Change from the First Past the Post (FPTP) system for electing the UK House of Commons has been intermittently suggested over the past hundred years, most recently in the referendum of 5 May 2011 on the introduction of the Alternative Vote. A typically British variety of more proportional systems has now been adopted for other elections such as those to the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Greater London Assembly (all by the additional member system), elections in Northern Ireland and Scottish councils (the single transferable vote), and for the European Parliament (regional list). However every election for MPs at Westminster, where most of the power has always been located, between 1910 and 2010 have essentially retained FPTP, giving rise to debate about both its fairness and its effects.
In this chapter the latter are considered, in the light of the possibility that for general elections from 1918 onwards FPTP might have been replaced by a considerable degree of proportionality in the way that votes are translated into parliamentary seats. This suggestion is not, in its initial premise, mere fantasy. Electoral reform for the Commons was seriously considered by the Speaker’s Conference that was called in 1916 and reported in 1917. If the outcome adopted then had been different, many believe that the subsequent history of Britain would have been significantly altered. They may have been disappointed.
Reform of the electoral system, both the alternative vote (AV) and a fully proportional method, the single transferable vote (STV), were both very seriously considered during the second half of the First World War. The work of the First Speaker’s Conference began in October 1916, two months before Lloyd George’s ‘coup’ in which he replaced his long-term Liberal colleague Asquith to form a three-party coalition headed by a five-man War Cabinet. David Butler, in his authoritative study of the electoral system in Britain since 1918, declared that ‘astonishingly, on proportional representation complete unanimity was achieved’.1 By 14 December the Speaker reported its first period of its work to the new Prime Minister – and it included a resolution which had been passed recommending the use of proportional representation (STV) for multi-member constituencies,2 along with AV for all the remainder, single-member seats.3 The acknowledged expert on electoral reform for this period, Martin Pugh, has argued that Lloyd George missed a golden opportunity fully to back electoral reform at this stage, before he had decided to throw in his lot with the Conservatives as in the December 1918 ‘coupon election’.4
A proposal by Asquith to enact the Speaker’s Conference report was passed by the Commons on 28 March 1917 and a consequent Representation of the Bill to that effect on second reading in late May. Even after thorough controversy and debate at the Committee stage, the AV proposal was passed by 151–123 in the Commons on 22 November 1917. However the STV section of the Bill was defeated three times in the Commons, on 11–12 June by seven votes, when heavy Conservative opposition by over two to one outweighed the small but favourable majorities of the other three main parties (all being unwhipped),5 then again in July and November. However when the Bill went to the Lords the PR-STV idea was not only revived but extended, as members of the Upper House sought to remove AV entirely and replace it with an STV system covering more than 90 per cent of the constituencies in a framework of multi-member seats, in Lord Selborne’s proposal of 21 January 1918. By 26 January, five days later, Selborne had prepared a detailed proposal for 25 five-member, 42 four-member, and 50 three-member constituencies in England.6
However by a majority of 100 the Commons rejected this measure that might have so transformed the subsequent course of British history, though they did reinsert the alternative vote on 31 January. In a rapid game of parliamentary table-tennis, in early February 1918 the Houses ejected each other’s electoral reform proposals, and ended with neither, even though, as David Butler pointed out, ‘a parliamentary conference had unanimously recommended another system and although a substantial majority of the members of each House had, at some stage of the discussion of the Bill, voted for one or other of the proposed reforms of the system’.7
According to the Manchester Guardian Editor C. P. Scott’s diary for 28 January 1917, Lloyd George’s position was that he would apply proportional representation ‘all round or not at all’. It was to be ‘not at all’ in reality, but let us imagine that the Prime Minister – perhaps already having the intention of cementing his putative personal ‘centre’ party in coalitions for the foreseeable future – had used his influence in favour of the Lords position on STV, and that, as with votes for women and far more men in 1918, ‘all-round’ PR had indeed been passed in that seminal Representation of the People Act. Lord Hattersley opined in his recent biography that ‘Lloyd George was a coalition man’,8 and PR would have been an ideal way to all but ensure coalition government.
