I had a discussion with Neal Lawson of Compass, and others, this week on the subject of proportional representation.
Many of the usual arguments were rehearsed, and I will not repeat them here.
I did, however, express my bafflement at Labour's position on this issue . It is Neal‘s view that the Labour leadership is sticking to first-past-the-post because they believe that, once in a while, they get the chance to form a government, and they are not willing to abandon that.
My position is that if only they abandoned that position then Labour would, most likely, be the leading party within an almost perpetual left of centre coalition that might form the government of the UK for a very long time to come, given the obvious political preferences of most people in this country. They could, in other words, be in power almost continuously, even if they would have to tolerate the presence of some ministers within their administration who came from smaller parties.
Rationally, you would expect anyone within the Labour leadership to opt for almost continuous power if that choice was available to them when the alternative is decades or more of opposition, during which periods there is virtually nothing that Labour can do to influence the way in which the UK is governed.
Why it is that Labour cannot see this, and why it is that Labour is not willing to compromise to achieve this outcome on behalf of its membership, who are in favour of it, and the wider interests of people in the UK as a whole, who also want this, is beyond my comprehension .
In fairness to Neal, he too cannot really understand why Labour holds its position. All that we know is that because of some old tribal belief they think that it is impossible for them to compromise with anyone in pursuit of power, even if doing so would be of benefit to the party, its leadership, and the country at large.
And if that insular and utterly self-centred illogicality does not worry you, it should.
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First Past The Post systems manufacture a duopoly of ‘broad church’ parties; Proportional Representation produces lots of more focused parties (which form governments in ‘broad church’ coalitions). PR is more democratic, probably better for everybody – except those at the top of the existing broad church parties, who lose personal power – yes, they can be ‘in government’, but only by the continuing sufferance of relatively fragile coalition – so not so much ‘in power’ – either in their own party, or in the government.
Except that, now, FPTP no longer creates a duopoly of broad church parties, if it ever did in the past.
Labour has deliberately “triangulated” to move as far right as possible. Their idea is, presumably, to have a broader church than the Tories. Cynically they seem to think that centre or left leaning voters will have no choice but to vote for them. But neither party is a broad church any longer. Labour has eviscerated the left of the party, so it is now a right wing party. The Tories are riven with multiple factions, having also eviscerated parts of their party. Neither is any longer a broad church.
This leaves nothing for voters to choose between.
Hence, previously, the rise of UKIP, and now it’s reincarnation as Reform. Both main parties have patronised the voters. No wonder Brexit was lost. That may be repeated, to a lesser extent, by Reform damaging the Conservatives even more.
This all leaves the poor voter with little choice.
FPTP is pernicious, a significant contributor to the degradation of this county over past decades. We desperately need a change.
Agreed
Starmer has reaffirmed his position that he would never contemplate an arrangement with the S.N.P, even although it meant the Tories staying in power.
The Labour leadership is dangerously undemocratic as the Labour membership has voted at conference in favour of proportional representation.
I don’t think anyone wants a party to “get into power”. We have all seen how that power can be abused.
Sunak is claiming that “no one wants a General Election. Starmer is claiming there is “no money to do anything”.
People want to be represented.
Agreed
You’re right – it doesn’t make sense, unless you consider who benefits from the current arrangement. Maybe this is exactly the way the Establishment want UK politics to remain – an easily managed duopoly to preserve longstanding heirarchies of wealth and power. So they work through their placemen and women in both main parties to advance the Establishment interest and make sure PR doesn’t get a look in.
The ‘broad church’ parties are coalitions of various factions who can strike deals to share power. Voters may believe that that the ‘Tory-lite’ faction currently on power within Labour will always be so, but some other faction could take over.
It’s far better to have a government formed by parties smaller than the behemoths we have to put up with.
Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural and political theory at the University of East London, nails the ‘why’ here (writing in The Guardian after Labour’s defeat in 2019)…
“Labourism is the name of a specific political ideology – a habit of political thought and action – that is almost unique to the British left. According to this belief, there is only one true vehicle for progressive politics, the Labour party. Trade unions have their place – to represent their members at an “industrial” level, in workplaces and on shop floors – but actual political campaigning must be delegated to the party, and the primary focus of the party must be winning elections. No other party can ever represent the working class, and any political movement that is not subservient to either unions or party is to be treated with the greatest suspicion.”
That ‘one true’, self-worshipping, winner-take-all Labourism brings them to the deal with the devil: an unwavering, religious allegiance to FPTP. Even if that assures Tories in power the majority of the time, so be it. Party first, the nation second. And such a profound betrayal makes Labour worse than the Tories – as at least the latter are honest about their support of privilege and inequality.
Thanks. That is spot on.
It is indeed. Sickening, and moronic. Labour are not a solution to anything, but part of the problem.
