But there is something I little UnBritish about complaining about the rules of a game you have gone all out to win but nevertheless lost? Cricket is a silly game and if you say I was out I am taking my bat and my ball and going home. People talk about "British Values", but I would have thought that sportsmanship and not being a sore loser was pretty high on the list of things that we value more than some other nations do.
It is perfectly true that about a million fewer humans voted Labour this time (when it won a Famous Victory) than last time (when it suffered a Historic Defeat). It is equally true that Labour's 33% of the votes equated to 65% per cent of the seats, when the Tories 23% equated to 19%. None of this is exactly news. Corbyn got lots and lots of votes in 2019 because he got massive majorities in a small number of left-wing constituencies but was narrowly trashed in a huge number of more traditional ones. There is no point in competing under a system which counts the votes by constituency, and then moaning that you would have won under a system which counted total votes across the whole country.
Have you ever played D&D with one of those people who says that he if he'd rolled that natural twenty when attacking the frost giant, instead of when he was opening the door to the frost giants cage, he would have killed the frost giant so it wasn't fair that the frost giant squashed his hobbit?
Counting up the total number of votes cast across the whole country is a pretty feeble way of finding out whether THE PEOPLE loved Jeremy more than Kier, or whether the new PM truthfully has a POPULAR MANDATE. One of the things which makes the present system so silly is that voters don't necessarily vote for the candidate they love the mostest -- or even for the party they actually wanted to win. Everyone takes that for granted. The Tories spent the last weeks of the campaign telling people not to vote Reform even if they supported Reform because voting Reform might take votes away from the Tories and let Labour win. The Greens spent the whole of the campaign telling people that it was safe to vote Green because Labour was definitely going to win so there was no danger of accidentally letting the Tories back into power. Reform had a theory since Labour was definitely going to win anyway, you ought to vote Reform in seats where Reform had no chance of winning because if they managed to come a strong fourth votewise, Farage would be the de facto leader of the opposition.
David Cameron, you will recall, opposed proportional representation because he just intuited in his little heart of hearts that it was not the British way of doing things. The main argument for the divine right of first past the post has always been that the people understand it and know how to use their vote. And I think that is roughly what happened. Overwhelmingly people wanted to Vote The Bastards Out, and voted for the Not A Bastard candidate they thought had the best chance of winning .
There are 650 parliamentary seats and some 46 million votes, so a truly proportionate system would give each party 1 seat for each 70 thousand votes cast. It is perfectly true that, under such a system, no single party would have had the magic 326 votes necessary to form an overall majority. However, a Labour/Liberal alliance would have 299 compared with the Tories 156. The Green Party would have brought it up to 345. The Tories and Reform together could only have managed managed 247. I suppose it is possible that the Liberals would do as they did in 2010 and form an alliance with the Tories, making 234 seats, but Labour/Green would beat them on 267. A Tory/Reform/Liberal alliance would clock in 325 votes, but Nigel Farage working with the Liberals really is the stuff of fantasy. It is overwhelmingly likely that under a True PR system, we would have ended up in with a Centrist Labour Government with a Right Wing Tory opposition.
Doubtless, a Starmer administration which had to pay attention to the opinion of some Green MPs and some Liberal Democrat MPs would feel aesthetically different from one where any dissidents and rebels are back benchers from his own party. And a Tory opposition which had to vote with Reform to stand any chance of ever defeating the government on anything would feel different from the one we have at the moment, where some "Tory" MPs are pretty far to the right and others not so much. But we'd be pretty much in the same place we are now.
Some people are horrified by the idea of a coalitions and alliances. They think that it would lead to a legislature permanently caught up in compromise and horse-trading. Some people believe that once there has been an election, the Prime Minister should be allowed to do what he wants and challenging him goes against Democracy and the Will of The People. (Tony Blair often talked as if that was what he thought.) But some people think that a parliament where politicians have to negotiate with other politicians, as opposed to merely hurl zingers at them, might be rather an improvement.
But so far as I know, no-one is proposing a literally proportional system: what they are imagining is some kind of Preferential Voting System or Automatic Run-Offs, where the punters are allowed to indicate their first, second and third choices and second choice votes are reallocated if no-one gets an overall majority the first time around.
Now, this does change things a little bit -- although since most Green voters would put Labour in second place and most Reform voters would put the Tories in second place, not as much as you might think.
I argued before the election that since Starmer is probably less of a bastard than the other bastards; and certainly one of only two bastards with the slightest chance of getting elected, he was the best bastard to vote for, even though he wasn't the best bastard possible. I entirely stand by that analysis. But it would have looked very threadbare under the preferential system. There would have been lots of First Choice Green/Second Choice Labour cards; and a goodly wodge of First Choice Reform / Second Choice Tory ones. I myself would have written a a big 1 by the New Corbyn Idealists party, a medium sized 2 by the Green party and a small but reluctant 3 by the Centrist Labour candidate.
But under such a system, the entire campaign would have been conducted differently. "Don't vote for that lot because the other lot might get in and you hate them even more than you hate us " would have ceased to be such a compelling argument. Parties would have had to spend more time saying "Vote for us because we've got the better policies" and less time engaged in a prisoner's dilemma exercise in which punters have to second guess where the punters in the other booths are putting their crosses.
What I would like best would be a system of Compulsory voting. I am not envisaging Orwellian stormtroopers frogmarching citizens down the road to the polling station. I imagine elections would be more like censuses, with a week or a fortnight before the deadline to get your votes in, small fines for people who don't comply, and sensible conscience clauses for people who think that every time you vote, God kills a puppy. Currently, elections are largely won by the party who most efficiently identify their supporters and persuade them to get off their bottoms and cast their vote. Under a compulsory system, persuading uncommitted voters that you were the best candidate would become a much bigger part of the process.
It's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad system: a system where the incumbents best tactic is to say "A vote for the Far Right will result in too decisive a victory for the Moderate Left." But it happens to be the system we have. And the answer to the question "Did Starmer really win" is "yes, of course he did?"
> I think some people believe that once there has been an election, the Prime Minister should be allowed to do what he wants and challenging him goes against Democracy and the Will of The People.
ReplyDeleteThis blog post https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/12/19/bullveto.html suggests an interesting way in which political systems can differ, orthogonal to other more commonly-used axes like left/right: bulldozer/vetocracy
He defines it as:
* Bulldozer: single actors can do important and meaningful, but potentially risky and disruptive, things without asking for permission
* Vetocracy: doing anything potentially disruptive and controversial requires getting a sign-off from a large number of different and diverse actors, any of whom could stop it
What you're describing feels a lot like this. The UK currently has a relatively bulldozerish system; the US is much, much more vetocratic, and what you're suggesting is a move in the vetocratic direction.
I think the US is extremely poorly served by its vetocracy, as is Israel (the other example of a very vetocratic state that leaps to my mind), which makes me nervous of this, but obviously that's only two examples, and there could well be other vetocratic states where it works better.