Backroom deals before or after elections…Why PR is a terrible, undemocratic idea for the UK
Yesterday I was asked for my views on Proportional Representation for the UK.
I’ve been thinking about this question and observing the world through this question for decades since back when I studied The British Constitution in A-level Economics & Social Affairs.
PR seems only fair, right? Well, no. There is a short answer (“it’s a very bad idea”), but it depends of course on one’s premises. Here is my premise and analysis.
For almost all of human history, life was for most, as Hobbes would say, “nasty, brutish and short”. This is true across almost all civilisations. Some civilisations managed to do a little better, but still contained terrible processes and outcomes. Even in good pockets without constant civil war or boundary wars, medicine was unavailable in any sense we now know it, slavery and butchery were not uncommon, and freedom to think and act were very limited.
Over a long timeline, human history has largely dragged itself from tyrannical despotism and murder, to slavery, to colonialism, to communism, and to liberal democracy (at least in 31 of the 195 countries – often called “The West”).
Now that’s called progress – but you have to admit it has been very slow, and with long periods (often centuries) of downs as well as ups. In terms of current lifespans there is no reason to be complacent and say that we will make further progress in terms of prosperity, security and freedom. Communism descended within a decade in several places. And I see many signs that we could easily go backwards quickly. We have to understand societal ‘freedom’ and nurture it, in order to survive without a return to authoritarian or even totalitarian society. That would be a blind tragedy.
The answers as to whether the West will maintain and improve in prosperity, security and freedom lie in the field of Constitutional Politics. And the PR question resides within this. In the UK there is a British Constitution, but it is not written in one document. It is inferred, existing in several places and documents, understood by Parliament and the wider culture in an implied way and across a social contract.
British culture is currently often sold by Government as a combination of, and balance between Individual Liberty, Rule of Law, Mutual Respect and Tolerance, and Democracy. In the US, the Declaration of Independence set the scene for the US Constitution, which I regard as inspired, giving human beings inalienable rights from God that the State cannot take away. The sentiment is “God before State”, so that people cannot gather into tribes and dominate individuals as this would override God’s provision of human life and human agency. We could discuss this separately.
This is where Constitutional Politics is important – it is ‘how we agree the rules of the political game’, not the ‘partisan policy’ part of politics, though these overlap over time.
Now, if the social contract falls apart, then we have civil war, but before then we have a collapse of the Constitutional element of politics, replaced by raw power politics itself after respect for the Constitution is lost. This can happen even in a democracy if voters support anti-Constitutional policies. I could put a case that the current British Constitution perpetuates unfair privilege to a top 1%; I could also argue conversely that the purpose of the Fabian Society (look it up, and see its historical policies – members include every Labour Prime Minister in history, plus Reeves, Cooper, Miliband, Lammy, plus George Bernard Shaw and others) is to redefine British Values in such a collectivist way and through such a left-wing lens as to destroy the Values in a way millions of moderates would be surprised about, despite Orwell’s writings highlighting his opposition to Fabian philosophy.
So…to our voting system. It’s ‘First-Past-The-Post’. In each local Parliamentary Constituency, the prospective MP with most votes is elected to the House of Commons, and the leader of the Party with most seats becomes Prime Minister. A majority (currently 326 of a 650-seat chamber) of MPs’ votes is enough to create new Laws, with the House of Lords a temporarily tempering entity.
The effect of our local Constituency voting system has traditionally led to a “Two-Party System”. We see it often that in by-elections there are calls for mergers or non-competition between similar parties to gain a seat. Small parties cannot win enough seats in the House of Commons, so they gang together before elections. The two parties therefore become ‘broader churches’ containing left-and-right within each party, to the extent it can without splitting again.
This is good. The reason is that it keeps out extremes (by which I mean far from the average) parties of both right and left – they cannot win enough seats without merging with a more moderate party, who dominate and curtail them. It also creates acceptable compromises and allyships – “Jaw-Jaw is better than War-War” for the greater prize of moderated power. And parties need to stay moderate enough to attract the marginal voter. Then the next election within five years means the governing party has to listen enough to the voters to win power again next time. In a way, it is genius.
It doesn’t work perfectly, Devolution has weakened it, and it means there are a lot of voters in local ‘safe seat’ areas which means their vote is ex-ante very unlikely to get them what they want, but this is more fluid over time than people realise. Safe is proven not to be safe forever. A further cost of this system for those who dislike confrontation or unfair criticism is the unpalatable end of ‘free speech’, where people can say whatever they like in the public square, provided it does not incite violence (details in Brandenburg principles in USA – and greater limitations in UK related to offensive language, some of which I reluctantly disagree with). Racism will inevitably be an issue in any society and we can discuss separately how to deal with ‘free speech vs harm speech’.
We do not live in Utopia, so to have achieved politics as ‘war without the fighting’ in the above way is actually a tremendous achievement which has evolved over hundreds of years, and exported throughout the democratic West.
So why not PR? Every vote counts, and the House of Commons then comprises a representative sample of votes. Nice? Fair? But this will be a multi-party chamber with lots of small parties represented. Not only will some be extremists, possibly on both/many wings, and with a more equal voice to others despite their relative unpopularity, but somehow Laws need to be proposed and passed, and that requires a majority coalition – either temporary or permanent. The horse-trading required to achieve a majority coalition is heavily bureaucratic, with concessions made everywhere. With apologies to those who know the value of camels, they say, “A camel is a horse built by a committee”. And with justification. We end up with camel-shaped laws, incoherent sets of laws based on different coalitions at different moments, and often no agreement, and hence no new law where one is needed. Worse, the extremists often hold the ‘balance of power’ in coalition-building, giving them outsize influence over the large majority of moderates.
Technically the choice can be seen as whether the horse-trading and coalition-building happens before the election (so at least you know what you are voting for), or after (when you have little idea how all the political dynamics will work and flip and keep flipping). I know which of these two imperfect options I would prefer.
So no, I think PR would be a disaster.
It is natural to complain and want a perfect system, and a conservative response would be to say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, plus “Who knows what you unleash if you change it?”. Left-leaners are typically more emotionally open to change, but sometimes do not think through, or want to think through, the potential unforeseen negative consequences. Lots of bad things can happen when you pull down Chesterton’s fence (the seemingly old, unowned, unnecessary one).
Assuming our Judeo-Christian underpinnings survive, and we survive as a nation, we see the positives of how it works currently, and we see the peaceful and orderly handover of power at election time. I am every time in awe of seeing a political party lose a general election and the Prime Minister put their chattels into a removals van, making space and way for their opponent leader with more Commons seats to take over within hours, having seen the Constitutional Monarch for permission (which is always granted). We know who is now in charge, with the most seats (usually but even if not always quite the most votes relatively) and we can vote again next time, unless the Party transgresses Constitutional Politics and tears at wider long-term democracy itself.
But if our social contract tears, and a belief in peaceful argument tears, people cease to believe in old documents, unwritten constitutions or each others’ goodwill, and the game shifts from ‘war without the physical force’ to political violence. That is the end of what we have enjoyed, black, white, rich, poor, disabled and all. And then we are back to Hobbes and civil war, where vulnerable groups really do worse on a much more fundamental scale. I want to avoid that for everyone’s sake.
Moving from intense verbal argument (good, given an imperfect world of passionate differences and visions) to political violence (bad) is the much greater and real risk than playing with voting systems. And no, PR does not help and it would make things far worse. That is why the electorate voted 2 to 1 against Alternative Vote in 2011, and all this is why a new Government of the day would be immoral to force it past the existing Constitution with a Parliamentary majority in coming years.