Britain looks like heading for another hung parliament - and even with the first-past-the-post electoral system in place, that could be a very familiar outcome in the years ahead, writes guest blogger Charles Britten.
For the second time I have to thank Ben for allowing me to guest on this blog, with the disclaimer that the post is not necessarily written from a centre-left perspective, along with the counterbalancing point that those of a centre-left disposition should, I hope, find it as interesting as anyone else.
My previous post, in early September, had considered the implications of a yes vote in the Scottish referendum, along with the prediction that the debate on future constitutional arrangements would soon spread across the UK. That was not a particularly prescient view; it would have been more surprising had the debate not emerged. How that pans out may depend much on the composition of the next parliament, a matter of huge uncertainty just now.
With campaigning underway, it appears increasingly likely that the upcoming election will deliver another hung parliament, but with a different third party holding the balance of power. The Liberal Democrats have paid a high price for going into government, losing the support of two key parts of its voter base. The first is among people who would hitherto consider them a safe haven for a protest vote, rather than a party who would get their hands dirty by taking the tough and sometimes unpopular decisions that come from being in office.
The party has also lost support from those floating voters who incline to the left without always voting for Labour, leaving most of its support mainly confined to a core base. Notwithstanding the possibility that those pesky 'shy voters' - identified by pollsters as forever inconveniently distorting their figures - may now include some Liberal Democrat supporters, the only question is just how much of its parliamentary strength the party will retain this time round.
All that on its own might have made the 2015 election more likely to produce an outright majority, had the lost votes simply switched to the two biggest parties. Instead, a far more complex situation has arisen. By no means have all the left-leaning former Liberal Democrat voters gone over to Labour. This has in turn contributed to the rise in support for the Greens and the SNP, the latter bolstered further by Labour's startling decline in Scotland.
Without these developments, the basic consequences of the loss of Liberal Democrat support would be that a few of their seats would fall to Labour and many more to the Conservatives, but even a small swing from Conservative to Labour would see the latter regain plenty of marginal seats, propelling Ed Miliband into office. Now, however, the surge in SNP support as it pledges to provide a 'second best' solution for frustrated yes voters looks like scuppering Labour hopes for a majority.
The conclusion some might draw from this is that a second successive hung parliament would be incidental, since the main cause of it this time would be different to that of five years ago.
However, that would be short-sighted, overlooking the long-term gradual decline in the share of the popular vote enjoyed by the two main parties. In 1992 - an election that looked like producing a hung parliament until the actual ballots were counted - the polls had placed Labour and the Conservatives neck-and-neck at just under 40 per cent. Now, reaching 35 per cent is a struggle for them both. Even the present SNP phenomenon is not unique; while it is now eating into Labour's central belt strongholds, it should be noted the Nationalist heartlands in the north-east of Scotland used to be strong Conservative territory.
All this has arisen from a process familiar to psephologists: that of partisan dealignment. For many years after 1945 the safe assumption was that the working class voted Labour and the middle class was Conservative. However, at that time the working class was more numerous. This could have meant perpetual Labour government, but, on average, only two thirds of this demographic voted Labour, whereas four-fifths of the middle class voted Conservative.
This imbalance in class-based loyalties produced an overall balance in support and a two-party system was sustained - with the caveat that a small minority would still support other parties and did so enough in the remote Celtic fringes to maintain a tiny Liberal parliamentary presence.
Since the 1960s, however, class-based voting has waned. Of course, this has made it possible for one of the two main parties to snatch the initiative, win big majorities and rule for many years; For instance, Margaret Thatcher's council house sales in the 1980s helped attract votes from aspirant working class people who saw home ownership as their ticket to upward social mobility.
Similarly, After four successive defeats, Labour twigged that rather than trying to get the working class to be more loyal to it, the circle was more easily squared by a pitch to the middle class, which proved more willing to switch allegiance than would once have been the case. Thus New Labour's electoral success was a product of strategically exploited partisan dealignment.
However, the triumphs of Thatcher and Blair partially disguised the extent to which the smaller parties were growing in strength and significance from the 1970s onwards. The Liberals and their Alliance and Liberal Democrat successors were not alone in providing an alternative. If in the minds of voters they represented a slightly nebulous concept of simply being 'something else', the nationalist parties offered a clearer alternative to class loyalties: that of national allegiance, laced with concepts of suppressed identity and other grievances. UKIP is now doing essentially the same thing, with the distinction being that they see Brussels, rather than Westminster (that popular SNP euphemism for perfidious Albion), as the bogeyman.
