The FishTank

Which Lib Dems lost the election? You’ll recall in my earlier article I looked at the internal divisions of the major political parties. In Labour and the Conservatives these divides are papered over in an attempt to create an united front. The Lib Dems are frequently criticised for the manner in which they espouse different policy positions in different constituencies (something that led Nick Clegg to be extremely vague and inconsistent in the debates). Traditionally, the media have viewed this Janus-like behaviour as evidence of opportunism, of a party saying whatever they need to in order to secure power. In the negotiations for coalition this is also held up as prime cause.

There is, however, another explanation. A deeply divided party without a firm party line may face in a different direction from seat to seat because the candidates themselves have different leanings. Newspapers analysing the electoral arithmetic over the last few days have claimed that Lib Dem candidates predominately consider themselves to be left-wing or left of centre. But are they really? Over the last decade or so, the media have been redefining the terms left and right wing. A distinction which once defined attitudes about the size of the state and its degree of intrusion into our lives has been distorted to define attitudes toward race and international relations. So, the BNP who are xenophobic but believe in the state dictating to people, are regarded as right-wing, rather than – as the official definition decrees – left-wing. UKIP, who aren’t racist, but are no less isolationist, are right-wing because they believe in a small state and individualism, but the media bundle them together in an attempt to embed the idea that right-wing is the equivalent of Star Wars’ evil empire and thus tarnish the Conservatives who equally believe in a small state but who are far less isolationist than either UKIP or the BNP. Given the connotations of associating their views with those of the BNP, any Lib Dem candidate asked to classify themselves on a left-right axis is likely to consider themselves as leaning left. If, however, you discerned their position by asking policy questions, the divide would likely be very different.

Why does this matter? Well, it matters if we ever do move to a more proportional system. One of the characteristics of societies with proportional governments is that, rather than having large, inwardly divided parties, they tend to have coalitions of smaller parties with individually distinct positions. Under first-past-the-post, parties band together because they need enough candidates to secure a majority; if parliament is a plurality, this united front can muddy the message and become a positive hindrance.

If we split each party along its fault lines and ran the election again, therefore, the results would not necessarily turn out as they have now. It depends heavily not only on the views of the Lib Dem MPs who won their seats but on those who were rejected. If the policies which failed to secure a Lib Dem vote on the doorstep were those of the left, then the right-leaning Liberal party would garner more votes; if the policies of the right were the turn off, the more SDP-oriented wing of the party would be in the ascendant. The result could bolster either Labour or the Tories (or, indeed, a centre-left New Labour splinter group).

There are those who promote PR on the self-interested basis that many societies with such a system have left-leaning governments, but it doesn’t follow that we would see the same here. Different countries have different political centres of gravity: Sweden’s is to our left, America’s very much to our right. It’s possible that in the first election run under PR there could be a spurious result that favours one faction over another, but as the people got used to the system they would learn how to use it to return the government they actually wanted. And when, instead of a party attempting to face left and right in different seats there are two parties presenting different choices, the electorate may not decide that left is the direction they wish to go.