair as they come, and not to the ever-complaining Tories. Let’s remind ourselves of the number of votes required for some of the parties in the UK to win a seat in Westminster: Lab: 33k, Con: 35k, LibDem: 126k, Greens: 200k.
Another effect of FPTP which doesn’t get talked about very often – but is kind of obvious from the above numbers – is that it severely penalises small parties and strongly encourages large ones. No society, however, can easily be split in just two camps: we are not all simply either Labour or Tory, either Democrat or Republican. I may be economically left-of-centre, and politically liberal; I am also a woman, a bisexual, middle class, an immigrant, childless, working full-time, I believe climate change is the biggest challenge we face, and have many, many other interests and facets to who I am which have a political aspect. The same thing goes for any one of us. However, the party of middle class bisexual immigrant childless women would be quite small – and even smaller if you only took the women who agreed on every single policy issue. The First Past the Post political system would strongly discourage its existence. And so we look to get together with another party whose views we more or less share – they might be the middle class immigrant childless lesbians, they might be the working class bisexual childless women, or even the middle class immigrant men; and then we find another group, and another, to join our ever-expanding political party. You can probably already see how easy it is to form a daisy-chain from you to anyone anywhere else on the political spectrum, even if you’re only taking tiny incremental steps with each new association.
So what we end up with in an FPTP system is a political landscape generally dominated by two parties. Those parties are large and far from homogeneous – they are “broad churches” (yes, that is a technical political science term – remind me to explain about cross-cutting cleavages some day). In fact, it is fair to say that the large parties produced in an FPTP system are coalitions in themselves. You can see plenty of evidence of this in the three main parties in the UK: The LibDems split reasonably neatly into a social wing and the Orange Book wing; Labour have a hard-core left wing trying to cohabit with the Blairites who in turn would actually not be too out of place in the more centrist wing of the Tory party (I may be being charitable here).
Remember back in May all the fear-uncertainty-doubt talk about how coalitions were undemocratic because they made shady deals in smoke-filledfree rooms and were thus not accountable to the public who had voted for the parties involved based on their manifestos and not based on some sort of coalition agreement? So what do you think produces said manifestos other than shady deals and back-room politics, except in a much less transparent, scrutinisable way?
That much about the theory. As a quick postscript, let’s have a look at the damage FPTP is doing to the UK political landscape in practice. So we have the two main parties (the LibDems will forgive me if I treat them separately here) which historically represented different class interests: Labour, economically left of centre, representing the working class (or, well, labour); and the Conservatives, economically right of centre, representing the upper classes (in other words, capital). The LibDems are a freak of nature, a misshapen merger of what was left of the 19th century Liberals and a centre-left off-shoot of Labour. Under Tony Blair, Labour moved to the right, and up along the authoritarian axis for those of you playing along at home on Political Compass. The LibDems’ social wing (which I’d still like to believe makes up the majority of the actual membership) has been submerged by the Orange Bookers who are now solidly forming the leadership of the party. And so the British political landscape is left with a large social-democracy-shaped black hole in it – not so good for those of us who would like someone to represent us in that part of the spectrum.
That’s it for tonight. In the next instalment, by popular request, I’ll be trying to convince myself to campaign for AV.