Some reflections on legitimacy and on FPTP

There may be a lot of fuss in the next few days about the ‘legitimacy’ of the various parties’ claims to take part in the new government. There is also a growing lobby, presumably worked up over many lunches and dinners in the manner described in my ‘Cameron Delusion’, aimed at abolishing this country’s voting system and replacing it with a Continental proportional system designed for a wholly different culture.

Please try not to be fooled by this stuff. One rule decides who forms a government, and that is the ability to command a majority in the House of Commons. All parties which have not got an overall majority are losers. A party without a majority, even if it has the largest vote or the largest number of seats, is still a loser. It must eat its slice of humble pie with the others.,

Thanks to Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg, and their Fixed Term Parliaments Act, this is not as simple as it used to be. It is far harder for the House of Commons to throw out a dud ministry and force an election.

And that means that the Queen’s government may well be carried on in the next few years by a series of ad hoc informal alliances, rather than by any formal coalition. For this to work, one party will have to be the government, having all the ministerial posts etc, but heavily constrained by the limits on its action caused by mathematics.

This isn’t totally different from the existing arrangement, in which large minorities within parties can keep them from doing things that their leaders would like to do – or the longstanding cross-party socially liberal alliance which pushed through the whole permissive society agenda, and then combined again to get us into the Common Market, as it then was.

But its operation will be more obvious.

It’s obviously less satisfactory than a clear majority government in some important ways. Foreign policy will be especially weakened. But that’s not the fault of the constitution.

It’s a necessary result of the decay of the two major parties, which is not some irrational development but an absolutely true reflection of the fact that they have lost any true reason to exist.

They are classic examples of organisational inertia, by which bodies which have outlived their usefulness seek to survive for their own sake, and invent new reasons for doing so (the NATO alliance whose whole purpose vanished in 1991, is another example).

We are in a similar fix to the one we were in in the 1920s, when the Liberals had not quite died, and Labour had not yet grown strong enough to supplant them. We got through that without adopting some Belgian sociological system for electing our ancient Parliament.

As I said on BBC2’s ‘Daily Politics’ on Tuesday (it’s about 18 minutes in, here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05twy29 )

The electoral system is not there for the good of the parties, but for the good of the country.

It has two irreplaceable and unique characteristics. The first is that it provides strong government, constantly challenged by a vigilant and ambitious opposition.

The next is that it allows the people, when enraged or otherwise disappointed by a bad government, to turn it out completely. A peaceful revolution, immensely good for the people and the politicians themselves, is possible every five years and likely every 15 or so.

I cannot tell you what joy it gives me to see a man who was Prime Minister yesterday, powerless the next, supervising only the removal of his furniture from Downing Street.

Proportional systems cannot do this, except in very exceptional circumstances. In a proportional system, the leader you loathe could well end up premier of a new and different coalition later.

All such coalitions tend to be ludicrously unprincipled, based upon short-term deals. Israel offers the best example of this, with governments often the prisoners of factions they hate.

By the way, FPTP undoubtedly forces the formation of open and largely predictable pre-election coalitions, as opposed to the post-election coalitions, whose nature the electorate cannot even guess at, of PR. In this transition,as the FPTP system tries to spit out the dead Labour and Tory Parties, we get a taste of this. But we have no need to put up with it forever. The problem is caused *by* those parties, with their ludicrous unprincipled alliances and their inertia-driven refusal to admit that they no longer stand for anything anyone wants.

PR also entrenches small dying parties. Look at the Scottish Tories, a grouplet that ostensibly stands for policies that will never again be implemented in Scotland, and for a Union which is all but dead.

Yet thanks to PR, they still offer a career, and broadcasting access, to anyone who is prepared to accept such things on such terms. On my last visit to Cairo I was shown the shabby but central building which still houses the headquarters of the Nasserite party, which remains alive long after its leader and inspiration is forgotten by the world. I believe that a combination of state aid for parties and PR, such as are sought by thoughtless reformers here, allows this party to maintain a salaried bureaucracy.

The point about FPTP is that it favours two strong parties, and has hiccups when it does not have two strong parties. But that is not an argument for getting rid of FPTP. It is an argument for hastening the collapse of those dying parties, by banning millionaire contributions, by ending state aid, by reducing the airtime they get on TV, and for us ceasing to vote for those dying parties.

It is not an argument for destroying our constitution. Why should we do that because Tory and Labour Parties have both ceased to speak for anyone? Surely they, not we, should pay the price for their failure?