If we assume PR could already have been in place for the December 1918 ‘coupon election’, Lloyd George’s coalition would still have won an overall majority, especially as the vast majority of Irish members would still have been Sinn Feiners, who did not take their seats on principle. The Labour Party would have been more rewarded for their advances since the previous election eight years before for, with over 20 per cent of the vote, PR should have given them nearly 150 MPs rather than the 52 actually won under FPTP.
As the reform of electoral systems is highly unlikely to alter the onset, course or aftermath of wars, including their overwhelming economic consequences, there is no reason to believe that the events of the years 1918–22 would not be as happened in reality, with Lloyd George’s coalition coming to an end after the legendary expression of backbench Conservative power at the Carlton Club meeting on 19 October 1922. However, we must assume that the election that followed the next month would commence the divergence in history, as the Conservatives were far short of winning a majority of votes, achieving only 38.5 per cent of the UK share – which in FPTP reality was enough for 55.9 per cent of the seats, well ahead of the very divided opposition. As Labour and the two bitterly divided Liberal parties (still led by the feuding Asquith and Lloyd George) would have been highly unlikely to form a coalition between them, especially as two of these three had refused LG’s coupon less than four years previously, Baldwin would still have formed the government in November 1922 – except as a minority.
It could be argued that we should no longer assume that Baldwin’s government would have taken the same course as it did ‘in the real world’ in 1923. However, it seems reasonable in this, as other counterfactual exercises, to work on the principle of less difference from reality in the early stages, and it can also be argued that the effects of PR would not be fully understood in its early years. Finally, as A. J. P. Taylor pointed out,9 there seemed little rational reason why Baldwin should have revived the ‘terrible controversy’ of protectionism anyway; he must have realised that it would be likely that it would end in his defeat when he called the election of December 1923 to give a mandate to tariff reform. He may have been worried about a revived coalition between Lloyd George and the Conservatives, and wanted to drive a wedge between them, or it may have simply been a matter of principle.
Assuming that proportional representation did not, initially at least, mean an end to all political principle, it is posited that the 1923 election did take place, and produced a similar result in terms of votes. With the Conservatives obtaining 38 per cent of the vote, and Labour and the temporarily reunited Liberals 30 per cent each, this produced a hung parliament in any case (a rare election in which FPTP produced a fairly proportionate outcome), and we assume that the Liberals backed a minority Labour government for the reasons they did in the real timeline – and withdrew that support for the same reasons after just under a year. However, the October 1924 election would have meant that Baldwin again did not gain an overall majority, attaining under 47 per cent under FPTP – and the Liberals may have come up with more than 339 candidates, knowing that votes gained even in their many hopeless seats would still count towards electing MPs.
This would have given Lloyd George another potential opportunity to regain a place in government. Differences with Asquith had again reemerged, and LG could have mobilised enough of his old supporters to split earlier than he did (in 1931), to provide enough support for Baldwin to achieve his overall majority, especially after a promise not to revive the spectre of tariff reform. We do know that in 1924 LG ‘was adamantine in his refusal to provide the Asquithian-dominated Liberal Party organisation with funds,10 and in The Goat in the Wilderness John Campbell accused him of a Machiavellian action to oust Asquith, to smash his own party and to rule the rump:
He soon became equally impatient of Asquith and of Labour, and resolved to be rid of both. He therefore worked with the Tories to bring down the government and force a general election, for which the Liberal Party, lacking adequate financial help, was unprepared.11
Chris Wrigley has summed up Lloyd George’s position thus:
During the 1920s, LG moved this way and that for political advantage, sometimes veering towards Conservatives to explore possibilities of a new political grouping and at the same time making advances towards Labour.12
PR would have been ideal for those manoeuvres.
In our counterfactual, industrial relations still came to dominate the mid-1920s, but LG proved an enthusiastic junior coalition supporter in the Conservative strategy to crush the 1926 General Strike, unlike in reality; the attractions of power and office can have potent effects on policy positions. His role as a man of the people on his road to power way back in the 1909 Budget was certainly long behind him.
