Misrule Britannia: The U.K.’s Screwed-Up Election

The fondest dream of the Liberal Democrats has long been to bring European-style electoral reform to the parliament of the United Kingdom.PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN KITWOOD WPA POOL / GETTY

Judging from the plethora of theories purporting to explain the utterly unanticipated victory of David Cameron’s Tories in the British general election, the result was wildly overdetermined. There’s the Shy Tory Theory: people don’t want to admit to inquiring strangers, such as pollsters, that they’re voting Conservative because they’re afraid of being thought of as selfish bastards who hate taxes more than they love their fellow man. There’s the Wallace Theory: the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, looked too much like Gromit’s human housemate and struck people as somehow odd or weird. Relatedly, there’s the Wrong Miliband Theory: Labour should have gone with Ed’s smoother, less Gromit-like older brother David, who had been Gordon Brown’s foreign minister and is now self-exiled to New York as president of the International Rescue Committee. There’s the Fundamentals Theory: the British economy has been doing a bit better lately, and good economic news always benefits incumbents. There’s the Keynes Theory, a.k.a. the Cassidy Corollary: the Labour Party accepted the premises of austerity and totally failed to educate the public in the well-established truth that budget deficits are a positive in times of high unemployment, falling demand, and low interest rates, thereby allowing itself to be portrayed as the party of un-paid-for government handouts and fiscal irresponsibility. (Barack Obama was guilty of the same failure in 2009, thereby helping to precipitate the Republican sweep of the 2010 midterms.) There’s the Clashing Nationalisms Theory: alarmed at the rise of the Scottish National Party and the prospect of a Labour-S.N.P. coalition that might accelerate the breakup of the United Kingdom, English voters stampeded rightward. There’s the—well, there are a lot of theories. All have something to them, and none are mutually exclusive.

I, too, have a theory. And it’s mine.

My theory centers on the catastrophic collapse of the Liberal Democrat Party, the political descendant of the once-dominant Liberal Party of Gladstone, Asquith, and Lloyd George.

The fondest dream of the Liberal Democrats has long been to bring European-style electoral reform to the parliament of the United Kingdom. For this perpetual third party, proportional representation was the Holy Grail that would win them a share of seats consonant with their popular support. By the turn of the twenty-first century they had reason to be hopeful. All of the new British legislative institutions created in recent decades—the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh National Assembly, the Northern Ireland Assembly, and the U.K. delegation to the European Parliament—are elected by one or another variant of P.R. Westminster was the last British holdout of “First Past the Post,” the ancient single-member-district, plurality-winner-take-all system still used mainly in certain former British colonies, such as Canada, India, and the United States.

The 2010 election finally produced the rare phenomenon the Liberal Democrats spent decades praying for: a “hung Parliament.” Since neither the Conservatives nor Labour had captured a majority of seats, the Lib Dems held the balance of power. Their center-center-left orientation notwithstanding, they decided to ally with the Tories, entering Her Majesty’s Government for the first time since 1922. The fresh-faced young leaders of the new coalition, the Tories’ David Cameron and the Lib Dems’ Nick Clegg, became prime minister and deputy prime minister respectively. They announced their partnership—their bromance!—in a joyful press conference in the garden of 10 Downing Street.

The Lib Dems had a number of reasons for their decision, but the biggest was that the Tories agreed to hold a referendum on replacing “First Past the Post” with what Brits call the “Alternative Vote.” Under A.V., the voter numbers the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets an outright majority of first choices, then second choices—and, if necessary, third and fourth choices—are counted until somebody goes over fifty per cent plus one. (As it happens, this is how some of the groovier American cities, such as San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Minneapolis, elect their mayors. It’s also how the Academy picks the Oscar for Best Picture. The stateside name for it is instant-runoff or ranked-choice voting.)

If you’re a P.R. fan, A.V. isn’t ideal. It’s still a one-winner-take-all system. It doesn’t allocate seats proportionately, so there’s no guarantee that a party that is the first choice of, say, one-fourth of the national electorate will end up with anything close to one-fourth of the national legislature. (Nick Clegg himself had once dismissed it a “miserable little compromise”—a rash remark that would eventually exact a high cost.)