I can’t help wondering if it’s to do with the internal selection processes within the political parties? If they adopted a more nuanced selection process for themselves, the leadership would probably be very different.
Whilst it sometimes produces duff leaders (FPTP does that too) by and large it produces leaders who have support of the membership.
I notice that the Electoral Reform Society recommends STV, which is the method that has been used for all membership elections, that I can vote in, since I was a student in the 1970’s.
I notice, selection of directors, even when there is competition, appears to always be FPTP, so perhaps UK businesses would benefit from having that changed too, it might help labour too. (Though Unions bosses would have to agree!)
Where is the Pilgrim Richard?? have
you upset him?
the board is no fun without him
We are talking
But he is taking a break
I will let him know he is being missed
Did he not return under a different name? I thought I recognised his style.
Yes, but only temporarily
As with water renationalisation, I think they’re frightened of the pushback from TPTB – which would indeed be nuclear.
If they had any conviction and integrity they would have the answer to TPTB and instruct the Treasury and other branches of Whitehall to put TPTB in their place.
Government has the power to do that if they choose.
Unfortunately, the conviction and integrity are in short supply, which is seen through the number of politicians who, when tired of parliamentary games, find for themselves comfortable positions within or serving TPTB.
For clarification TPTB = the powers that be
There is the issue of extreme parties being represented in PR systems. Almost inevitably, some far right parties like Reform and even the BNP and its offshoots will garner enough of the national vote to entitle them to an MP or two. This will lend legitimacy to their views and a platform for media access and exposure.
I am in favour of PR on principle, but we
Have to acknowledge that the fringes will get more of a say in public discourse under it. Part of the debate needs to be about this issue in order to have robust means to counter the siren call of the fascists and populists.
The current Labour leadership is against PR because they fear a split in the party in which the left (most of the membership) could happily leave and form a new and actually socialist party safe in the knowledge that their views will be represented under a system where every vote actually counts.
I can live with the fringes being exposed if sanity gets the chance to prevail. It does not at present. All we are getting is the fringes.
Exactly. Bring ‘the fringe’ out of the shadows into broad daylight. Nothing exposes like sunlight. UKIP would had won many seats under PR (and deservedly so). However their MPs would have shown themselves up every day of the week in parliament for the backward-looking ‘Colonel Blimp’ / ‘Angry Uncle’ types most of them are.
Such exposure would have been the biggest alarm bell to voters to just avoid UKIP.
I’m convinced Brexit would never have happened under PR.
What I like about a PR system is that it improves the chances of new ideas coming into the public realm. In a country like the UK where many voters are conservative (with a small “c”) largely because they don’t take much interest in how things really work economically, monetarily and politically. PR exposes them to these ideas which slowly gain more acceptance (like MMT) because they are being spear-headed by smaller parties.
As it stands there is ossification in the country that results in the stupidity of Keir Starmer (the next prospective leader of the country) declaring there is No Magic Money Tree, he won’t be raising taxes, and in consequence can’t help local authorities who are struggling financially. All of this is said despite the following:-
“… 92 per cent of social workers surveyed believe children would be better protected if caseloads were lighter, with 58 per cent reporting their caseloads are unmanageable. There has been no improvement in this perception since a previous survey in 2022, carried out not long after the country had emerged from the pandemic. The SWU said more funding was urgently required to tackle the problem and that pressures faced by social workers had not been addressed.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/social-services-failing-children-finley-boden-b2500037.html
“Keir Starmer has told voters he cannot “turn the taps on” to fix the crisis in local authority funding as he was quizzed on how Labour would plug councils’ £4bn gap at the launch of its local election campaign. ‘I can’t pretend that we could turn the taps on, pretend the damage hasn’t been done to the economy – it has,’ he said. ‘There’s no magic money tree that we can waggle the day after the election. No, they’ve broken the economy, they’ve done huge damage.’ ”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/28/starmer-says-he-cannot-turn-the-taps-on-to-fix-crisis-in-council-funding
Thanks
I think it is obvious why, with proportional representation the labour party would probably split it 2-3 smaller parties… The labour leadership would ‘dig their own grave’… the same would happen to the tories.
But they would still all be in leadership….
Starmer believes that Labour are never likely to get 51% or more share of the popular vote. However, he wants the opportunity to impose legislation and budgets etc that only that level of PR support could empower him to do so. Therefore he endorses FPTP which could deliver a Labour parliamentary majority on just 35% or less vote share. Note, last time Labour won a general election in 2005, the SNP only had six seats and Labour 41. I doubt we will see a return to that ratio.
I’m afraid that Gio is correct. The real problem is that the office of PM in Brexitania is immensely powerful because it reflects the central problem in the ‘constitution’ of the ‘U’ K – namely that these benighted nations and the north of Ireland are a monarchy – and the PM is the soveriegn’s prime minister and has powers of patronage and authority rarely matched even in presidencies.