The two elections of 1974 demonstrated that these were very much two sides of the same coin, with the Liberal surge in support and the rise of the nationalist parties - the SNP took 30.4 per cent of the Scottish vote in the October election - happening at the same time. Thus it would be incorrect to conclude that the rise of the SNP since 2010, the increasing support for UKIP and the Greens, and the successes of the Liberal Democrats over the 13 years up to that point are unrelated. All derive from a common decline in electoral loyalty to the main two parties, which has been manifested in different ways.
Consequently, it is reasonable to conclude the once unfamiliar phenomenon of hung parliaments may now become a regular feature of British politics.
To some, that brings into question whether the current electoral system is obsolete, given that it is supposedly 'designed for two parties', yet now features a multi-party system. Certainly those advocating first-past-the post (FPTP) on the grounds that it usually delivers majority government appear set for disappointment again - and I know Ben will be among those suggesting the weakening of this argument strengthens the case for electoral reform. ( http://viewsfromthecentre-left.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/electoral-reform.html )
In asking whether hung Parliaments are likely to be the norm, however, it is important to start by remembering that there have been two referendums of major constitutional importance since 2010. While the Scottish referendum was close, the result of the choice between retaining first-past-the-post and switching to the alternative vote (AV) was not. At the very least, the case for electoral reform suffered a damaging reverse. That is not to say it will never return as a major issue, but for the foreseeable future it makes more sense to consider what elections under FPTP will look like.
When analysing what may happen, we are not confined to the realm of speculation, for electoral systems of all kinds can produce results they were not 'designed' to; after all, there is a certain irony in one referendum being held as a result of a coalition formed in the wake of an hung parliament under FPTP, while another came about because an election held under a proportional system - for the Scottish Parliament in 2012 - gave one party a majority.
The reality of FPTP is that it was not - at least in Britain - designed to produce a particular kind of party system at all. Until the end of the 1990s British electoral law did not even recognise the party system. It is incidental that it may produce a system of alternating, two-party majority government. Indeed, it often does not - without the system being abandoned as a result.
To demonstrate this, consider the highly varied experiences of other countries using FPTP. On the one hand, the United States with its Republican and Democrat parties is a prime example of an established two-party system. By contrast, in neighbouring Canada - which uses a system based on the Westminster model - there have been 18 general elections since 1865 that have not produced a majority.
These Canadian results include almost half of the elections since 1945 and has occurred in a political landscape in which three-party and even four-party politics have been the norm, while party names and compositions have regularly changed as splits and mergers have abounded. So common are such outcomes that they are commonly termed "minority parliaments", a more neutral term than "hung parliaments".
Other FPTP electoral outcomes include countries where one party dominates, such as Botswana, or dramatically changing fortunes like those in India, the world's largest democracy.
The former is an instance of a support base sticking loyally with one party (The Botswana Democratic Party), which, as explained above, is exactly the sort of thing that could have happened in post-war Britain had Labour achieved more loyalty from British working class voters. In Botswana, this has delivered victory for the ruling party in all 11 elections since independence in 1969.
In India's case, the first 40 years after Independence were also manifested by a dominant party system, as Congress won every election bar that of 1977. However, things changed dramatically from 1988. The rise of the Hindu Nationalist BJP did not create a real two party system as might have been supposed, because their emergence coincided with a wider fragmentation of the party system. A host of smaller and regional parties won large numbers of seats between them time and again - and the result of this was nine successive hung parliaments.
The landslide victory of the BJP and its electoral pact allies last year ended that sequence, but so badly beaten was Congress that this might be the start of another dominant party period. That remains to be seen, but the fact remains the history of Indian elections has been that of two utterly contrasting situations, both at odds with the supposed two-party norm of FPTP.
So then, what of Britain? Would the emergence now of a political landscape where single-party majority government was the exception rather than the rule be unprecedented? Certainly not.
If the British 'norm' is of alternation between Labour and Conservative majority governments, then it is one that has only applied to a 60-year period encompassing the general elections of 1945 and 2005 and those in between (before 1945, there had never been such a thing as a Labour majority government). In this period 16 out of 17 elections produced a majority. The exception was February 1974, along with the additional caveats that the Labour government of 1974-79 and Conservative administration of 1992-97 lost their majorities through by-elections and defections during those parliaments.
