November 2021

By Calvin Tucker

Although defeated at Labour conference last September by the card votes of trade union delegates, promoters of proportional representation (PR) are not accepting that democratic no vote, and are busy campaigning and lobbying to overturn the decision at next year’s conference. They have already moved closer to that aim by persuading the UNITE union to change its position. If they succeed, the result could be as damaging as the ‘People's Vote’ campaign of 2018 and 2019 for a second referendum on the EU. As with the People's Vote, the problem is not merely the wrongness of the policy, but the harm done to the labour movement and to the prospects for socialism if the Labour Party were to adopt it.

ABSTRACT DEMOCRACY VERSUS THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE 

PR is supposed to make Britain more democratic. But not only do the advocates of PR misunderstand the democratic deficit within our capitalist society, their proposals would actually make it worse by entrenching it. Despite the appearance of moving closer to ‘pure’ democracy, proportional representation would actually make Britain less democratic, by erecting additional barriers between what most people want and what actually gets delivered.

Democracy under capitalism cannot be understood if we disregard class and the nature of power in society. In Britain, the majority of people have shown in poll after poll, with huge majorities, that they want nationalisation of the utilities, more state control of the economy, more taxes on the rich, etc. In polls taken after the Labour Party conference in September, a vast majority of voters among supporters of all parties, said they wanted a £15 per hour minimum wage. Overwhelmingly, the people want an end to neoliberalism. Yet our democratically elected governments and the leaderships of all parliamentary parties, including now the Labour Party, work to achieve the exact opposite of what the people want. And we’re all familiar with people whose response, with some justification, is to say: “They’re all the same”. Corporate control of the media, allied to a pro-capitalist establishment, successfully shifts the debate away from the class issues that unite the working class majority of people onto ‘culture wars’ that divide people. PR itself has the potential to become a major issue of this sort.

The 2017 election produced a temporary rupture. For a brief exhilarating moment, under Corbyn’s Labour it looked possible that you might actually get what you voted for!

So, the real democratic deficit is that under capitalism, there isn't a transmission belt between putting a cross on a ballot paper and achieving the outcomes that most people desire. PR doesn’t even claim to address this. Instead it proposes that there should be an exact, or near exact, arithmetical relationship between the crosses on the ballot papers and the numbers of seats in Parliament for the various parties. It has nothing to say about the fact that none of these parties would, or could, form a government to implement what people want.

The advocates of PR generally accept, and largely support, the idea that this would lead to a proliferation of political parties and a permanently hung parliament. But experience suggests that this appeal to abstract democracy actually makes it less likely that promises made to voters in manifestos will be delivered. We don't have to look back very far to see how this plays out in practice from our experience of hung parliaments and coalitions in Westminster. In 2010, people who had voted Liberal Democrat to abolish tuition fees discovered to their horror that they had actually voted for the tripling of tuition fees and a Tory-led government that delivered austerity. When the betrayed complained, Nick Clegg told them from the side window of his ministerial limo that that was the price for achieving power.

HUNG PARLIAMENTS AND REGRESSIVE ALLIANCES

Many (though not all) advocates of PR promote something they call a ‘Progressive Alliance’, the idea of a pact or coalition between the Labour Party, the Lib Dems, and the Green Party, usually also involving an arrangement with the Scottish National Party (SNP). A good example is the Guardian article on 29 May 2021, headlined “To beat the Tories we must first join forces to beat the electoral system”. The authors being three leading People’s Voters: Caroline Lucas from the Greens, Layla Moran from the Liberal Democrats, and Clive Lewis from the Labour Party. [1] The authors take it as read that Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens are the progressives, and they identify the problem as being that progressives are split into three tribes. The good thing about the article is that it exposes what is not considered by some left advocates of proportional representation - that the only way that anyone can envisage it being achieved is through an electoral pact at a general election with the Lib Dems and the Greens (but principally with the Lib Dems).