There are several different types of proportional representation, and it was a well-advised choice in 1918 to opt for the single transferable vote. Regional lists and the additional member system both transfer power from the voter to the parties, denying the opportunity for voters to vote out an individual MP whose representation is deemed unsatisfactory, due to the party control of the order of the lists. STV, however, uses a preferential system, with one vote with second, third, fourth (and so on) choices being applied until candidates are either eliminated for lack of support or reach the necessary quota to be elected, thus ending such evils as the wasted vote and tactical voting. As applied in multi-member constituencies, for example of three, four or five representatives, it also does not break the link between the MP and his seat; in fact, in theory it improves the link, as voters can even express a preference between candidates of the same party, either on a personal basis (for example if a government minister is thought to be neglecting the constituency), or on political lines, giving a possible choice between more left- and right-wing candidates from the same party, or even choosing politicians with a local base in part of the larger seats – all strategies that have been practised in Irish elections under STV.
Unfortunately, in our counterfactual all the major parties soon realised that these characteristics meant that STV gave voters a dangerous amount of democratic choice and power at their expense – and adopted the policy of only putting up as many candidates as seats they believed they could win, as well as tightly controlling all their nominations; this is essentially what happened when STV was used in Scottish local elections from 2007.13 This negated one of the democratic advantages of a system that remained very attractive, on paper.
The 1929 election saw a swing against the Baldwin-LG government, with Labour almost becoming the largest party for the first time, and the non-LG Liberals were only too keen to support MacDonald as he formed his second minority administration. The electoral system encouraged the Labour leader to aim for moderation, even more than in reality because of the PR-determined need to occupy the centre ground. However, the method of electing MPs cannot stave off a great depression, whether it originates outside the country or not, so his second government met the same fate as it did in reality.
In 1931, therefore, there was a similar outcome to the actual course of history, with the MacDonald-Baldwin National Government coalition gaining just over two-thirds of the total vote, although of course Labour’s 31 per cent share meant they returned nearly 200 MPs, not the paltry 52 they managed in reality. The parliamentary system scarcely allowed even this number to form an effective opposition to the coalition that continued through the 1930s, although after the 1935 election its majority was much more slender, having obtained only 53 per cent of the vote, meaning its overall majority was not nearly 250 but more like 50.
The only impact this could have had was somewhat to strengthen the hand of the anti-appeasers within the Conservative Party as the prospect of war loomed again in the late 1930s – or it would have, if Labour had itself not been divided. The Labour leadership was suspicious of the Communist influence on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War, the Parliamentary Party only voted to abstain rather than vote against increased rearmament expenditure in July 1937, and Labour generally welcomed the Munich agreement in September 1938. There were even doubts about the ‘Popular Front’ later in 1938 as a revival of ‘Lib-Labbery’.14 Anyway, as he had at the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany itself, Hitler ignored PR and its effects, and the war led to Churchill’s all-party coalition in any event, while the 1940 election was cancelled, as parliamentary sovereignty allowed.
1945, however, was a different case. Although in the true course of history this was regarded as a Labour landslide, in fact the party did not achieve an overall majority of votes but only 48 per cent, and in our counterfactual Attlee could form a government only with the help of Common Wealth party radicals and left independents. Even this gave him only a slender majority in the Commons, and with 48.6 per cent of the 1945 vote going to Conservatives and Liberals (who gained over 50 MPs rather than just 12), parties strongly ideologically committed against socialism, only part of the programme of the most radical government Britain has ever had could be passed. This did, however, include the bulk of the welfare state provisions, due to the expectations raised during the war, for example by the Beveridge Report (Beveridge himself was a Liberal). In addition, the coal industry was nationalised, as it had effectively been taken under government control for war production, and the private coal companies’ control had already been broken.15 However the more contentious nationalisation of iron and steel in 1951 did not happen, as Attlee had already been ousted in the election the year before.
