Dan Nicholson-Heap argues in favour of hung parliaments

Whether we will actually have a hung parliament is only a matter of speculation, and there’s not much we can usefully say when there are still 6 months to go before the next election.  One swallow does not make a summer, just like one poll does not make a collapse in Tory support.  One thing to note is that oppositions tend never to do as well as polls say; Labour were registering well over 50% in some polls in 1996, but fell back to 43% on election day.  The same is likely to apply this time around; Tory poll leads have hit as much as 20%, with an average of around 15%. 

Given that the economy has started to pick up again and the Tories have been perhaps too open about their spending cuts, Tory support is likely to fall back moderately, although perhaps not to the levels seen in the Ipsos-Mori poll.  The consensus among the polling techies is that the drop was mostly due to sampling error, but was also representative of a modest Labour revival.  YouGov for The Telegraph on Thursday showed the lead has dropped to 10%, which is probably closer to the truth.

As soon as the 6% figure was reported in the press, talking heads in the media and both of the main parties were wheeled out to bash the idea of coalition government.  Opponents of coalition governments paint a vivid picture of hung parliaments producing faction-ridden, indecisive, mistake-prone administrations, but are never able to provide a decent number of real-world examples. 

Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, New Zealand and many others have had coalition governments.  Even in a ‘grand coalition’ with her political enemies, Angela Merkel had a fairly successful 4 years, and is in a even stronger position now, even though she is still in a coalition, this time with the more market-orientated FDP.  On measures of Cabinet stability in democracies, Finland comes out on near the top, even though there is quite some distance between the constituent parties in its coalition.

Scotland had a Labour-Lib Dem coalition from 1999-2007 and has a minority SNP government  now, but it didn’t suddenly collapse into anarchy, as opponents of coalition government would have you believe.  On the contrary, we had an imaginative, energetic government coming up with progressive policies which was consistently ahead of the Westminster administration on key issues.

Another argument is that coalition government gives too much power to the smaller parties.  This, in theory, is absolutely true.  However, if a third or fourth party coalition partner was seen to be behaving irresponsibly; holding up the work of government over a few of its pet issues, it would be routed in an election. 

In 1976-8, the majority-less Labour government relied on Liberal votes to stay in office.  The Liberals could have held Callaghan to ransom, but they didn’t.  Several commentators this week pointed out that a coalition would be disastrous given the state of public finances.  The Lib Dems know that they would draw the ire of the media and public if they held up necessary cuts, and so they wouldn’t. The Lib Dems have proved themselves responsible coalition partners in Scotland and Wales (equally, all three Holyrood opposition parties have provided responsible opposition to the vulnerable SNP minority government), and there is no reason to believe that they would not do so again at Westminster if called upon. 

And even if a hung parliament did give the Lib Dems an unfair amount of power, this would make up for the decades of supression that they have been subjected to by the electoral system.  In 1983, they received more than 25% of the vote, but only 3% of the seats in Parliament, with this pattern being repeated at all subsequent elections. 

I just don’t see how we can call ourselves a democracy under the current electoral system.  The 2005 election was won by Labour with 36% of the vote on a 60% turnout; the government thus took office with a healthy majority (55% of the seats), with only the support of 21% of the electorate.  A coalition government would mean that a far larger proprortion of the electorate will have voted for the government that rules it.  The unfairness of the current electoral system is not the same as  Robert Mugabe stuffing ballot boxes. But its not a million miles away from it.  Coalition governments would go some way to rectifying the bias of the electoral system.

Roy Hattersely-a minister in the minority Callaghan government complained in The Guardian this week that his government had to constantly lobby MPs in order to win support for its legislation, instead of simply bullying its troops into the right voting lobby. Last time I checked, that is how democratic parliamentary government was supposed to work.  A coalition would mean that there would be a greater range of views amongst those with their hands on the levers of power.  This is especially important in a country like Britain where power is centralised and too few people with too narrow a range of views has had the majority of the power in the past.

A hung parliament at the next election would produce a government which would look seriously at proportional representation as a fairer way of electing our legislature.  It would be a government which would need to consult a much wider range of views in order to get its policies through.  It would be a government that would need to send its ministers to those fairly elected representatives to win their votes, instead of ramming their policies down their throats against public opinion and treating Parliament as if it didn't exist.  

In short, it would be a democratic government.

*Printed December 1st*

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