Non-Fungible Voters
Why won’t they just let us win? There’s more than a hint of sour grapes in Tory ministers’ current go-to response for any election defeat, which is to accuse Labour and the Lib Dems of having a ‘pact’ and, quite frankly, being terribly unfair by not splitting the left-wing vote down the middle and letting the Tories win on their currently reduced share of the vote.
The Lab-Lib ‘pact’ might not exist on paper, but it certainly exists in the hearts of both parties’ voters. In Tiverton and Honiton, Labour lost their deposit with just 3.7% of the vote; whereas in Wakefield, the Lib Dems rolled up in seventh place on just 1.8%. Perhaps the Tories could attack both parties for their decidedly relaxed approach to £500 sums in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. That deposit could have funded 0.09 seconds of NHS spending!
Understandably, calls are growing for an actual Lab-Lib pact, perhaps also including the Greens, and even the SNP and Plaid Cymru. In addition to saving thousands of pounds worth of deposits, it would put a stop to vote-splitting among the 60% or thereabouts of voters who currently support one of the smorgasbord of left-wing parties on offer, and almost certainly knock the Tories out of power (or so the theory goes).
Alternatively, once in power, the left parties could simply introduce proportional representation, permanently eliminate vote-splitting among their supporters, and since their supporters usually amount to at least 50% of the vote, almost certainly lock the Tories out of power forever (or so the theory goes).
It’s true that, for all intents and purposes, Labour, the Lib Dems, and the Greens are franchises of the same party. On every other issue than the existence of the United Kingdom, the same could be said for the SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the non-unionist parties in Northern Ireland. They’re all broadly left-of-centre on economics and staunchly left-wing on social issues, none of them are keen on Brexit, and you’d be especially hard-pressed to find a control on immigration that any of them like. Their activists on Twitter are basically interchangeable save for the party emoji (the orange diamond, red rose, &c.). And crucially, there’s more difference within each party than between the parties — Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, and the SNP all have basically the same ongoing ruckus over transgender issues.
But in that case, why don’t they merge? The answer is because franchises serve a purpose. Each franchise, each avatar of the British liberal left, each face of this multiple-headed beast appeals to a somewhat different set of voters; just like some people used to prefer Currys over PC World, or vice versa. If it had been Labour in Tiverton and Honiton, and the Lib Dems in Wakefield, or the Greens in either seat, the Tories would likely have fared better than they did.
This, in turn, is why the ‘progressive majority’ theory, and the accompanying theory that PR would more or less permanently keep the Tories out of power, is a myth. Voters aren’t fungible. Labour voters can’t perfectly be translated into Lib Dem voters or Green voters, or vice versa. The recent by-elections have given the impression they can come close, but there’s no telling how many Labour supporters in Tiverton, faced with a Lib Dem / Tory by-election where their own party clearly didn’t care that much about winning, simply stayed home, or voted for another small party, or even voted Tory.
The left’s vote share in Britain is inflated because they have multiple different viable parties, whereas the right only has one, and has done for decades, with the brief exception of UKIP in 2015. The current incarnation of the Farage movement is currently polling around 4%, has no serious chance of winning a Parliamentary seat, and boasts around 75 times fewer councillors than the Greens. If you’re on the right and you don’t like the Conservative Party in its current form, then you don’t have many other options, unless you’re willing to consider one of the left-wing franchises. If you’re in the centre, you have more centre-left options than centre-right ones.
The right can tolerate this state of affairs, ministers moaning about ‘pacts’ notwithstanding, because the first-past-the-post system mitigates against it. The left parties might gain from being able to appeal to different audiences, but they lose out from vote-splitting. There are marginal seats that a left-wing party would win if the others weren’t there; and there are seats that a left-wing party can win now that a merged left-wing party couldn’t. A formal left-wing pact would also almost certainly shed voters, just like the ‘united opposition’ pact in Hungary earlier this year.
Likewise, PR would not lock the right out of power forever in Britain, because Britain is not, in fact, a fundamentally left-wing country kept down by its electoral system. What PR would do, however, is strongly incentivise the right to split into three or four franchises with a broader appeal between them, just like the left. Because voters are non-fungible, PR systems around the world reward splits and punish mergers — just look at Israel.
After a brief period of left-wing domination, the Tories would most likely return to power at the head of an alliance of themselves, an enlarged Faragist party, and a couple of offshoots — perhaps a right-liberal party appealing to ‘blue wall’ voters, and an agrarian party catering to rural voters. We’d probably end up with a ‘bloc’ system akin to what exists in the Scandinavian countries — a two-party system in all but name. Whether this would be preferable or not to the current situation is arguable, but it wouldn’t be the golden ticket to long-term power that a lot of left-wingers seem to think.
The above is a thought exercise, but then, so is any ‘Britain under PR’ scenario, past, present, or future. Many left-wingers are hopeful, and many Tories terrified, that a future left-wing government would introduce a form of PR, but in reality it’s unlikely. A Labour majority government would conveniently decide that FPTP isn’t that bad after all; while a multi-party ‘progressive alliance’ would struggle to find the votes for a system that would inherently render dozens of Labour MPs in London, South Wales, and the North East redundant (plus about half the SNP Westminster group).
This is for the best. PR isn’t inherently ‘fairer’. Like all electoral systems in democratic countries, it just creates its own, different set of distortions and incentives. And more to the point, PR — like most constitutional tinkering favoured by Twitter anoraks — would not address the actual problems with how power works in this country.
PR wouldn’t reduce the power of the whips; it wouldn’t improve parties’ candidate selection processes to the point where you’d feel comfortable reducing the power of the whips; it wouldn’t make becoming a politician more attractive for talented individuals; it wouldn’t make MPs’ offices better resourced; it wouldn’t give ministers substantive control over their departments; it wouldn’t address the outsized influence of well-funded NGOs; and it wouldn’t make local elections any less determined by national issues.
If we want to make Britain a better governed and more genuinely democratic country, we should start from those problems, and work from there towards solutions, rather than wrangling over PR, electoral pacts (real or imagined), and how ‘fair’ they are towards one party or another.
And if the left aren’t interested in that and just really want to stack the system against the right, they could simply give the vote to millions of schoolkids and non-citizens instead.