Looking again at 2010, that general election did in fact deliver a what would have been a working parliamentary majority for the proposed components of a Progressive Alliance. It would have been potentially able to win all votes in Parliament with the support or acquiescence of the SNP and smaller parties, including the SDLP from the 6 counties of the north of Ireland. But what actually happened? The Lib Dems - the second biggest component of this supposed Progressive Alliance - demanded that Gordon Brown be removed as leader before they would even consider an alliance with Labour. And then, after having humiliated the centrist Brown, they put the Tories in anyway. If the alternative to the Tories was an actual left Prime Minister intent on implementing policies such as those contained in the manifestos of 2017 and 2019, that would be an instant deal breaker for the Lib Dems.

That situation – a hung Parliament where Liberal Democrats always get to choose the government, thus preventing any prospect of a move towards socialism – is an optimistic prediction for the outcome of PR. It ignores the danger of an even worse outcome: permanent or semi-permanent Tory rule in alliance with a populist nationalist party which we could call ‘Continuity UKIP’, and if required, with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). The latter of course was the outcome of the second hung Parliament in 2017. So, the 2010 hung Parliament led to a Tory/Lib Dem government and the 2017 hung Parliament led to a Tory/DUP government. Of course, the Tory Party opposes PR, because they prefer to govern alone. But they are quite capable of implementing their class-based agenda in coalition. It was the Cameron-Clegg government of 2010 to 2015 that made the biggest cuts to wages and public services for over a century.

Critically, PR makes any theoretical parliamentary road to socialism impossible. Under PR, it's hard to envisage a scenario in which a socialist candidate in a British election is seen as the alternative Prime Minister of the country - there would be no more 2017 opportunities. At best, the socialist left would be a very small bloc in a hung parliament, a bloc whose lofty ambition would be to become a junior partner in a centrist-led coalition, and even that is most unlikely.

And another concern: if the economic situation for most people in Britain worsens further, PR could also unleash the prospects of national representation for an explicitly racist and fascist party, on the lines of the old National Front or British National Party. Left advocates of PR tend to downplay the dangers of a revived ‘Continuity UKIP’ plus an openly fascist party gaining a major foothold in Parliament, sometimes even claiming that this has already happened with Boris Johnson’s leadership of the Tories. This view rests on the naïve and mechanistic idea that there is a fixed pool of right wing voters, in which the Tories and more extreme nationalist parties fish for votes. But as the current situation in France and Germany shows, together with experience in parts of Britain, ultra-nationalist, openly racist and fascist parties can, when opportunity presents, gain substantial support from (former) left and centre-left working class voters.

Looking abroad, in post-World War 2 Italy, under a system of proportional representation, the Italian Communist Party (which had become a Eurocommunist party, a sort of left social democrat rather than a revolutionary party) received as much as 35% of the vote in the mid-1970s, but was permanently excluded from office by all other parties. Under that system of PR, there was a regressive alliance of all other parties to exclude the left.

In London, in the proportionally elected Greater London Assembly (GLA), there is a regressive alliance: the Greens and the Liberal Democrats have teamed up with the Tories to share the chairs of all GLA committees and completely exclude Labour. Or to take another recent example from national politics in Britain: in 2017, the Tories bribed the DUP in order to stay in office, and when the Tory-DUP majority fractured over Brexit, and a ‘Progressive Alliance’ of Remainers had the opportunity to install Jeremy Corbyn as an interim prime minister for just a few short weeks and for the sole purpose of reversing Brexit, they declined the opportunity. Stopping Corbyn was more important than stopping Brexit.

Hung parliaments reduce accountability and encourage pork-barrel politics. Transactional politics become institutionalised. The manifestos, i.e. actual policy commitments, become near worthless and people are left to vote for party ‘values’ - values which the party leaderships will then be free to interpret in any way they choose. Governments will be formed behind closed doors whilst we wait outside as passive observers for a prime minister to emerge, rather like good Catholics wait for the white smoke over the Vatican to see who has been appointed Pope.

