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Out of all proportion

19 July 2004

Society is complicated, and a legislature split between two dominant parties presents a bogus polarity in which those complications are unrepresented.

As Tony Blair passes the ten year mark as Labour leader there can be little doubt that, from the electoral point of view, he is damaged goods. For a man who came to the leadership pledging to restore trust to politics it is, perhaps, ironic that he should have failed so spectacularly in this area. Or maybe all politicians do this - trumpeting as a virtue their own area of weakness, presumably to protect themselves from what it might do to them. John Major with his "family values" is a case in point.

But, despite the harm the Iraq war has done to his political reputation, the Prime Minister still carries at least one strong electoral card. To understand how strong it is one merely has to ask "What's the alternative?", at which point a vast swathe of the disgruntled but otherwise moderate left immediately swings back into line. If the choice is between Blair's New Labour and Howard's Conservatives, the only issue for voters even slightly to the left of centre is whether to vote Labour or not vote at all.

The idea of an unelectable opposition is nothing new. Labour suffered from this problem through four consecutive elections up to 1992, having to re-invent itself completely before it could take power in 1997. After eighteen years of government the Conservatives were burned out, and the excitement and optimism of the Labour victory was palpable. The boot was firmly on the other foot; the Conservatives could neither work out what had gone wrong nor what to do about it, with the consequence that they've meandered about in the political wilderness for a parliament and a half and look like finding their way out of it no time soon.

What has made matters worse for them is the New Labour push to the right, which has seen Mr Blair repeatedly driving his tanks on to the Conservatives' lawn. This is not a new trick, either. Stealing the occasional brightly-coloured policy garment from the opposition is sound politics and sometimes makes for good government, too. But Blair has made off with the entire wardrobe, make-up and all, leaving the opposition struggling to come up with attractive and distinctive alternative raiments, and forced to draw attention away from their own nakedness by opportunistic barbs and petty point-scoring.

Blair's conservative agenda naturally attracts the opprobrium of the left; but here, again, the old lore of politics comes into play. A government of the left that moves to the right broadens its hinterland, attracting new adherents at the centre while keeping their existing ones on the basis that there's nowhere else for them to go. It's a trick the Conservatives have been trying in the opposite direction, but with much more limited success. Mr Howard is beset on his right wing by both an active and vociferous party membership and various alternative parties such as UKIP and the BNP that may draw support if he moves too close to the centre.

Opposition to Tony Blair from within the Labour party is diluted by the practical consequences of an approaching general election, which he is widely expected to win. Any outflanking from the left, therefore, is in the hands of insignificant splinter groups such as those that make up the Respect coalition, and of the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems pride themselves on defying the traditional left-right dichotomy, and their presence on the left arguably reflects a consistent centrist position left high and dry by the rightwards drift of the traditional centre - the space that separates Labour from the Conservatives.

The fact that all three main parties are piling into something that approximates to the central ground, wherein, in terms of policy, they are separated by specific questions such as Europe or constitutional change rather than great ideological differences, could represent a positive opportunity for British politics, if its structures allowed it. Unfortunately they do not. The spectacle of Labour and the Conservatives trotting out not dissimilar lines on education and health, while doing everything within their respective powers to emphasise the differences and incompatibility of their approaches, illustrates what is going wrong.

Like American politics, the British system is stuck in an adversarial culture in which changes of government occur only in the context of the rejection and failure of the outgoing party. In other words, governments have to lose elections rather than oppositions win them. Voters never say - "I like the government but I like the other lot better"; the challenge for the opposition, therefore, is to make the government appear to be as bad as possible - ideally bad in a moral, corrupt, self-serving manner that turns the electorate against the individuals in government as well as the party to which they belong.