Still, A.V. has some formidable advantages compared to F.P.T.P. It allows you to vote for the party or candidate you genuinely prefer without penalizing the one you’d settle for (the dreaded Nader Effect). It discourages scorched-earth negative campaigning, because candidates want your second preference if they can’t get your first. It broadens “the conversation.” It confers greater democratic legitimacy, because the ultimate winner is at least acceptable to a majority. It encourages moderation, compromise, and civility, which many people regard as good things, too.

On May 5, 2011, one year after the Cameron-Clegg team took office, the promised referendum took place. Since you, dear reader, are the kind of person who stuck with me this deep into this wonky post, it’s a cinch you’re also the kind of person who would have voted Yes. Among the Yes supporters were the editorialists of the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, and the Daily Mirror. Yes had all the best celebrities: Billy Bragg, Helena Bonham Carter, John Cleese, Steve Coogan, Colin Firth, Stephen Fry, Eddie Izzard, Joanna Lumley, Vivienne Westwood … plus a whole slew of Anglican bishops and other worthies. The No camp had little more than a handful of cricketers. What could go wrong?

Everything, apparently. The Conservatives had been clear from the beginning that their official position would be No, but they had encouraged the Lib Dems to delude themselves that their opposition would be pro forma. Instead, even though a few prominent Tories urged a Yes, the entire Conservative infrastructure mobilized for No. The right-wing press—the Daily Express, the Telegraph, and Murdoch’s Sun and Times went all out. Labour was officially neutral, and, although Ed Miliband and many other Labour politicians plumped for Yes, the majority of Labour members of Parliament ended up in the No camp. They were joined by masses of Labour voters, who wanted to punish the Lib Dems in general for making Cameron prime minister and Clegg in particular for going along with sharp rises in university tuition fees. Old-school lefties hated the prospect that Labour candidates might have to depend for their election on the second preferences of Lib Dem voters, even if that would produce more Labour MPs. Better, in their view, to have a “pure” Labour government once in a blue moon than a necessarily more moderate Labour-Lib Dem alliance on a much more frequent basis.

The referendum lost and lost big. The margin was two to one against A.V.—a ghastly humiliation for the Lib Dems, making them objects of near-universal contempt. At that point, they were trapped in a vortex of doom. Their plummeting popularity made it impossible for them to withdraw from the coalition and force a snap election. For the next four years, they were slowly smothered by the Tory embrace. (It was similar to the way François Mitterrand had smothered the French Communist Party—only different, in that Communism is bad but liberal democracy is good.)

During their run as the Tories’ junior partners, the Lib Dems succeeded in frustrating many of the Conservatives’ most egregious impulses. On social issues, especially marriage equality, their clout sufficed to allow the government to compile a sterling record. Their reward on May 7th was utter devastation. They lost all but eight of their fifty-six members of the House of Commons. Seats-wise, they aren’t even the U.K.’s third party any more. They’re tied for fourth with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, Ian Paisley’s old right-wing redoubt.

The Lib Dem collapse, set in motion by the defeat of A.V., is a synecdoche. It is part of a larger story: the frequent inability of single-seat, plurality-winner-take-all electoral arrangements to insure acceptably democratic, acceptably representative outcomes, especially in a non-two-party environment. Among other flaws, it hugely rewards smaller parties if they’re narrowly regional and mercilessly punishes them if they’re broadly national.

The only bright spot in all this is that electoral reform, which had been pronounced dead after the failure of the A.V. referendum, is suddenly showing signs of life again. The unrepresentative nature of F.P.T.P. has never been more glaringly obvious. The Tories won an outright parliamentary majority with just 36.9 per cent of the popular vote, up a few tenths of a percentage point from 2010. This is identical with Alf Landon’s showing in the 1936 U.S. Presidential election and worse than George McGovern’s in 1972. The Democratic Unionists got their eight seats with fewer than two hundred thousand votes; it took the Lib Dems thirteen times that many to eke out their eight. The new kid on the right-wing block, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which actually beat the Lib Dems in the popular vote, snagged just one seat. That’s a voter-to-seat ratio of 3,881,129 to one. The Labour Party’s ratio was 40,277 to one; the Tories’, 34,244 to one; the S.N.P.’s, 25,972 to one. The Lib Dems’ ratio was 301,986 to one.

Do the math, as the saying goes. Something is amiss—and, eventually, something’s got to give.

Fun fact: In their post-college days, both Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband were interns at The Nation magazine in New York.