CAMPAIGN FOR PR HELPS THE TORIES 

The worse Labour is polling, the louder the advocates of proportional representation demand it. But while advocacy within the Labour Party for PR and a Progressive Alliance is an expression of demoralisation and defeatism, it doesn’t solve the problem of declining support. The so-called progressives: Labour, Lib Dem, Greens, generally poll around 45% to 50% between them. But voters are not armies that can be ordered by party leaders to vote for other parties. Parties do not own voters. Polls tell us that up to a third of Lib Dems would vote Tory over Labour, and we can safely assume that a good number of Labour and Green voters would stay at home rather than vote Lib Dem. So the combined vote for the three parties would be significantly less when they share out the constituencies and stand as an alliance, than when they stand separately. Even on these very conservative estimates, the notional vote for the Progressive Alliance falls to under 40%. That’s less than Corbyn’s Labour achieved on its own in 2017. 

Such an election would pit the Tories saying: “We’ll deal with your problems” (whatever those problems are, and however illusory their solutions) against this Progressive Alliance saying: “let's talk about a second referendum on changing the electoral system”, or even “let’s talk about having this major constitutional change without a referendum”. You don’t need a crystal ball to predict the likely outcome of that contest!

What else, apart from PR, would be in the manifesto of the so-called Progressive Alliance? Whatever the politics of the Labour leadership, these would be limited to what the Lib Dems would be happy to sign up to- i.e. centrist policies. Thus, another institutional barrier would be raised against the possibility of policies representing the views and needs of the working class majority being put to the electorate, let alone implemented.

If the Progressive Alliance (or the Labour Party separately but alongside the Lib Dems and Greens, in the absence of an alliance) were to go into a general election promising to implement a form of PR without a referendum, as is implied by the text of the motion promoted by the Labour Campaign for New Democracy, which was defeated at 2021 Labour Conference, then that would raise a very serious problem of legitimacy. More so since, relatively recently, in 2011, there was a referendum on a specific form of PR, the alternative vote (AV). Then 13 million voters, a whopping 68% of those who voted, decided to keep the existing system. It will be hard to rebut the arguments that the Progressive Alliance and/or Labour is trying to do something underhand and anti-democratic. However, if a referendum on PR were to be proposed in the manifesto, you can be sure that it will be decried as a ‘second referendum’ on electoral reform, echoing the circumstances that led to Boris Johnson’s big parliamentary majority in 2019. Further, all the divisions and strife following the 2016 Brexit referendum will be dredged up as arguments against having yet another UK-wide referendum, and hence as arguments against voting Labour/Progressive Alliance. Nor will there be unity among supporters of PR about the form it should take, opening up further divisions and attacks by the media. 

DESTROYING SOCIALIST REPRESENTATION

Thus, merely adopting the policy of PR would entrench Tory rule, without even the prospect of implementing a system of proportional representation. But, if PR somehow could be achieved, what would be the effect on socialist representation in Parliament?

For some people who are understandably very dismayed at the Labour Party’s move back to the right under Keir Starmer, PR appears to offer the attractive prospect that a party or parties to the left of Labour could win seats in Parliament. PR probably would prompt many more people on the left to leave the Labour Party, with a view to joining one of the myriad existing very small ‘left of Labour’ parties, or with the idea that another newly created left wing party could win seats under PR. But nothing in the history of the left outside the Labour Party suggests that anything but further fracturing and electoral irrelevance would occur.

We do have something to go by in reckoning the realistic likely electoral prospects for a non-Labour left under PR, because we already have PR for the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, and the London Assembly, and we had it for the European Parliament. The current number of representatives of parties to the left of Labour in all assemblies and parliaments elected under PR in Britain is zero. A decade or two ago, there was a little flurry in Scotland with Tommy Sheridan and the Scottish Socialist Party picking up a handful of seats. But no signs of life since. In London, not even when Ken Livingstone won the London Mayorship as an independent, did parties to the left of Labour win a single seat on the GLA.