However, what of British politics before 1945? How about the 60 years before Labour's first majority victory? And what about the period before that?
If we go back to the time before 1885 - if not 60 years, then at least 53, to the Great Reform Act of 1832 - we see another time when a two-party system was the norm, with Whig/Liberal or Tory majority governments, once again, just one hung parliament (1847) interrupted the sequence.
However, the 60 years between 1885 and 1945 was different again. The first development was the rise of the Irish Nationalists, consistently securing over 80 seats in what is now mainly the Republic. This took some seats away from the Conservatives and many more from the Liberals. The arithmetic of this made it inevitable hung parliaments would happen, a situation the SNP could be repeating now.
This soon had knock-on effects. In 1885 the Liberals fell just short of a majority, sought Nationalist support with a home-rule bill and split over the issue, as the Liberal Unionist party emerged and joined an alliance with the Conservatives.
Their partnership worked rather like the Liberal-SDP Alliance, except this one managed to win elections. Thus while the polls of 1886, 1895 and 1900 did not produce hung parliaments, they also did not produce one-party majorities, as the Conservatives alone had less than half the seats but were comfortably in charge thanks to the scores of Liberal Unionists sat alongside them in the house. The two parties remained separate until merging in 1912.
However, there still were more hung parliaments during these years: The two-party unionist alliance could not gain a majority in 1892 and that led to another Liberal minority government being formed, again with Nationalist support. The same happened in both the January and December 1910 elections, with the added feature of over 40 Labour MPs. Indeed, in the eight elections from 1885 to the first world war, the only single party majority came in the 1906 Liberal landslide. Even then their strength was bolstered through an electoral pact with the fledgling Labour Party in England and Wales.
War brought the first coalition governments, as the minority Liberal administration joined forces with the Conservatives in 1915. This arrangement was replaced in 1916 with a second coalition when Lloyd George ousted Asquith, producing an arguably fatal split in the Liberal Party that continued through the 1918 election, in which a Liberal Prime minister issued a letter of endorsement - known as the coupon - to a field of candidates that included far more Conservatives than members of his own party. This was to be the first of two inter-war governments with a Tory majority but a prime minister from another party - or fragment of it; the same was true when Ramsay Macdonald and his 'National Labour' party held just a handful of seats after 1931, when the national government he formed amid the onset of the Great Depression split the Labour party and ushered in a Conservative landslide - even though the resulting cabinet included both National Labour and Liberal ministers.
The Liberal split between Lloyd George and Asquith aided the rise of Labour and while 1922 and 1924 brought Conservative majorities, the election needlessly called in 1923 brought another hung parliament, a genuine three-party split with the (newly reunited) Liberals coming third on 158 seats. Labour, on second with 191, formed the first of two minority governments with Liberal support. The second, from 1929, occurred with 59 Liberal MPs and a similar arithmetical outcome to 2010, except with Labour as the largest party.
With the 1935 election producing a continuation of the national government (only with a Conservative prime minister), it was another world war that brought about a second grand coalition (1940-45), with Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee sitting around the same cabinet table.
So it was that during the 60 years from 1885 to 1945, majority one-party government was the exception, not the rule, with six hung parliaments, four coalitions and three two-party alliances. Only the Liberals from 1906-10 and the Conservative governments of 1922-23 and 1924-29 were single-party majority administrations in the post-1945 (or pre-1885) sense.
Of course, it is true that any overview of this period would be incomplete if it did not note that electoral reform became a popular cause for many during the inter-war years (particularly the Liberals as the party declined), that the single transferable vote was experimented with in the multi-member university seats at general elections between 1918 and 1945, and that the Labour government of 1929-31 was prepared to introduce AV before it fell.
Be that as it may, what this analysis shows is that even an electoral system under which two elongated periods of two-party politics have occurred can be subject to fragmentation, uncertainty and change, with governments of various different compositions emerging. Whether it is the changing party system, a period of three-party politics (in terms of seats and not just votes) or strong nationalist / regionalist parties (the latter often being a factor in the Indian and Canadian situations too), the historical lesson is that the two-party model cannot be taken for granted.
This historic lesson tells us that a post-2005 period of multi-party politics may indeed be upon us. And while the coming election may not bring much cheer for Ben and his Liberal Democrat colleagues, the fluid, unpredictable electoral landscape means there remains a significant possibility that, even under FPTP, they will get another taste of coalition government - or influence over a minority administration - before too long.