In short, the politician’s hunger for power means that the PM’s job – untrammeled by the need to work collectively with other party leaders – is immensely seductive and the constitution itself miltates against the mindset of collegiality which is a necessary part of any truly proportional system. They are ‘in it to win it’ – and that means all of it. The spirit is best expressed by Prince John in The Lion In Winter when he rages at Henry about his inheritance, “When do I get it Daddy? Not till you’re dead.” The PM equivalent is the regal authority which rests with him/her alone – and nothing will suffice except the elimination of any other authority. None of them have ever shown any ability to share – even Cromwell was no better.
Of course we should have PR… that is if we ambitions to become a democracy!
I have often wondered why the concept of a ‘triumvarate’ is not more popular. It has been tried in many different countries at many different times, most notably in Ancient Rome, and would mean we would have less of an emphasis on the idea of a ‘great leader’…..
It not only is utterly stupid it is fundamentally self defeating and a betrayal of the majority of the population who wants some form of progressive government.
I actually think that on this and labour’s inability and unwillingness to abandon the neoliberal ideology of the right, labour shows that it is captured by the right, both intellectually and psychologically, despite supposedly being a different party.
It cannot conceive of fighting elections and governing in any other way than under the winner takes all FPTP, and it can’t conceive of economics as anything other than tax and spend. Maybe it’s case of Stockholm syndrome?
My mum was a stalwart of the Labour party having left the CP in 1956 when the USSR went in to Hungary. She was a Labour councillor for many years. She then parted company with Labour from the day Labour supported the Iraq war. Every Saturday on the high street of her town she held a vigil against the Iraq war and Labour’s part in it until her early 90s when she was eventually incapacitated by dementia around 2010.
She was convinced however, that effective government has to be won through a coherent party manifesto setting out detailed policies to achieve the redistribution of wealth by the state and designed to deliver full employment, universal healthcare, free education, available and affordable housing, and so on. Taking her cue from Atlee’s government, she believed this is best achieved by a party winning seats for MPs who are accountable to their constituents – so FPTP, no PR and no coalitions.
I would say that this mantra in favour of FPTP has been distorted by New Labour for their own individual leader’s and many MPs’ self-interest. They seem to be happy to collect the MP’s salary, expenses, and pension benefits along with the increasingly substantial bungs from corporate interests such that actual power is merely an extra bonus for more of the same. Certainly Starmer’s and Reeves’ fatalistic view of power as inevitably following a right wing neoliberal financialised Tory austerity agenda has to be the most extremely unambitious pursuit of power imaginable. Is it that they don’t actually want power at all? Power without ambition??
Moving to PR would in my view require vacating the binary oppositional crumbling Houses of Parliament (the physical embodiment of the current crumbling 2-party system) for a non-adversarial, consensus-building, non-hierarchically arranged debating chamber with digital voting etc. It also demands a different kind of politician. Starmer is not that kind of politician. His opportunistic dishonesty, his authoritarian centralisation of the party, his complete lack of empathy; all this and more make him a comfortable ally of the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg.
“If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media – having tasted blood – would demand next that it expelled all its Socialist and reunited the remaining Labour Party with
the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed of the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed … it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of
a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.”
– Tony Benn
and Stephen Law’s reasons why he won’t be voting Labour
https://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2023/04/why-i-wont-be-voting-labour-at-next.html
Thanks
Labour and the Tories support FPTP because they believe it gives them a better chance of getting into power without needing to form coalitions. This means both parties knowingly don’t support democracy. To them, power is more important than democracy. FPTP also means all parties produce manifestos based on what they believe will win most votes rather than what they really believe. Even when they know that many of the beliefs they focus on, like the idea that we need to balance tax and spend like a household, have been falsely created and reinforced by the vested interests of the wealthy and media. Labours move to the right is the worst example of this.
There has not been a Labour Party that has represented citizens since the end of the Wilson era. Both Wilson and Heath had been to war, and service of their citizens was in their blood. Foot was the penultimate socialist, Smith the last. Kinnock – who I witnessed first hand – was already captured by the stirrings that produced Blair. He wore the skin of a Bevan heritage over a gold digger mentality. Blair was undiluted LibDem, Clegg undiluted neoliberal. The membership, now at less than 60% of its 2019 high watermark, was sidelined by the Blairites who seized the local and regional reins in the 90s and never relinquished them. Internal democracy was moribund, misogynist and racist under McNicol (as evidenced by Forde) , let alone the dodgy Evans, who promoted ‘democratic centralism’ during Blairs reign. Starmer is just the logical iteration of the Blair machine.
I fail to see the difference between Government and Opposition.
Both mean snout in trough.
Perhaps it’s just an easier life in Opposition, having the same access to ‘government’ cash, but no responsibility.