Because of the structure of British politics, including the nature of the Labour Party and corporate/establishment control of the media, there is no relation whatsoever between the 40% of the vote which Labour could achieve in 2017 with a left wing programme, and the vote that a ‘left of Labour’ Party would achieve if it stood for election with exactly the same programme.

On the other hand, under PR the prospects for a potential right wing split from Labour would be very different. In the early 1980s the SDP, led by four senior right wing Labour figures, split from the Party which was at the time led by Michael Foot. Given massive media backing, the SDP in alliance with the Liberals, won nearly 7.8 million votes, enough to ensure the defeat of Labour in the 1983 general election and prompt the resignation of Foot, who was replaced by Neil Kinnock. But due to First Past the Post, the SDP did not gain enough seats to threaten Labour’s position as the main opposition party. Should events in future result in Labour again moving to the left, PR would make the party very much more vulnerable to the impact of a pro-capitalist split, with the prospect of it achieving even a plurality of parliamentary seats very remote.

And while the Labour leadership and hierarchy are in right wing hands, the potentially devastating impact of PR on left Labour representation in Parliament also needs to be considered. A “party list” PR system, or even a hybrid system comprising a national party list and local constituencies with new multi-member or single member constituencies, would give Labour HQ the opportunity to centralise control, further disenfranchise local party members, and remove all existing left Labour MPs at a stroke.

Most forms of PR also make it very difficult for independent candidates to win, whether that’s Martin Bell on an anti-sleaze platform, or a ‘save the local hospital’ campaigner. So, it means more power to the party leaderships to control the narrative and to quell dissent.

Some left supporters of PR counter that the version of PR which they prefer, and the way Labour applied it, would not cause these devastating results. The problem with this is that once the Party had adopted PR as a policy, as it stands now, it would be up to the right wing leadership and officials of the Party to decide which version of PR would be adopted and how it would be implemented – not the left supporters of PR.

MEANINGFUL CHANGE 

The claim that PR is needed because First Past the Post ensures perpetual Tory rule is founded on an astonishing act of political amnesia. In 2017, Labour came within a few thousand votes of becoming the largest party in Parliament. What prevented electoral victory was not the voting system, but the internal right wing sabotage of Corbyn’s leadership and the election campaign. Despite the sabotage, a manifesto that embodied what most people want increased the Labour vote dramatically, from 30% to 40%. Labour lost in 2019, not because of the electoral system, but principally because of the Party’s accelerating capitulation to People's Vote campaign, which lost it scores of Leave-voting seats and destroyed any prospect of winning the party’s target marginal seats in England and Wales, nearly 80% of which were Leave-voting Tory held constituencies. (2)

Now in the form of the PR campaign, we face the new equivalent of the People’s Vote - a policy that cannot actually be delivered but will cause all kinds of unintended, or in some cases, intended - negative consequences. What it does do is take Labour towards the idea, if not the actuality, of a Lib-Lab pact and in doing so make it institutionalised hostages to centrism and a platform that has no policies that haven’t already failed.

Rejecting PR is not to accept the status quo. On the contrary, it is to fight to keep the door open to overcoming the status quo, i.e. the system that impoverishes the majority and enriches a tiny minority. And it is a fight for democracy, for the possibility that voting could result in meaningful change.

 

[1] Caroline Lucas, Layla Moran and Clive Lewis, To beat the Tories, we must first join forces to beat the electoral system https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/29/beat-the-tories-electoral-system-first-past-the-post

 

[2] Richard Johnson, Labour’s path to victory is through Leave-voting Conservative marginals https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2019/02/04/labours-path-to-vicotry-is-through-leave-voting-conservative-marginals/

 

Can a left majority be elected to this place? Pic by Henry Kellner

...if the economic situation for most people in Britain worsens further, PR could also unleash the prospects of national representation for an explicitly racist and fascist party, on the lines of the old National Front of British National Party.

Nick Clegg and Lib Dems sold out on tuition fees for coalition with Tories pic by Nick Clegg