Governments defend themselves by spinning hard to show their every action in a positive light, while simultaneously impugning - on the precautionary principle - the virtues and policies of those who would challenge them. The consequence is twofold: first, governments carry on far too long, persisting with failed policies and personalities, pushing their bright ideas and convictions to the sort of extreme limits that gave Britain the poll tax and the world the second Iraq war; second, this persistence ad extremis means that the transition from one government to another is associated with moral decay and renewal, a sort of cleansing of the Augean Stables that both places unreasonable expectations on the shoulders of the incomers and prevents continuity of political endeavour.

The opprobrium suffered by Gordon Brown in sticking to Tory spending limits for two years after 1997 illustrates the problem of expectation. The relatively healthy state of the public finances and the increases in expenditure that have been possible illustrate the benefits of continuity. But public finances do not set elections alight. Issues such as health and education, transport, immigration, crime and tax are the battlegrounds that require each contending party to rubbish each other's ideas and efforts, to question the veracity of their intentions and to promise for themselves more than they can reasonably fulfil.

Because the parties have to disagree, it is difficult to get support for sound, middle-of-the-road policies. Take crime, for example. Irrespective of the facts, the opposition has an interest in maintaining that crime (and its attendant danger to the person) is rising, and the populist press, whose sales figures are more effectively driven by emotion that political good sense, have an interest in supporting that view. The government is roundly blamed for the failure of its policies, even if they are good policies that are working at the problem in an unheadline-grabbing sort of way.

Two things may follow: first, the government may feel forced to change its policy to a less effective but more populist one; second, the opposition, if it comes to power, has to discard what the government was doing, whether or not it was effective, in favour of it the populist approach it favoured when in opposition. If by then the government has already moved in the populist direction, the opposition will probably have sought to differentiate itself by moving even deeper into this territory. The policies it applies in government could therefore be still further from the effective middle ground that both parties have abandoned.

Such consequences flow almost inevitably from an entrenched, two party, adversarial politics. The first-past-the-post electoral system that gives rise to it is generally credited with providing strong governments, as if strong governments, like strong peppermints, are necessarily a good thing. Italy is often quoted in illustration of the failure of the proportional system, although Germany, in which, for most of the post-war era, political continuity was provided by the presence of the liberal Free Democrats in coalition with one or other of the two big parties, could make the argument on the other side. Even in Italy, "weak" governments did not necessarily produce bad government; and those who rightly observed the opportunities for nepotism and corruption in a system in which governments came and went with such rapidity that the stables never did get cleaned have only to look at the present "strong" Berlusconi administration to see how much worse things can be.

Coalition governments are unattractive to "strong" leaders like Tony Blair, who are convinced that they know best. Nor are they attractive to leaders of the opposition who aspire to become "strong" leaders of government in their turn. But the problem is that no one person does know best, and coalitions reflect a social and political reality in which a diversity of needs and aspirations are represented. In other words, society is complicated, and a legislature that is divided between two parties is unrepresentative in failing to reflect those complications.

If the House of Commons contained representation approximately proportionate to the number of votes cast for individuals or parties, it would contain 259 Labour members, 202 Conservatives, 113 Lib Dems and 57 assorted others, instead of 410 Labour members, or 65% of the house, elected with 41% of the popular vote. The present government would be a coalition more broadly representative of the electorate than at present. More importantly, the culture of political compromise required by such a system would tend to draw parties towards each other, rather than subjecting them to a climate of entrenched mutual hostility. Policy would be improved, benefiting from the nurture of consensus rather than the alienation occasioned by the need to be different.

Proportional representation would make of the national tier of government a tool for society to regulate itself, rather than what it is in danger of becoming, which is a cockpit of political personality driven by a vision and conviction that is untested and may as easily be wrong as right. Politicians ought not to regard the measure of their success as lying in the longevity of their tenure or the effectiveness with which they have succeeded in imposing their will. Good, representative and effective government is a social activity that produces clarity of purpose only to the extent that such clarity is reflected in the general will. Good politicians are no more that guiding participants in that process, and when they see themselves as standing out from it, it may be time to move on. This is a subject we will return to next time.