One of the characteristic effects of PR is the encouragement of consensus politics and the diminution of drastic changes between successive governments, and this is well illustrated by the case of the steel industry, which in fact was the subject of denationalisation by the Conservatives in 1953 and renationalisation by Labour thirteen years later, before finally being re-privatised under the Thatcher government in 1988. It is a matter of deep political debate whether this consequence of the electoral system represents more stable government and policy, or a bar to radical change.
In 1950, Labour achieved 46.1 per cent of the vote – under FPTP enough to be returned with a narrow overall majority of 15, but under PR this would have been overborne by the 52.5 per cent gained by Conservatives (including the remnants who still called themselves National Liberals) and the Liberal Party itself, which, led by Clement Davies, was far more inclined to support the right rather than the socialists. Indeed, in reality, the anti-Labour pacts that were to sustain some of the handful of Liberal MPs through the decade started in 1950, with Donald Wade elected in Huddersfield West without a Conservative opponent, while the Tories alone fought the east division of the town. This arrangement was extended from 1951, with Bolton entering a similar arrangement to Huddersfield, and Davies himself had no Tory opposition in 1951 and 1955 – by which time most of the six Liberals actually returned did so courtesy of a free run. In 1950 Churchill actually offered one of the Tories’ party political broadcasts to the Liberal candidate for Colne Valley, Asquith’s daughter Violet Bonham Carter, and in 1951 invited Clement Davies to a government post as minister for education.16
Given these facts, we may posit that under PR the Conservatives would have governed with Liberal support throughout the 1950s, even though they never achieved 50 per cent of the vote – and we should remember that the Liberals (and other minor parties) would probably have achieved more votes with the proportional system, as they drastically reduced their candidatures to stand in just 109 seats in the UK in 1951 and 110 in 1955. Under the STV system this would have not have had such a diminishing effect on their share of the vote in the larger multi-member constituencies. Consequently we can assume that the course of history in the ‘grey decade’ would have been relatively unaltered, with a Conservative-led government adopting Conservative policies, supported by a rather sycophantic Liberal leadership, although it is to be doubted whether Clement Davies would ever have played tennis with Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden or Harold Macmillan. Indeed the Liberal Party itself could be regarded in our scenario as little more than a shadow of the National Liberals, until a younger group of grassroots activists rebelled against the leaders, who they accused of going ‘Tory-native’ in government.
However, that did not happen until the mid-1960s. Since there was much less reason to vote Liberal as a way of objecting to a Conservative government, there had been no Liberal revival based on by-election victories against Conservative incumbents such as those at Torrington in 1958 or Orpington in 1962. Alec Douglas Home was thus able to form a fourth successive Tory administration in 1964, despite getting fewer votes than Harold Wilson’s Labour – due to the continuing support of the ‘old guard’ Liberal Party leaders. But as his government was seen as ever more tired and out of touch with the ‘swinging sixties’, and mercilessly panned by the energised new waves of satirists, encouraged by the electoral system the Liberals split, with a new younger group of MPs, led by Jeremy Thorpe, moving over to support Wilson, still spouting his ‘white heat’ line and as leader of the Opposition engaging in photo-shoots with the Beatles. After a seminal grassroots Liberal conference, eliciting echoes of the heroes of the 1922 Committee, the government changed in 1965, without an election.
This was a new departure for the UK, but by no means unlikely under a PR system, as the practice of the Free Democrats in Germany was to show. Even in 1966, Labour could not achieve more than 50 per cent of their vote on their own – in fact, no party ever had, nor probably ever will, under PR, because it encourages small parties and independent candidates to stand much more than under FPTP, making the chance of an overall majority effectively impossible. Because of their agreement, after the 1970 election the Lab/New Lib coalition survived, even though the Conservatives won more votes than Labour after the economic crises of the late 1960s. Edward Heath declared that the will of the people had been thwarted, but Mr Wilson retorted that he had been returned to power with a clear mandate of over 50 per cent of the electorate, and that Mr Heath might well practise his sulking, as he was likely to need it on later occasions.
