Proportional representation: fair deal for a divided nation

We are heading for a Boulton/Campbell election and it’s going to be destabilising, possibly dangerous, for what currently passes as the Queen’s Peace in the United Kingdom.

Boulton/Campbell is a term in electoral theory (first coined in this article) that describes two different positions on the constitutional niceties of a hung parliament – one in which no single party has 326 seats or more in the House of Commons.

It derives from a charged live confrontation on television the day after the 2010 general election between Sky’s then political editor, Adam Boulton, and the former Labour spin-doctor, Alastair Campbell.

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Boulton suggested that because David Cameron’s party had the most seats (303 to Labour’s 257) and the most votes (10,726,614 to Labour’s 8,609,527) it had a right to form either a minority or a coalition government.

Campbell disagreed, pointing out that “constitutionally” Gordon Brown remained prime minister, and was perfectly within his rights to carry on governing and try for a coalition of his own. Boulton looked outraged: for a few delicious seconds it looked as though things would kick off.

The spookiest thing about the exchange is that Campbell was absolutely correct, constitutionally. Gordon Brown did have the right to stay in Downing Street and try to cobble together a coalition with the Lib Dems, plus anyone else he fancied. In the end, the figures were against him – just. According to some press reports he still believes he was somehow cheated of victory.

It’s clear that we have at least part of our political elite believing that anything goes in coalition-building - the Campbell and, crucially, constitutional view. Whereas most of the rest of us believe that the largest party has a right to try to set up a government particularly when it’s a couple of million votes ahead of its nearest rival – the Boulton perspective.

But if at the end of the day it’s all going to be about numbers – why not have pure, plain numbers rather than figures artificially magnified by first-past-the-post. In short, proportional representation (PR): what we vote for is what we get.

The loudest arguments against PR suggest that it would break the link between MPs and their constituents; and even worse, give more power to the political parties to choose candidates acceptable to the party high command. Both arguments are now entirely redundant. That’s what happens already.

A further once powerful constitutional argument was that the first-past-the-post system produced strong and decisive governments with widely accepted mandates. No longer, it would seem.

What first-past-the-post means in modern Britain is that unpopular ‘Thornberryized’ political parties that basically despise the electorate are still able to scavenge enough votes to be in with a chance of forming a government on about a third of the vote, while ‘non-Thornberryized’ parties like Ukip, or even the Greens, find it difficult to break through.

Labour could take, say, 33 per cent of the vote in May 2015 and that might well be enough for them to form a government, possibly on their own. Ukip could take 20 per cent of the vote nationally (and a greater percentage in England) and end up with just a handful of MPs.

The nightmare scenario in my view would be the one outlined by Don Brind for The Week on 24 November. Labour scrapes enough seats in England to be the largest party in the Commons, with fewer votes than the Tories: and then the deeply unpopular Ed Milliband governs with the support of the Scottish Nationalists. In what way would this represent the will of the electorate? The West Lothian question would quickly become the West Lothian Crisis.

Not that Lord Smith of Kelvin seems to have noticed. His commission (comprised of ten members of Scotland’s political elite) is currently setting out the arrangements for so-called ‘devo-max’ that will in effect make Scotland almost independent – but of course Scottish MPs returned to Westminster will still be able to vote on purely English matters. Dream on, pal - as they say in Lord Smith’s home town of Glasgow.

Of course, depending on taste, the nightmare could happen the other way round, with the Tories scraping in and then relying on Ukip’s MPs for Confidence and Supply.

But there are important differences: if the Tories end up with the largest number of MPs they will almost certainly have polled the largest number of votes; and whether or not Ukip make a big breakthrough at the next election in terms of MPs, they are likely to hoover up votes across the country.

The arrangement would have some kind of democratic legitimacy – as does the current Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government with 59 per cent of the popular vote behind it.

The concept of the popular vote in a UK general election is technically, constitutionally irrelevant just as it is in a US Presidential election where the winner, as we all discovered in 2000, is the candidate who has the most votes in the electoral college, not the one with the most votes nationwide.

But the key thing about what looks at first sight an unfair, perverse result is that it is exactly what Jefferson, Madison, Adams and Franklin wanted in order to offset the then overweening size of the state of Virginia. The system still carries their authority down the years.

In the UK we have no such mechanism and no such authority – only plain numbers. In the future, given our weird and unbalanced electoral system, the raw numbers rather than the number of MPs returned will come to mean everything. We are moving into a Boulton world: the Campbell world is on the point of decommissioning.

If a party can only persuade a third of the electorate to vote for it - it should receive only a third of the MPs. In an era of what looks like perpetual coalition, only proportional representation can confer legitimacy.

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