However, for the time being, Mr Wilson was wrong. He had either underestimated or overestimated his coalition partners.
Due to the militancy of the unions and associated economic problems, and even more because of the prospect of Heath making a renewed bid for EEC entry (while Wilson, faced with a deeply divided party, sat on the Channel-fence), the Liberals switched again in early 1972. The government again changed without an election. Enoch Powell left the Conservative Party due to his perception of the fraudulence of its European position, but despite calls, did not form a breakaway party – even though it would have had a considerable chance of success under PR, due to his position on race and immigration – because he was against PR on high principle. Instead he went to Ulster.
The Heath-Thorpe government succeeded in its application to join the European Economic Community, but the unions, led by the miners, continued to cause trouble. In February 1974 Deputy PM Thorpe refused to let Heath call a divisive election, insisting that the coalition should complete a full five-year term, that consensus, not confrontation, was the right way to govern, and that the Liberals expected loyalty from their partners in administration. Therefore Heath staggered on, but after the 1975 election Labour obtained the most votes – but of course no majority, as it was under PR – and the Liberals switched yet again to back Labour, stressing that it was their democratic duty to support the party that had received the highest popular acclaim. Mr Heath continued to occupy Downing Street for some days, but although it was rumoured that Jeremy Thorpe himself had been willing to consider his offer of a renewed coalition, particularly with the role of Home Secretary for himself, his Liberal Party colleagues vetoed the idea.
The late 1970s Labour-Liberal government (Callaghan-Steel after two changes of leadership, for different reasons) was so beset by stagflation and union troubles that the new Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher came as close to winning a majority of the popular vote in 1980 as can be imagined under STV. The opposition was very divided partly because minor parties, including the extreme right National Front, did better than under first past the post. The NF managed to get a few MPs elected in 1980 in the West Midlands and North of England, but most were soon disqualified for non-attendance and/or criminal activity. The NF split, partly due to an argument about the sexual preferences of their leading figures, and for the time being the far right sank out of sight.
The redoubtable Mrs Thatcher had no truck with coalitions (apart from with the Ulster Unionists) but she could never command enough support in the House to push through her more radical measures, although most parties did support her over the Falklands. She again nearly won a majority with 45 per cent of the vote in an election called shortly thereafter, in 1982.
However, she could not pass such strong anti-union measures, due to her lack of an overall majority, so there was no full Thatcherite revolution (although the unions still grew much weaker and lost over half their membership because of the inevitable decline of manufacturing industry and coal mining). When she proposed a poll tax to replace local authority rates, opinion poll ratings led the party to remove her in the late 1980s and replace her with a more emollient compromise candidate who might return to a coalition approach – John Major.
As Labour had swung to the left after pressure from grassroots militants, and Trotskyite entryism, even though the main parties were fairly close in the 1987 election, Major formed a government with the Liberal-SDP Alliance as junior partner. The SDP had been created a little earlier than in reality due to the encouragement PR gives to splits and new parties, almost immediately after its leading members, the Gang of Four, had lost their cabinet positions at the 1980 election. For the same reason they had not joined with the Liberals quickly, but the Alliance and then the merger to form the Social & Liberal Democrats was cemented when Dr David Owen gained a promise from the Liberals that they would on no account form a coalition with his loathed former colleagues.
Major’s thoroughly centrist government lasted into the 1990s, and through the 1992 election, when it did surprisingly well (not that it would have mattered what the shares or totals of the votes were as long as the coalition held). With the Liberals pushing him not to resist the advance of Euro-federalism, however, the Conservative right became even worse ‘bastards’, and with the birth and rise of New Labour, in 1997 Tony Blair’s remodelled party won the most votes by far. Of course Blair had no majority, but the Liberal Democrats were happy with him, his social democratic (to put it mildly) policies, and his promises of massive constitutional reform, as were the Nationalists with his devolution proposals. Dr Owen, on the other hand, left the political scene with some venom.
Nationalists had consistently returned more MPs due to PR. In 1975, for example, the SNP had taken 30 per cent of the Scottish vote, which gave them 21 seats, and even in 1980, after a relative collapse of their share, they retained 12. The prospect of continuous representation on this scale enhanced the need for devolution to both Scotland and Wales – as it had in the late 1970s, given the increased number of nationalists elected under PR. However, in the earlier decade this justification was not strong enough to overcome the bitter divisions within the Labour Party and the staunch unionism of the Conservatives at the time – and oddly, PR had seemed to limit the threat of a massive SNP breakthrough compared with the magnifying effects of FPTP. Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland there had long been a much better representation of the minority Nationalist/Republican tradition than under FPTP, though this had little effect while the province was largely ruled by a Unionist majority at Stormont.
Even without a majority, with Blair’s constitutional reforms – mild though they turned out to be, including incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, but with no concession of a codified constitution or a bill of rights entrenched in law, and there is a big difference between a human rights act (easily suspended, amended or repealed) and an entrenched bill of rights as in the US codified constitution – and moderate pro-EU stance, and even more the economic climate, the Liberal Democrats remained satisfied with him and with New Labour, so he remained comfortably in office, with another election producing a similar result in 2002. ‘The Project’ was sailing along nicely until 2003, with Blair completing the privatisations of telecoms, water, gas, railways, coal mines, and almost all other public sector industries (and air traffic control) that Thatcher and Major had struggled to achieve in their minority and coalition administrations.
However, his coalition partners did not let him join the US in their war of revenge on Iraq, and the Prime Minister – denied his mission, however liberal the intervention – resigned in a fit of pique, stating his evangelical determination to bring peace to the Middle East, one way or another. Gordon Brown finally got his chance.
Impossible to work with, after a much more even result in 2005, the Liberals were fed up with Brown shouting at them, especially when Kennedy had quit through ill health and Ming Campbell had been brow-beaten; and under yet another leader, Nick Clegg, in 2006 they switched to the smoother Conservative Party leader, David Cameron – without an election, and after lengthy secret discussions. The latest coalition was not really much more electorally successful in the 2007 election than the two parties had been in 2005, but Cameron and Clegg hit it off and again formed a coalition government.
They were immediately beset by a sea of troubles, most of all an economic crunch caused by a banking crisis, and in the run-up to the fixed-term election in 2012 they are a long way behind in the polls. It looks like the Lib Dems are likely to split, or else the Conservatives may do, with the hard-line ideological right wing, ardently supported by the Daily Telegraph, considering a bid to incorporate the small but potentially growing band of UKIP MPs, that party being more fairly represented due to the proportional system.
Everyone awaits the 2012 election, but everyone knows the result: a hung parliament, like every one since 1918. It will be over to the politicians yet again, to see what deals can be cobbled together. All parties refuse to say in advance who they might ally with. Interest, and hence turnout, is expected to be low.
1 David Butler, The Electoral System in Britain Since 1918 (Clarendon, second edition, 1963), p. 7.
2 Martin Pugh, Electoral Reform in War and Peace 1906–18 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 77.
3 Ibid., p. 83.
4 Ibid., pp. 87–91.
5 Ibid., pp. 158–59.
6 Ibid., p. 164.
7 Butler, The Electoral System in Britain Since 1918, p. 11.
8 Roy Hattersley, The Great Outsider, David Lloyd George (Little, Brown & Co., 2010), p. 477.
9 A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (OUP, 1965), pp. 206–07.
10 Chris Wrigley, Lloyd George (Wiley-Blackwell, 1992), p. 127.
11 John Campbell, Lloyd George: The Goat in the Wilderness (Jonathan Cape, 1977), p. 89.
12 Wrigley, Lloyd George, p. 126.
13 Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, Local Government Handbook (Local Government Chronicle Elections Centre, 2007).
14 Taylor, English History 1914–1945, p. 436.
15 See, for example, Robert Waller, The Dukeries Transformed (Clarendon, 1983), p. 217.
16 Martin Pugh, ‘Churchill’s Strange Brew’, History Today, May 2011, p. 32.